The Culture Code (13 page)

There are obvious reasons why home means so much to Americans. This country was founded by a group of people who came here to create a new home. When they arrived, there were no houses, no roads, none of the trappings of home. For most of them, there was also no turning back. For political, financial, or logistical reasons, they could not return to the place they left behind. This was even truer for the waves of immigrants who followed them, people who gave up everything they owned for a chance to start a new life in the New World. These people turned their backs on everything they knew and came to America in search of home. In doing so, they defined home not only for themselves but for the entire culture they created.

Americans may have a stronger sense of home than any other culture on the planet. We see home not only as the house we grew up in or the one where we live with our families, but as our entire country. No invading force has ever occupied our country. Never in our history have we lost our home (as opposed to most other countries around the world that have been occupied or annexed at some point). The French do not share this sense of home. After multiple invasions, the French sense of “homeland” is considerably less intense than the American sense. (This, by the way, is one of the reasons people from other countries are simultaneously fascinated and repelled by Americans’ strong sense of nationalism.) Many other countries were stitched together from various cultures after a war (Iraq after World War I, for instance) or, like India, gained independence after long years of colonial rule. These countries do not have the same sense of the country as their home that we have.

What mental highway do we traverse when we think about home? What unconscious signal do we receive? I explored the Code for home for Homeowner Insurance Company, but I also received many insights from studying other subjects, such as corrugated boxes (for Inland Container) and coffee (for Folger’s).

My first memory of home was my mother’s picking me up from the bus stop after my first day at school. I was very nervous about going to kindergarten and even though that first day turned out better than I expected, I was still so glad to see her waiting for me when I got back. We went home, had a snack together, and talked about the day. From then on, we did that every day until I went to high school.

—a twenty-four-year-old woman

When I came back from my first semester at college for Christmas break, I had a big party at my house for all of my friends. I don’t think I realized how much I missed these people until I saw them all again. Some of us stayed together until four in the morning just getting back in touch.

—a thirty-six-year-old man

We had this thing in our home every Sunday dinner. Before we ate, we told each other our highs and lows for the week. Sometimes the things we talked about were really silly, but a lot of times we talked about things that really meant something. I tried to be home for dinner every Sunday night because I really loved having the chance to bounce things off the other members of my family.

—a thirty-two-year-old woman

It’s funny, but when you asked me to think about home, I think about seeing my parents and grandparents in the stands watching my Little League baseball games. For some reason, knowing they were there to root for me made me feel at home even when I wasn’t home.

—a twenty-six-year-old man

Things were always a little disjointed when I was growing up. My father lived in Cleveland and we only saw him during the summer. My mother worked late and really couldn’t spend a lot of time with us. Now that I’m happily married and have my own family, though, I find that home has a completely different meaning to me. We have all of these little rituals associated with holidays and birthdays and even the start of baseball season. It seems that we find lots of different reasons to celebrate being together.

—a forty-year-old woman

My father died five years ago. Family was so important to him and he gave me a very strong sense of home. He was my rock and I miss him like crazy. Even today, whenever something is bothering me or even when I have great news, I talk to this picture I have of him on my kitchen counter (yes, I know that’s a little weird) and it makes me feel like he’s still with me.

—a woman in her sixties

The language in these stories reveals strong emotion, exactly what one would have expected given the subject. The emotion had a definite sense of motion, though, a surprising emphasis on repetition. Coming back from school and sharing a snack every day. Coming back from college and finding the old friends with whom you once spent so much time. Sitting down over dinner to share stories every week. Seeing your family at every game. Sharing rituals. Seeking advice and comfort from a family member who had died. There were many words that could describe the message triggered by the sense of home—but only one prefix.

The Code for home in America is the prefix “RE-.”

When we think of home, we think of words that begin with the prefix “re-.” Words like
re
turn (as the girl did when she came home from school),
re
unite (as the boy did when he got back from college),
re
connect (as the family did when they told each other their highs and lows for the week, and as the woman did when she spoke to the picture of her father),
re
confirm (as the boy did when he saw his family in the stands at his baseball games), and
re
new (as the woman did during her family’s various rituals). This sends a very powerful message to us about what it means to be home. Home is a place where you can do things repeatedly and have a good sense of the outcome—unlike the outside world, where everything can be so unpredictable. Home is a place where doing things
again
gives them added meaning. This is why coming home has such a powerful dimension in this culture and why we have such a strong emotional reaction when we think about bringing home our troops or our endangered astronauts. We want them to experience their lives again, surrounded by the people who mean the most to them.

Home has different meanings in other cultures. Because space is at a premium, the Japanese consider every inch of the home precious. The Japanese remove their shoes before entering their homes to avoid sullying their treasured space with dirt from the outside. Each room has multiple functions (the living room becomes the bedroom as futons [invented by the Japanese] are converted from seating space to sleeping space) and few people in Japan have a room of their own. Interestingly, there is no word for intimacy in Japanese. When one lives in such close quarters, the concept goes without saying.

Nomadic Arab tribes are always moving. Still, they have a very strong sense of home, even though it is not related to a specific place. They have tents made of camel hair that are incredibly gorgeous and intricately designed. When they make camp, they appoint their tents luxuriously with items that have strong personal meaning—beautiful furniture and carpets—which they take with them from place to place. The first time I entered one of these tents, I was amazed. The family I visited had its entire culture under one roof.

