The Culture Code (2 page)

We continued to talk and the man made me an extremely attractive offer. Not only were the financial terms considerable, but there was something promising about a project like this. Unlike my work with autistic children, where progress was painfully slow, this offer was a chance to quickly test theories I had developed about imprinting and the unconscious mind. It was an opportunity too good to pass up. I took a sabbatical and went off on my new assignment.

My first meeting with Nestlé executives and their Japanese advertising agency was very instructive. Their strategy, which today seems absurdly wrong but wasn’t as obviously so in the 1970s, was to try to convince Japanese consumers to switch from tea to coffee. Having spent some time in Japan, I knew that tea meant a great deal to this culture, but I had no sense of what emotions they attached to coffee. I decided to gather several groups of people together to discover how they imprinted the beverage. I believed there was a message there that could open a door for Nestlé.

I structured a three-hour session with each of the groups. In the first hour, I took on the persona of a visitor from another planet, someone who had never seen coffee before and had no idea how one “used” it. I asked for help understanding the product, believing their descriptions would give me insight into what they thought of it.

In the next hour, I had them sit on the floor like elementary school children and use scissors and a pile of magazines to make a collage of words about coffee. The goal here was to get them to tell me stories with these words that would offer me further clues.

In the third hour, I had participants lie on the floor with pillows. There was some hesitation among members of every group, but I convinced them I wasn’t entirely out of my mind. I put on soothing music and asked the participants to relax. What I was doing was calming their active brainwaves, getting them to that tranquil point just before sleep. When they reached this state, I took them on a journey back from their adulthood, past their teenage years, to a time when they were very young. Once they arrived, I asked them to think again about coffee and to recall their earliest memory of it, the first time they consciously experienced it, and their most significant memory of it (if that memory was a different one).

I designed this process to bring participants back to their first imprint of coffee and the emotion attached to it. In most cases, though, the journey led nowhere. What this signified for Nestlé was very clear. While the Japanese had an extremely strong emotional connection to tea (something I learned without asking in the first hour of the sessions), they had, at the most, a very superficial imprint of coffee. Most, in fact, had no imprint of coffee at all.

Under these circumstances, Nestlé’s strategy of getting these consumers to switch from tea to coffee could only fail. Coffee could not compete with tea in the Japanese culture if it had such weak emotional resonance. Instead, if Nestlé was going to have any success in this market at all, they needed to start at the beginning. They needed to give the product meaning in this culture. They needed to create an imprint for coffee for the Japanese.

Armed with this information, Nestlé devised a new strategy. Rather than selling instant coffee to a country dedicated to tea, they created desserts for children infused with the flavor of coffee but without the caffeine. The younger generation embraced these desserts. Their first imprint of coffee was a very positive one, one they would carry throughout their lives. Through this, Nestlé gained a meaningful foothold in the Japanese market. While no marketer will likely ever be able to convince the Japanese to abandon tea, coffee sales—nearly nonexistent in 1970—now approach half a billion pounds per year in Japan. Understanding the process of imprinting—and how it related directly to Nestlé’s marketing efforts—unlocked a door to the Japanese culture for them and turned around a floundering business venture.

It did something much more important for me, however. The realization that there was no significant imprint for coffee in Japan underscored for me that early imprinting has a tremendous impact on why people do what they do. In addition, the fact that the Japanese did not have a strong imprint for coffee while the Swiss (Nestlé is a Swiss company) obviously did made it clear that imprints vary from culture to culture. If I could get to the source of these imprints—if I could somehow “decode” elements of culture to discover the emotions and meanings attached to them—I would learn a great deal about human behavior and how it varies across the planet. This set me on the course of my life’s work. I went off in search of the Codes hidden within the unconscious of every culture.

W
hen a man and a woman have a child, they have a little human being rather than a bird, a fish, or an alligator. Their genetic code dictates this. When an American man and an American woman have a child, they have a little American. The reason for this is not genetic; it is because a different code—the Culture Code—is at work.

For example, “the sun” in French is
le soleil,
a masculine noun, and, for the French, a word closely associated with the Sun King, Louis
XIV
. The French, who imprint this reference at a young age, perceive the sun as male and, by extension, see males as brilliant and shining. Women, on the other hand, are associated with the moon,
la lune,
a feminine word. The moon, of course, does not shine by herself; she reflects the light of the sun. We can learn much about the relationship between French men and French women through this observation and the understanding of how French children receive the imprint of these terms.

For Germans, however, these words have nearly opposite meanings. The sun,
die Sonne,
is feminine, and Germans believe that women are the ones who bring warmth to the world, make things grow, and raise children. German men are the night, the dark, the moon side.
Der Mond,
“the moon,” is a masculine term. Again, this speaks volumes about the relationships the genders have to each other in this culture and the roles they play in this society.

The simple acquisition of words like “sun” and “moon” can trigger completely opposite imprints among the French and Germans. Therefore, each culture has a different interpretation—a different Code—for these words. All of the different codes for all of the different imprints, when put together, create a reference system that people living in these cultures use without being aware of it. These reference systems guide different cultures in very different ways.

An imprint and its Code are like a lock and its combination. If you have all of the right numbers in the right sequence, you can open the lock. Doing so over a vast array of imprints has profound implications. It brings us to the answer to one of our most fundamental questions: why do we act the way we do? Understanding the Culture Code provides us with a remarkable new tool—a new set of glasses, if you will, with which to view ourselves and our behaviors. It changes the way we see everything around us. What’s more, it confirms what we have always suspected is true—that, despite our common humanity, people around the world really
are
different. The Culture Code offers a way to understand how.

