The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Buy and Live as They Do

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'Oreal 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 newset 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.

"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 navet 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)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Cultural anthropologist and marketing consultant Rapaille shares the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of his corporate clients. His approach is based on the idea that every culture has a "cultural unconscious" that drives the behavior of its members. Twelve chapters reveal the "codes" that underlie American consumer behavior in such areas as food, beauty, health, and home.
Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Cultural anthropologist and marketing consultant Rapaille shares the techniques he has used to improve profitability and practices for dozens of his corporate clients. His approach is based on the idea that every culture has a "cultural unconscious" that drives the behavior of its members. Twelve chapters reveal the "codes" that underlie American consumer behavior in such areas as food, beauty, health, and home. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Dr. CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE is the chairman of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide and has used this decoding approach for thirty years. He is the personal adviser to ten high-ranking CEOs and is kept on retainer by fifty Fortune 100 companies. He has been profiled in many national media outlets, including 60 Minutes II and on the front page of the New York Times Sunday Styles section. He lives in Tuxedo Park, New York.