Dr. Clotaire Rapaille uses a combination of phychiatry, physchology and cultural anthropology to provide powerful tools to large corporations trying to understand how to penetrate the minds of their consumers. His approach, Archetype Discovery, allows organizations understand why a certain group of people do what they do, whether the research is related to a particular product or service. To understand how influential his work is, just take a look at his list of clients.
I came across his work through his most recent book, The Culture Code
One particular notion that got my attention was the relationship between emotion and learning, establishing that most people learn the important things about their cultures before age 7 because during that period the process is deeply emotional. Once they start to reason and react logically to new information, the imprint of cultural learning is not as powerful. This may also be the key to understanding the mechanisms that would allow different cultures to find common codes through the analysis of how their children are raised in the early years.
One can’t help but feel “used” when discovering how sophisticated large corporations have become and the quality of tools they have to continue their race for global reach. Next time you are purchasing any non-essential product question if your decision was influenced by some advanced marketing technique that touched a hidden nerve. It is truly scary that sometimes we just can’t help but obey our unconscious self and that corporations know how to command us through it. Our only hope is to understand the same tools and use them to strengthen our global unconscious so it assigns priority to the things that really matter.
1 response so far ↓
1 Indian Chomsky // Nov 1, 2006 at 5:34 am
The current scenario in the Indian marketplace is quite interesting as it is dynamic. The middle classes, who have thus far been extremely stringent about their finances are actually allowing themselves the ‘freedom’ to experience consumerism as prescribed by the west. What’s very intriguing however is the fact that they are still very conscientious about the old adage…”Value for Money”…So while multinational conglomerates can use every marketing tacting depoyed all over the world to seduce the desis…It’s going to take much more emotional engagement and grass root involvement at the community by the multi national corporationns to convince or for that matter coerce the average Indian consumer whether in Delhi or Dibrugarh.
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