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Chapter 1
Chapter 1
THE BIRTH OF A NOTION
I still run discovery sessions the same way I ran that first session for Nestlé more than thirty years ago. Five principles guide my methodology for uncovering cultural Codes, and knowledge of these principles will help you understand the thinking that goes into each discovery.
The best way to illustrate these principles is to look at them in the context of an actual discovery. In the following pages, I'll take you through the discovery of the American Code for cars. I did this several years ago for Chrysler, after the work I did for them on the Jeep Wrangler. They were preparing to launch a new vehicle and hired me to learn what people really wanted from cars. At the time, sales of sedans were flagging as Americans became more and more fascinated with SUVs, minivans, and trucks. Quite a few people in the industry even suggested that the public was no longer particularly interested in sedans at all. This discovery session was therefore critical to Chrysler in a number of ways, because if they learned that sedans no longer had appeal among Americans, it would dramatically alter the direction of the company.
PRINCIPLE 1: YOU CAN'T BELIEVE WHAT PEOPLE SAY
What do Americans look for in a car? I've heard many answers when I've asked this question. The answers include excellent safety ratings, great gas mileage, handling, and cornering ability, among others. I don't believe any of these. That's because the first principle of the Culture Code is that the only effective way to understand what people truly mean is to ignore what they say. This is not to suggest that people intentionally lie or misrepresent themselves. What it means is that, when asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. Again, this is not because they intend to mislead. It is because people respond to these questions with their cortexes, the parts of their brains that control intelligence rather than emotion or instinct. They ponder a question, they process a question, and when they deliver an answer, it is the product of deliberation. They believe they are telling the truth. A lie detector would confirm this. In most cases, however, they aren't saying what they mean.
The reason for this is simple: most people don't know why they do the things they do. In a classic study, the nineteenth-century scientist Jean-Martin Charcot hypnotized a female patient, handed her an umbrella, and asked her to open it. After this, he slowly brought the woman out of her hypnotic state. When she came to, she was surprised by the object she held in her hand. Charcot then asked her why she was carrying an open umbrella indoors. The woman was utterly confused by the question. She of course had no idea of what she had just been through and no memories of Charcot's instructions. Baffled, she looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back at Charcot and said, "It was raining."
Surely the woman didn't think she had an open umbrella indoors because it was raining. When asked, though, she felt the need to come up with an answer, and this was the only logical one she could devise.
Even the most self-examining of us are rarely in close contact with our subconscious. We have little interaction with this powerful force that drives so many of our actions. Therefore, we give answers to questions that sound logical and are even what the questioner expected, but which don't reveal the unconscious forces that precondition our feelings. This is why polls and surveys are so often misleading and useless (and why the executives at Chrysler got the wrong "answers" regarding the Wrangler). They simply reflect what people say, rather than what they mean.
Early in my career I realized that, if I wanted to help people identify what something really meant to them, I needed to adopt the role of "professional stranger," that visitor from another planet I wrote about earlier. I needed to convince people that I was a complete outsider who required their help in understanding how a particular item worked, what its appeal might be, or what emotions it was likely to provoke. What do you do with coffee? Is money some kind of clothing? How does one operate love? This allows people to begin the process of separating from their cortexes and moving toward the source of their first encounter with the item in question.
By the third hour of a discovery session—the point when the participants lie on the floor with pillows and listen to soothing music—people finally begin to say what they really mean. This process helps them access a different part of their brains. The answers they give now come from their reptilian brains, the place where their instincts are housed. It is in our reptilian brains that the real answers lie.
Many people have the experience of remembering their dreams vividly for the first five or ten minutes after they awaken. If they don't record the details of these dreams in those first few minutes, though, they usually lose them forever. This is because, during this state between sleep and wakefulness, you have better access to your memories and instincts. The relaxation process employed during the discovery sessions allows participants to access this state and in so doing to bypass their cortexes to reconnect with their reptilian brains. People regularly report that memories come back to them during these sessions that they had forgotten for years.