This book is the culmination of more than three decades of experience decoding imprints for major corporations around the world. I call this decoding process a “discovery”—I have performed more than three hundred—and I have seen these discoveries put to work to my clients’ advantage. More than half of today’s Fortune 100 companies have me on retainer, and corporate response to my findings has validated the accuracy of my work, assuring me that the glasses I have fashioned, the glasses of the Culture Code, offer a new and especially vivid vision of the world around us. Over the last thirty years, I have devised and patented a proven, tested method for making discoveries. In this book, I will share this method, and some of what I have learned about major world cultures by using it.

My primary intent is to liberate those who read this book. There is remarkable freedom gained in understanding why you act the way you do. This freedom will affect every part of your life, from the relationships you have, to your feelings about your possessions and the things you do, to the attitudes you have about America’s place in the world.

The topics I will discuss in
The Culture Code
include many of the most significant forces driving our lives: sex, money, relationships, food, fat, health, and even America itself. You will see how participants in the discovery sessions led me to the Codes and how the revelation of the Codes led me to a new understanding of behavior in this country, how it contrasts with behavior in other cultures, and what these differences mean for all of us.

Once you know the Codes, nothing will ever look the same again.

I
still run discovery sessions the same way I ran that first session for Nestlé more than thirty years ago. Five principles guide my methodology for uncovering cultural Codes, and knowledge of these principles will help you understand the thinking that goes into each discovery.

The best way to illustrate these principles is to look at them in the context of an actual discovery. In the following pages, I’ll take you through the discovery of the American Code for cars. I did this several years ago for Chrysler, after the work I did for them on the Jeep Wrangler. They were preparing to launch a new vehicle and hired me to learn what people really wanted from cars. At the time, sales of sedans were flagging as Americans became more and more fascinated with SUVs, minivans, and trucks. Quite a few people in the industry even suggested that the public was no longer particularly interested in sedans at all. This discovery session was therefore critical to Chrysler in a number of ways, because if they learned that sedans no longer had appeal among Americans, it would dramatically alter the direction of the company.

PRINCIPLE
1:
YOU
CAN’T
BELIEVE
WHAT
PEOPLE
SAY

What do Americans look for in a car? I’ve heard many answers when I’ve asked this question. The answers include excellent safety ratings, great gas mileage, handling, and cornering ability, among others. I don’t believe any of these. That’s because the first principle of the Culture Code is that the only effective way to understand what people truly mean is to ignore what they say. This is not to suggest that people intentionally lie or misrepresent themselves. What it means is that, when asked direct questions about their interests and preferences, people tend to give answers they believe the questioner wants to hear. Again, this is not because they intend to mislead. It is because people respond to these questions with their cortexes, the parts of their brains that control intelligence rather than emotion or instinct. They ponder a question, they process a question, and when they deliver an answer, it is the product of deliberation. They believe they are telling the truth. A lie detector would confirm this. In most cases, however, they aren’t saying what they mean.

The reason for this is simple: most people don’t know why they do the things they do. In a classic study, the nineteenth-century scientist Jean-Martin Charcot hypnotized a female patient, handed her an umbrella, and asked her to open it. After this, he slowly brought the woman out of her hypnotic state. When she came to, she was surprised by the object she held in her hand. Charcot then asked her why she was carrying an open umbrella indoors. The woman was utterly confused by the question. She of course had no idea of what she had just been through and no memories of Charcot’s instructions. Baffled, she looked at the ceiling. Then she looked back at Charcot and said, “It was raining.”

Surely the woman didn’t think she had an open umbrella indoors because it was raining. When asked, though, she felt the need to come up with an answer, and this was the only logical one she could devise.

Even the most self-examining of us are rarely in close contact with our subconscious. We have little interaction with this powerful force that drives so many of our actions. Therefore, we give answers to questions that sound logical and are even what the questioner expected, but which don’t reveal the unconscious forces that precondition our feelings. This is why polls and surveys are so often misleading and useless (and why the executives at Chrysler got the wrong “answers” regarding the Wrangler). They simply reflect what people say, rather than what they mean.

Early in my career I realized that, if I wanted to help people identify what something really meant to them, I needed to adopt the role of “professional stranger,” that visitor from another planet I wrote about earlier. I needed to convince people that I was a complete outsider who required their help in understanding how a particular item worked, what its appeal might be, or what emotions it was likely to provoke. What do you do with coffee? Is money some kind of clothing? How does one operate love? This allows people to begin the process of separating from their cortexes and moving toward the source of their first encounter with the item in question.

By the third hour of a discovery session—the point when the participants lie on the floor with pillows and listen to soothing music—people finally begin to say what they really mean. This process helps them access a different part of their brains. The answers they give now come from their reptilian brains, the place where their instincts are housed. It is in our reptilian brains that the real answers lie.

Many people have the experience of remembering their dreams vividly for the first five or ten minutes after they awaken. If they don’t record the details of these dreams in those first few minutes, though, they usually lose them forever. This is because, during this state between sleep and wakefulness, you have better access to your memories and instincts. The relaxation process employed during the discovery sessions allows participants to access this state and in so doing to bypass their cortexes to reconnect with their reptilian brains. People regularly report that memories come back to them during these sessions that they had forgotten for years.