The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do | 
 enlarge | Author: Clotaire Rapaille
Publisher: Broadway
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 15859
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 224
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 0767920570
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.8
EAN: 9780767920575
ASIN: 0767920570
Publication Date: July 17, 2007
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Product Description
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 new set 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.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 50 more reviews...
Once in a great while... September 11, 2008
... someone will introduce you to positions or ideas that on some level you already know, but in a way that makes you say wow. Now I get it. This is one of those books. Filled with insights that are both revolutionary and obvious, it is a book that will make you re-think the way you talk with your product developers, frontline staff and creative department.
 fascinating September 5, 2008
Although the writer mainly does his (extremely highly paid) work for marketing and advertising purposes, the book gives an unusually deep insight into the underlying meanings of certain concepts for various cultures.
Based on the learning of the particular culture as constructed in early childhood, he defines (for instance) what the word "love" means to several different cultures - and backs up his claims. He says that to the Americans (an adolescent culture) "love" really means "false expectation"; that in France "love" and pleasure are intertwined; the Italians expect love to contain strong dimensions of pleasure, beauty and (above all) fun (and that for them true love is maternal love); and for the Japanese (an older culture) love is a "temporary disease".
No, it's not terribly well written, but most of what he says resonates as true (I have lived for more than a decade each in Western Europe, US and Japan). He provides valuable insights and I'd love to read more on this subject by this author.
The human condition by culture.... September 2, 2008
We are products of our environment, rearing and experiences. This book may have value from a marketing stand-point. It is not why I read it.
Culture Code is insightful as to the behavior of people based on their life experiences. Our values as a society are reflected in our actions and our purchases. We do what is accepted by the majority and reject many things that are unpopular.
When a culture embraces a behavior we accept it as we grow within that culture. Sometimes it makes sense, other times, it does not.
If you are interested in why things are accepted as relevant for no seemingly good reason, read this title.
 Arbitrary conclusions; difficult to read August 3, 2008
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
There aren't many books I just don't like, but this was one. Rapaille comes across as an elitist who's tricked everyone into believing he's a guru. I would compare his book to a work of art where some know-it-all expert at the gallery is raving about the artist's use of light, color, and internal meaning, only to find out later that the painting was done by an elephant with a brush in its trunk (i.e. waaaay too much meaning assigned to random things). The same is true here. Rapaille's conclusions are ambigious and unproveable, and you or I could spout the same arbitrary theories. For example, because Americans consume a lot of hamburgers, I hereby declare that the culture code for America is a cow. See? It's easy. This type of random link between unrelated things (and the unsupportable claim that they're not random and they ARE related)is what you get with this book. Rapaille's only genius is in convincing corporate America that he is one.
 Preposterous Generalizations and Overstatements June 28, 2008
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
Nice stories, good observations, simplistic exposes and bold statements... but dubious generalizations.
This book fails to satisfy the very basic rules of logic. One can propose a generalization of a phenomenon based on unique observations and, depending upon which school of epistemology you belong to, either treat it as a hypothesis that must yet be proven, or adopt it as theory until it is proven wrong (i.e., falsified). But in either case, the existence of a counterexample will shatter the claim. If you are willing to read Rapaille's book from a critical thinking perspective, you will find a counterexample to his theories on almost every page.
I totally endorse Publishers Weekly's review: "preposterous generalizations and overstatements".
This does not discount the book's value as fantasy novel and "feel-good" reading.
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