For Chrysler, I gathered participants and asked them to tell me what they wanted from a car. The initial responses I got were pure cortex: good gas mileage, safety, mechanical reliability, and all the other things we have learned to say about this subject. I, of course, did not believe them. As each session continued, I began to hear other things about cars that resonated. Memories of distinctive cars of the past, like the 1964 Mustang, the original VW Beetle, and the Cadillacs of the 1950s with their huge fins. Stories of the sense of freedom that came with holding their first set of car keys. Bashful mutterings about first sexual experiences taking place in the backseat of a car. Slowly, the sense of what American consumers really wanted from an automobile began to emerge. They wanted something distinctive. They wanted freedom. They wanted a sensual experience.
The car that emerged from these discovery sessions was the PT Cruiser, a car with a very strong look and a very strong message.
The reaction to the car was equally strong. Some people, of course, hated it. Any truly distinctive thing will be utterly unappealing to some people, even people within the same culture. This is because of the tensions that define cultures, something I will address at length in chapter 3.
However, others loved the car, so much that it became a big commercial success. Its release was the most successful new car launch in recent memory. People spent up to $4,000 extra just to be on a waiting list to own one. Did the groundswell of excitement come because the PT Cruiser provided what people said they wanted in a car? No. It had gas mileage and safety ratings no better than any number of sedans, and it was no more reliable mechanically. It was, however, unusual, aggressive, and sexy. It appealed to what people really wanted in a car rather than what they said they wanted. If we had listened only to what people said, Chrysler would have created another boring, efficient sedan and the public would have shrugged. By learning what they really meant, Chrysler created a phenomenon instead.
PRINCIPLE 2: EMOTION IS THE ENERGY REQUIRED TO LEARN ANYTHING
The discovery sessions for cars brought up some very strong emotions. People came to me after the third hour to say that memories brought them to tears, filled them with joy, or even made them extremely uncomfortable. This is not unusual. In fact, some form of this happens at nearly every discovery session I do—even the ones for office products and toilet paper.
Emotions are the keys to learning, the keys to imprinting. The stronger the emotion, the more clearly the experience is learned. Think again of that child and the hot pan. Emotions create a series of mental connections (I call them mental highways) that are reinforced by repetition. These mental highways condition us to see the world in predictable ways. They are the path from our experience with the world (such as touching a hot pan) to a useful approach to the world (avoiding all hot things in the future).
We do the overwhelming majority of our learning when we are children. By the time we are seven, most of our mental highways have been constructed. But emotion continues to provide us with new imprints throughout our lives. Most Americans of the Boomer generation can remember where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Most Americans alive today can vividly relive the experience of watching the World Trade Center towers fall. This is because these experiences are so emotionally powerful that they are effectively seared onto our brains. We will never forget them, and the simple mention of the topic sends us back to that moment when we imprinted it.
In Normandy, peasants have a strange and unpleasant ritual that exhibits an innate understanding of this concept at the same time that it shows a misguided approach to utilizing it. When the first son in a family reaches his seventh birthday, his father takes him out to the land the father owns and walks him to each corner of the property. At each corner, the father beats the child. While the practice is repellent and probably doesn't do much for the father-son bond, it does create a very strong emotional connection for the child to the boundaries of the property. The father knows that having this experience will cause the child to remember forever the bounds of the land he will someday inherit.
I had my own unforgettable experience with learning an American phrase when I began teaching at Thomas Jefferson College not long after I arrived in this country in the seventies. I had only begun to learn how to speak American English. My class took place in a large, windowless lecture hall, and on the first day, I'd just started to explain my goals for the class when one of the students yelled at me, "Watch out!" I'd never heard the phrase before and therefore had no idea what the student meant. Instantly, my brain searched for some kind of definition. "Watch" meant "look." "Out" could mean "outside." Did the student want me to look outside? I couldn't, though, because there were no windows in the room. Of course, all of this happened in a fraction of a second—after which a part of the ceiling fell on my head and I was suddenly lying on the floor bleeding and waiting for paramedics to arrive.
To say the least, I now know what "watch out" means. In fact, whenever I hear it, I still look toward the ceiling first, just in case it's about to fall on me.
Copyright © 2006 by Clotaire Rapaille.