The Reptilian Code

Dr. Rapaille is a market research guru who has been contracted by a large number of companies to figure out the hidden desires of consumers. Companies like Accura or Boing have commissioned him to break the code on luxury for example. He says that most of the time people have no idea of why they are doing what they are doing; he says as well that they are going to try to make up something that makes sense. This is why he explains in the movie that he doesn’t believe what people say.

As a former psychiatrist he explains that there are unconscious associations for barely any product we buy deep in our brains. The first time we imprint the meaning of a word we create a mental connection. He says that there is a code behind every individual decisions and this is why he has developed a 3-stage technique to find out what patterns drive people to consume. The stages are the followings:

1.     Past reason

2.     Through emotion

3.     To the primal core (where interesting decisions really lie)

In the first step, the past reason, he lets people say what they think about the topic that is luxury in the example of the video. He actually doesn’t care much about what they say but does it because he says that like to show how intelligent we are. In this way, the attendants to the focus group go to the break thinking that they made a good job about the topic they where talking about as Dr. Rapaille has just listened what they said.

Then, after the break, he tells to the focus group members to tell him a story. Doing this, he pushes the crowd into the emotion. They are mindset different in this step, they stop being logical or intelligent to just play the role Dr. Rapaille has asked them to play. In this step the focus group members don’t understand anymore what they are doing, and that’s what he is just trying. Now they are more vulnerable and open.

The third and last step, Rapaille is hunting for the primal urges (the reptilian hot buttons that compel us to actions). As he says, the reptilian always win, he try’s to take people to a stage in where they are not thinking anymore, they are not trying to be intelligent, they just take from them the inner code that was imprinted in their minds. He wants to take out the mental connection people have to a specific word or idea.

Summing up the 3-stage technique, the objective is to reduce consumers to the primal impulses. An example of Rappaile findings could be the difference to sell cheese to French or Americans. For French people, the cheese is alive and that is why they don’t put it in the fridge. In the other hand, for Americans cheese is dead. You can’t approach to both consumers the same way and that’s why they have to wrap up in plastic something not imaginable for French consumers.

About the experience Song airlines is trying to create I think it’s a good idea but they take it a little bit to far. They tried not just to create a brand and a product but also a life style around the name of Song. One thing they did well was how to make the image out of their brand and how to sell it to their target market. People, as they say in The Persuaders movie, respond very well to de advertising and feel identified with it. In this way they get people attention. But there is a really negative part in how Song sell themselves to their prospects, as although identifying with the brand a lot of them didn’t know what they where talking about. Possible consumers didn’t identify Song with an airplane company. Another thing they could have done better is the part of the TV advertising media. It’s a good way to get to consumers directly and it took them a little bit too much time and money to take it to the small screen.

To conclude, I just want to mark out that we must have in the top of our heads that the final objective is to sell a product, and if the product doesn’t penetrate in the minds of the consumers there is no point in trying to create a specific branding or lifestyle around it. 

Kenna’s Dilemma

The chapter of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Kenna’s Dilemma” shows with a real example how difficult is to reach the insights of the customers that are targeted in some markets. We know that music industry, as every other industry, is moved from a business approach so us, as marketers, must have this in the top of our heads in the moment of gaining insights of potential customers and launch a new product into the market.

The first example of the chapter, Pepsi’s Challenge, is an illustration of how difficult it is to find out what people really think. I will go further in this adding that apart of the difficulty of getting into people’s insights, marketers can influence directly on this thoughts and change their perception about the products. To explain myself I will use the example of Pepsi and Coke. As the author explains, when tests are made people prefer Pepsi to Coke, and actually regular customers can’t really distinguish them when a triangle test is made. Even though, Coca-Cola is the leader beverage company in the world and there are lots of Coke loyal customers reject to drink Pepsi, not because they don’t like it but because they have a strong belonging feeling to the Coca-Cola brand.

Staying in the same subject, if marketers find the way of creating link between a need in the consumers and their product they can make that this same consumers think in their product among another one that they might at first impression like better. For example, the brand Kleenex, at least in Spain, has such a brand notoriety that when people think about paper tissues directly talk about Kleenex although they don’t really care which brand to buy. Another example is the sport shoes. In Spain there was a brand when sport shoes started to commercialize that was cold Bamba’s. Now this brand don’t even exist any more but people still refer to sport shoes as ¨bambas¨, I think something similar happens here, in the US, with the Nike’s. The point is this brands have made a link between the need of using the sport shoes to the brand on the beginning of the product life cycle that unconsciously customers think on this brand when they talk about the product.

Now, I would like to talk about the second issue I think can be instructive when thinking about gaining costumers insights that I have extract from Kenna’s Dilemma, which by the way is closely related to the first lesson. How knowledge give first impressions resiliency or what is more, not just consume the product but think about it when consuming.

Usually we don’t stop and analyze a when we are about to consume it; we just proceed to do what our unconscious or our experience push us to do. This is why, as showed in the lecture, there are products which we could rank better or worst depending if we take our time to think about its components or if we just give our first impression. As happened with Kenna, experts think that his music its outstanding because they have a lot of experience and knowledge internalized, so they see how good is his music by hearing it once. In the other hand, in the mass market people don’t think about music that much when they hear about it and that’s why in the different surveys it appeared that Kenna’s music wouldn’t be a hit.

Marketers should have always in their mind that is different to target expert people or regular consumers. In my personal case, and as I know it happens to many people, when I don’t know much about a product I’m very open to suggestions about friends or sellers about that product. In another way, I would buy what others tell me is the best option rather than choosing one by myself. In the other hand, if I have knowledge about something I want to buy I tend to buy what I have in my mind from a beginning. What it’s more, as I always ask to sellers if they give me an information I think it’s not correct what would happen is that it would create a skeptic thinking in me about the store. So the only thing that can happen is to create in my mind a negative linking.

Getting to the end of this blog, there are some markets, as the music market can be in this case, in which everyone (both experts and the mass market) have their own impression and thinking of the product. Us, as marketers, shouldn’t try to tell costumers what they should think but we should strengthen our products by using marketing tools so as to improve the perception consumers have about those products.