Clotaire Rapaille : The Culture Code
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It became obvious to me that, because the emotion
associated with driving and owning a car is so strong, the PT Cruiser needed
to be a car that people could feel strongly about. It needed to have a
distinctive identity to justify such strong emotions. To create a strong
identity and a new car at the same time, we decided to tap into something
that already existed in the culture, a familiar unconscious structure. The
one we chose was the gangster car – the kind of vehicle Al Capone famously
drove. This became the PT Cruiser’s signature. It lent the car an extremely
strong identity. There is nothing else like it on the road today and the
consumer responded. Again, if the Cruiser had been just another sedan, the
public probably wouldn’t even have noticed it, but its distinctiveness tapped
into something very emotional. |
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In France, the concepts of love and pleasure are
intertwined. The French consider the notions of true love and Mr. Right
irrelevant. The refinement of pleasure is paramount and romance is a highly
sophisticated process. Love means helping your partner achieve as much
pleasure as possible, even if this requires finding someone else to provide
some of this pleasure. French couples can, of course, be devoted to each
other, but their definition of this devotion differs greatly from the American
definition. Fidelity, for instance, is not nearly as important to them, and
their expectations are set accordingly. The Italians believe that life is a comedy rather
than a tragedy and that one should laugh whenever possible. They expect love
to contain strong dimensions of pleasure, beauty and, above all, fun. If love
becomes too dramatic or too hard, it is unsatisfying. The Italian culture centers
very strongly on family and Italians put their mothers up on pedestals. To
them, true love is maternal love. Therefore, their expectations for romantic
love are lower. Men romance women but seek true love from their mothers.
Women believe the best way to express and experience love is by becoming mothers.
The man is Mr. Right as long as he provides a child. The Japanese offer perhaps the best illustration of the differences in attitudes toward love between an adolescent culture (America) and an older culture. Japanese men and women often ask me to describe how westerners marry. I tell them that a young man meets a young woman, often one younger than he, and they begin the process of getting to know each other. If he happens to fall deeply in love, the man will ask the woman to marry him and if she loves him as well, she will say yes. Obviously, it’s more complicated than this in practice, but I get the main points across this way. Stunned expressions always meet this description. “The man is young?”, the Japanese questioner will say. “If he is young, how can he possibly have enough experience to make a decision of this type? Only his parents can know what kind of marriage is appropriate for him and will allow him to raise the best family. And you say the woman is younger. That means she is even less experienced than he is.” They save their greatest contempt, though, for the notion that westerners marry for love. Love is a temporary disease, they tell me. It is foolish to base something as important as the creation of a family on something so temporary.
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Phrases like “not a part of this life”, “just isn’t reality” and “definitely not in this universe” characterized perfection as something abstract and inchoate, something distant and maybe even undesirable. In fact, the quest for perfection seemed to be something most people preferred to avoid – something that defined the end of a process, after which there could be no movement. The culture code for perfection in America is death. Knowledge of the codes for quality and perfection helps explain why our attempts at Japanese level standards in these areas fail to gain traction. Americans understand the concept of getting it right the first time at the cortex level. But, deeper down, they don’t want to do it, might even fear doing it. The cultural reasons for this seem to be two-fold. Partly, because we are an adolescent culture with an adolescent attitude, we don’t want people telling us what to do and holding us to their standards. We want to discover things and learn how to do things our own way. Even more entrenched though, is the pioneer spirit that brought us to this country in the first place. When we arrived in the new world, there was no instruction manual teaching us how to deal with the conditions. We had to learn everything ourselves and we did it the only way we could – through trial and error. Learning from our mistakes not only allowed us to survive, but also allowed us to grow into a powerful and hugely successful country. We were rewarded for our ability to pick ourselves up of the ground and do things better the second and third times. Trying, failing, learning from our mistakes and coming back stronger than ever is an essential part of the American archetype.
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Because our country was so
vast and underpopulated when we developed it, we have grown accustomed to a
certain level of disposability. If the land we farmed didn’t produce enough,
we got new land. If the environment in one part of the country, we moved. There
was no need to improve the quality of one’s house because it was easier simply
to get a new and better house. This is fundamentally different from the way many other cultures learned to survive. Take, for instance, the Japanese. Their country comprises only 146,000 sq. miles, compared to the more than 3.7 million sq. miles of the United States. There was never a vast frontier to explore. The Japanese couldn’t dispose of their houses or their property if they grew disenchanted. They needed to make the most of their land and keep it as productive as possible (thank you for Norin 10😊). In addition, because so many people live in such a small space – the population of Japan is more than 125 million – 43% of the American population in 4% of the space – efficiency is critical. There’s no room for wasted products of wasted process. Mistakes are costlier. Quality is a necessity; perfection is a premium. Americans, on the other hand, find perfection boring. If something is perfect, you’re stuck with it for life, and that doesn’t sit well with most Americans.
