Product Description

Why are people around the world so very different? What makes us live, buy, even love as we do? The answers are in the codes.

In The Culture Code, internationally revered cultural anthropologist and marketing expert Clotaire Rapaille reveals for the first time the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of Fortune 100 companies. His groundbreaking revelations shed light not just on business but on the way every human being acts and lives around the world.

Rapaille’s breakthrough notion is that we acquire a silent system of codes as we grow up within our culture. These codes—the Culture Code—are what make us American, or German, or French, and they invisibly shape how we behave in our personal lives, even when we are completely unaware of our motives. What’s more, we can learn to crack the codes that guide our actions and achieve new understanding of why we do the things we do.

Rapaille has used the Culture Code to help Chrysler build the PT Cruiser—the most successful American car launch in recent memory. He has used it to help Procter & Gamble design its advertising campaign for Folger’s coffee – one of the longest lasting and most successful campaigns in the annals of advertising. He has used it to help companies as diverse as GE, AT&T, Boeing, Honda, Kellogg, and L’Oréal improve their bottom line at home and overseas. And now, in The Culture Code, he uses it to reveal why Americans act distinctly like Americans, and what makes us different from the world around us.

In The Culture Code, Dr. Rapaille decodes two dozen of our most fundamental archetypes—ranging from sex to money to health to America itself—to give us “a new set of glasses” with which to view our actions and motivations. Why are we so often disillusioned by love? Why is fat a solution rather than a problem? Why do we reject the notion of perfection? Why is fast food in our lives to stay? The answers are in the Codes.

Understanding the Codes gives us unprecedented freedom over our lives. It lets us do business in dramatically new ways. And it finally explains why people around the world really are different, and reveals the hidden clues to understanding us all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21535 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-17
• Released on: 2007-07-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From Publishers Weekly
French-born marketing consultant and psychoanalyst Rapaille takes a truism—different cultures are, well, different—and expands it by explaining how a nation's history and cultural myths are psychological templates to which its citizens respond unconsciously. Fair enough, but after that, it's all downhill. Rapaille intends his theory of culture codes to help us understand "why people do what they do," but the "fundamental archetypes" he offers are just trumped-up stereotypes. He often supports jarring pronouncements ("The Culture Code for perfection in America is DEATH") with preposterous generalizations and overstatements, e.g., Japanese men "seem utterly incapable of courtship or wooing a woman." Writing with the naïveté of someone who has learned about the world only through Hollywood films, he seems unaware that every person living within a nation's borders doesn't necessarily share the same cultural biases and references. Rapaille's successful consulting career is evidence that he's more convincing in the boardroom than he is on the page. Amid the overheated prose and dubious factoids, it's easy to overlook the book's scattered marketing proposals and employee-management tips. (June 6)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

“This book is just plain astonishing! Filled with profound insights and ideas that have enormous consequences for today’s organizations. If you want to understand customers, Constituencies, and crowds, this book is required reading.”

--Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader

Review

“This book is just plain astonishing! Filled with profound insights and ideas that have enormous consequences for today’s organizations. If you want to understand customers, Constituencies, and crowds, this book is required reading.”

--Warren Bennis, Distinguished Professor of Business, University of Southern California and author of On Becoming a Leader

Customer Reviews

Delivers the goods
Clotaire Rapaille delivers the goods in this outstanding exeplanation of what makes people tick. In my 20 years working in marketing and branding, I've spent more time studying psychology, sociology, anthropology, and politics than much of the standard marketing fare.

At the core, marketing is about understanding the messy world of human interaction - what drives and moves us, what frightens and stops us.

This book - and Dr. Rapaille's work - reveal the power in undesrtanding these principles. In my own work, this book has opened intellectual doors through which I continue to explore how to better understand the audiences we address in growing our business.

Once in a great while...
... someone will introduce you to positions or ideas that on some level you already know, but in a way that makes you say wow. Now I get it. This is one of those books. Filled with insights that are both revolutionary and obvious, it is a book that will make you re-think the way you talk with your product developers, frontline staff and creative department.

fascinating
Although the writer mainly does his (extremely highly paid) work for marketing and advertising purposes, the book gives an unusually deep insight into the underlying meanings of certain concepts for various cultures.

Based on the learning of the particular culture as constructed in early childhood, he defines (for instance) what the word "love" means to several different cultures - and backs up his claims. He says that to the Americans (an adolescent culture) "love" really means "false expectation"; that in France "love" and pleasure are intertwined; the Italians expect love to contain strong dimensions of pleasure, beauty and (above all) fun (and that for them true love is maternal love); and for the Japanese (an older culture) love is a "temporary disease".

No, it's not terribly well written, but most of what he says resonates as true (I have lived for more than a decade each in Western Europe, US and Japan). He provides valuable insights and I'd love to read more on this subject by this author.