Rapaille
There are many ways one could use marketing psychology. Today, I will discuss a French-born American cultural anthropologist and author, Clotaire Rapaille. He is the author of the best seller “The Culture Code”, and more than 10 other books, including “7 Secrets of Marketing in a Multi-Cultural World”.

Culture
Today, Rapaille is best known for his contributions to the advertising and marketing business world, researching the impact of culture on business and markets. Rapaille is using psychology to understand the deeper belongings and fears of people. One of his populair concepts is ‘the reptilion button’. I quote:

Hot button
Rapaille’s theory asserts that one’s decisions as to product purchases, political candidate preferences and the like are influenced by sub-conscious ‘imprints’. These imprints, he says, are located within the ‘reptillian brain’.

“When you learn a word, whatever it is, ‘coffee’, ‘love’, ‘mother’,  there is always a first time. There’s a first time to learn everything. The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection that you’re going to keep using the rest of your life. … So actually every word has a mental highway. I call that a code, an unconscious code in the brain.”

“It’s absolutely crucial for anybody in communication — and that could be journalists, TV, media, all of it, or marketing people — if you want to appeal to people, it’s absolutely crucial to understand what I call the reptilian hot button. If you don’t have a reptilian hot button, then you have to deal with the cortex; you have to work on price issues and stuff like that.”

Message
In an interview, Rapaille explains, “A car is a message. It has eyes, a mouth, a chin. It has a face, and that face speaks to you. The Hummer, he explains, is “a war machine”, which says: “if you want to fight, I can fight. But you will die.”

Rapaille shows how important it is to get to the essence of the consumer’s mind. Marketing 3.0.

Note: credits to Wikipedia for this post.