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“I have several American
friends. I find them endlessly entertaining. When I go to America, I know I
am going to eat too much, drink too much, stay up too late and speak twice as
loudly as I normally speak. I couldn’t live that way all the time, but it is
a lot of fun” A 32-year-old Englishman “It’s easy to think of
Americans as somewhat beneath us. Their accents are ridiculous and they
insist on using their voices at such high volume. They all seem like a bunch
of bounding children. They consider history to be anything that took place in
the past decade and they all weigh too much. If they are beneath us, though,
why have they accomplished so much. They seem to understand something that we
fail to understand” A 55-year-old Englishman “I always know when an American
is in my shop. They don’t even have to open their mouths for me to know. It’s
in their eyes. Americans want everything” |
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If the French expect us to be space-travelers, then the products we
bring them should have an other-worldly quality. They should feel new and
unusual. But, knowing the foreign codes for America still does not ensure
success in that market. Any marketing strategy in a foreign culture must also
be cognizant of what a culture thinks of itself. The French code for France
is IDEA. Raised on stories of great French philosophers and thinkers, French
children imprint the value of ideas as paramount and refinement of the mind as
the highest goal. The English code for England is class. There is a strong sense among
the English that they are of a higher social stratum than other people. This
arises from England’s long history of world leadership – the sun never sets
on the British empire – and from the messages passed down from generation to
generation that being English is a special privilege that one receives at
birth. The German code for Germany is perhaps best illustrated in a story.
Lego, the Danish toy company found instant success with their interlocking
blocks in the German market while sales foundered in the US. Why? The company’s
management believed that one of the primary reasons for their success was the
quality of the instructions that they provided inside each box that helped
children build the specific item – a car, a spaceship – that a particular box
of blocks was meant to build. The instructions were quite a breakthrough in
the field – precise, colorful and refreshingly clear. They made construction
with Lego blocks not only simple, but, in some ways, magical. If one followed
the path through the instructions, tiny plastic pieces methodically turned
into something grander. American children could not have cared less. They
would tear into the boxes, glance fleetingly at the instructions (if they
looked at them at all) and immediately set out on a construction project of
their own. They seem to be having a wonderful time that they were as likely
to build, say, a fort as they were to build the automobile for which the
blocks were intended and when they were done, they would tear their fort
apart and start over from scratch. To Lego’s dismay, a single box of Legos
could last for years. In Germany, however, Lego’s strategy worked exactly as
intended. German children opened a box of Legos, sought out the instructions,
read them carefully and then sorted the pieces by color. They began building,
comparing their assembly process to the crisp, helpful illustrations in the
instruction booklet. When they were finished, they had an exact duplicate of
the product shown on the cover of the box. They showed it to mother who
clapped approvingly and put the model on a shelf. Now the children needed
another box. Without knowing it, Lego had tapped into the culture code for
Germany itself – ORDER. Over many generations, Germans perfected bureaucracy in an effort to
stave off the chaos that came to them in wave after wave and Germans are
imprinted early on with this most powerful of codes. That imprint makes children
reach dutifully for the instructions and that code prevents them from
immediately destroying their neat construction in order to build it anew. Lego’s
elegant, full-color instructions had tapped into the German code in a way
that assured repeat sales. Given both codes – the code for the home culture and the code for the foreign culture – a company should be well-armed to succeed. |
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I was born in France, but, like everyone else in the world, I had no
choice of homeland. From the time I was very young, I knew that parts of the
French culture failed to fit me properly. The French are extremely critical,
they are pessimistic, they are jealous of what others have and they put
little value on personal success. When I told people there that I wanted to build a large business based
on new ideas, they sneered and called me a megalomaniac. The American culture
seemed to offer so many of the things I wanted from life – especially in building
a career. When I decided to emigrate, Francois Mitterand was the president
and he had frozen the assets of any French citizen leaving the country.
Therefore, when I arrived in NY, I had no money. I also had no place to live
and my English was very poor. I had come to America to do work on archetypes and
few people had any idea what I was even talking about. I knew a few French immigrants in NY and I went to see them as soon as
I arrived. They welcomed me, offering me a place to stay, some money and the
use of a car. When I told them about what I planned to do for a living, they
encouraged me and told me they were sure I would succeed. As happy as I was
to hear these words, the first thoughts that came to mind was, “Are you sure
you’re French?” These people who had been living in America for a few years,
were utterly different from the French I knew in France. They were
optimistic, helpful, generous and enthusiastic about new opportunities. In
other words, they were American. Yes, they’d embraced the American culture,
but, in addition, like me, they got many of these traits already and came
here because they knew that they would be surrounded by like-minded people.
The French who were lazy and lacked imagination stayed in Europe. The ones
with guts and determination came here. These people found home by moving
elsewhere. Their homeland was an accident of birth. They found a permanent
place to live when they left it to come to America. Clotaire Rapaille |
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Many disagreed with the platforms of FDR and Reagan, but both men effected tremendous turnarounds in America’s fortunes, particularly its economic fortunes during their terms. Rebellious visionaries do that. For the candidates themselves, the code offers a vivid image of what Americans expect from their chief executives. The vision thing is critical, as is the ability to get one’s message across and inspire. Americans don’t want father figures who tell them what to do, but they do want men and, someday, even soon, a woman, with a plan they can understand and follow. In addition, they do not want a president who thinks too much. Except under extraordinary circumstances, the more reptilian candidate always wins. This is something that John Kerry, Michael Dukakis and many others didn’t understand. Cultures change very slowly, which means Americans will be looking for Moses in their president a long time into the future. If we all understand this code, the election process could be very different in 2008 and beyond. |
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