In the American house, the kitchen is the central room where the family gathers. Contemporary kitchens include televisions, desks, islands with stools for seating, and other amenities that promote congregating. The kitchen is the heart of the American home because an essential ritual takes place there: the preparation of the evening meal. This is a ritual filled with repetition and reconnection that leads to replenishment. Making dinner is on Code for home in America.

Having grown up in France, I found my first visits to American homes a little surprising. I would often enter the house through a side door or even the garage and walk directly into the kitchen. There I would be told to “help myself” while the meal was prepared in front of me. This was very alien. In France, houses are designed differently and visitors are entertained in another way entirely. The biggest rooms in a French house are the “stage” areas: the foyer, the living room or salon, and the dining room. Guests will have drinks and coffee in the salon and dinner in the dining room and they will never see the kitchen. This is true even among close friends.

Knowledge of the Code explains a great deal about why “going home” means so much to us, even after our families have moved to a house where we never lived. If home is about return, reconnection, renewal, reunion, and other words with the prefix “re-,” then the physical location means nothing. What is important is that the feelings and family exist wherever you define “home.” Keeping our mementoes, photo albums, and symbols of home life is on Code because these things allow us to return to a sense of home whenever we need it. Throwing out memories to remove clutter is off Code. Having Thanksgiving dinner in your grandmother’s crowded dining room is decidedly on Code, while going to a roomy but unfamiliar restaurant for the holiday is not.

For businesses, awareness of the Code offers clear-cut ways to market household products. The Betty Crocker people came to me years ago to discover the Code for the icon of Betty Crocker herself. They believed that the icon had outlived its time and that if they understood the unconscious messages Americans received from the icon, they could reinvigorate their brand with new symbols. Instead, they learned that the image of Betty Crocker has a very strong positive imprint on the American unconscious. The American Code for Betty Crocker is
THE
SOUL
OF
THE
KITCHEN
. She represents tasty aromas and hot food. She has a very strong place in the American perception of home.

The Betty Crocker brand managers changed their plans completely. Instead of jettisoning the icon of Betty Crocker, they relaunched it. They gave the “new” Betty Crocker a face that appealed to all races. They gave her a distinctive handwriting and a voice to speak on radio (where she offers homemaking advice).

Selling any household item with the notion that it can become part of a family ritual (anything from popcorn to coffee to laundry detergent) is a valuable way to ignite our affection for home. Cell phone companies offering free calls to family members are on Code because they promote reconnection. An airline or travel agency that offered special packages for family reunions would be right on the mark.

When I worked with
GMAC
Home Insurance, we learned that at the unconscious level Americans believe that home is where their “stuff” is. We discovered, for instance, that people will pack a box of personal goods during a move, put it in the basement, and then move that same box—never opened—from new home to new home. The content of the box is unimportant (and often unknown). What
is
important is that the box contains “stuff,” and “stuff” has great value in making Americans feel at home. Because of this work,
GMAC
home insurance is exploring a program of preserving family photos—very important “stuff”—for policyholders. They would keep digital files of these valuable photos and replace them if they are destroyed in a fire. This resonates in a very on-Code way.

WHAT’S COOKING? ANYTHING?

Like the need for shelter, the biological scheme for dinner is fundamental: all human beings need nourishment. But what is the continuum between the biological requirement to eat and the particular cultural scheme in America? Like the notion of home, the concept of dinner is very powerful in our culture.

Dinners have a strong ceremonial place in America. That biggest dinner of the year—Thanksgiving dinner—even commemorates the launch of our culture. We commemorate holidays and birthdays with large family dinners; the celebration dinner is one of the most common ways to mark an accomplishment, such as a promotion or a good report card.

Each of these dinners is a major event that can produce lasting memories. What imprint comes from the everyday dinner, though—the weeknight meal one shares with family (at least occasionally) after a long day of work or school? Kraft, wanting to learn how to make its products synonymous with American meals, was interested in the answer to this question, and commissioned discovery sessions to learn what dinner means in America. Later in this book, we will decode food in general, but here the focus is on the meal that, as we will see, has the most resonance in the American mind.

In the first hour of these sessions, we heard what people think about the average dinner. It was something to prepare quickly. The family rarely sat down to eat together because everyone had such a busy schedule. When they did sit down together, there was often a TV playing. The meal consisted of a takeout pizza or a pre-prepared entrée. Conversation consisted of a fast debriefing on the day and then silence. The meal was over in fifteen minutes or less.

Certainly, none of this was surprising. Americans, who equate health with movement, have very active lives. We work long hours. We have soccer practices and tennis lessons and book clubs and poker nights to attend. We have three hours of homework, or a pile of papers brought home from the office. We have shows to watch and instant messages to write. Where are we supposed to find the time to prepare a nice meal or to linger over it with the clan? I got the sense during these first-hour conversations that Americans thought of the family dinner as a quaint element of our past, like the sewing circle or the ice cream social.

When we got to the third hour of every session, however, and when the harried participants relaxed and thought back to their first, their most powerful, and their most recent memories of dinner, the meaning of this meal bore no resemblance to what they’d said earlier.

Some spoke of regular family gatherings:

I always looked forward to dinner every night. First of all, my mother was a great cook, so we always had something good to eat. Even if she just threw something together quickly, it tasted fantastic. But the other thing was that everyone got to sit around and talk to each other. My parents, my two brothers, and I discussed the day’s events and upcoming plans for the following day. It was a warm environment, full of love and nurturing. Everyone was given an opportunity to speak about anything important to them. It was the time that everyone had to check in with each other.