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

Amazing for BOTH consumers AND marketers!

The author really has an ingenious way of interpreting how people relate certain emotions to products. This is extremely useful both as a Marketing student and as a consumer. It helps me u.derstand what happens when I shop and why I buy what I do.

Guidebook to deciphering cultural codes

The core idea of this pleasant, accessible book is easy to grasp: Culturally specific codes shape people's understandings, behaviors and emotional responses. French-born psychoanalyst and marketing maven Clotaire Rapaille brings a useful perspective shaped by his experiences as a U.S. immigrant to his discussion of what he calls "Culture Codes." His methods for tapping into these codes are straightforward. However, some of his conclusions lead to fairly sweeping, general claims about overall national cultures. His explanations of coded cultural instincts and actions are still interesting, particularly when he delves specifically into American, French, English, German, Japanese and other societies. getAbstract suggests his book to those interested in cultural differences and those responsible for tailoring marketing concepts to reach specific national audiences around the world.

Interesting, but a little repetitive

This was a pretty easy read, it wasn't difficult to understand, and I liked all the different stories Clotaire Rapaille included in his book. It was also interesting to see the difference between what people THINK they think, and what they actually, unconsciously think. This unconcscious thought leads us to "live and buy as [we] do." I had never heard of this concept before, so it was nice to get a new perspective on why people from all over the world make the decisions that they do. I have been to a few of the countries he mentioned, and when I thought about it, I agreed with most of the observations he made. It was a pretty good book overall, but I thought it got kind of repetitive near the end. It seemed liked Rapaille was trying to remind us how his "discovery sessions" work, when the reader already understood a while ago.

More like 'Cultural Veneer'

Having marketed and sold in every region of the globe, I was naturally drawn to Clotaire Rapaille's 'The Culture Code.' Rapaille utlizes a one word 'code' which you could characterize as an 'emoticon descriptor' for a product or service, such as 'HORSE' for the the Jeep Wrangler, or 'DISAPPOINTMENT' for Love. He caught my interest up front with a top line description of the process behind his code labeling, but as the book progressed, never provided a road map as to the analysis behind the process except the end results surrounding vanity areas of health, beauty, sex, home, money and other emotional strings. But nothing regarding hard business or marketing factor analysis. The book read more as opinion found in a celebrity magazine, resembling a bastard child of 'US' and 'The Economist.' His premise is that we all look at the world differently due to our childhood driven, hard wired cultural experiences, causing stark differences between the emotional quotient of Europeans, Asians and Americans. At the end, the chapters were fairly repetitive recapping the first, and strongest, in the book.

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