The Culture Code (3 page)

For Chrysler, I gathered participants and asked them to tell me what they wanted from a car. The initial responses I got were pure cortex: good gas mileage, safety, mechanical reliability, and all the other things we have learned to say about this subject. I, of course, did not believe them. As each session continued, I began to hear other things about cars that resonated. Memories of distinctive cars of the past, like the 1964
¹
/^2^ Mustang, the original VW Beetle, and the Cadillacs of the 1950s with their huge fins. Stories of the sense of freedom that came with holding their first set of car keys. Bashful mutterings about first sexual experiences taking place in the backseat of a car. Slowly, the sense of what American consumers really wanted from an automobile began to emerge. They wanted something distinctive. They wanted freedom. They wanted a sensual experience.

The car that emerged from these discovery sessions was the PT Cruiser, a car with a very strong look and a very strong message.

The reaction to the car was equally strong. Some people, of course, hated it. Any truly distinctive thing will be utterly unappealing to some people, even people within the same culture. This is because of the tensions that define cultures, something I will address at length in chapter 3.

However, others loved the car, so much that it became a big commercial success. Its release was the most successful new car launch in recent memory. People spent up to $4,000 extra just to be on a waiting list to own one. Did the groundswell of excitement come because the PT Cruiser provided what people said they wanted in a car? No. It had gas mileage and safety ratings no better than any number of sedans, and it was no more reliable mechanically. It was, however, unusual, aggressive, and sexy. It appealed to what people really wanted in a car rather than what they said they wanted. If we had listened only to what people said, Chrysler would have created another boring, efficient sedan and the public would have shrugged. By learning what they really meant, Chrysler created a phenomenon instead.

PRINCIPLE
2:
EMOTION
IS
THE
ENERGY
REQUIRED
TO
LEARN
ANYTHING

The discovery sessions for cars brought up some very strong emotions. People came to me after the third hour to say that memories brought them to tears, filled them with joy, or even made them extremely uncomfortable. This is not unusual. In fact, some form of this happens at nearly every discovery session I do—even the ones for office products and toilet paper.

Emotions are the keys to learning, the keys to imprinting. The stronger the emotion, the more clearly the experience is learned. Think again of that child and the hot pan. Emotions create a series of mental connections (I call them mental highways) that are reinforced by repetition. These mental highways condition us to see the world in predictable ways. They are the path from our experience with the world (such as touching a hot pan) to a useful approach to the world (avoiding all hot things in the future).

We do the overwhelming majority of our learning when we are children. By the time we are seven, most of our mental highways have been constructed. But emotion continues to provide us with new imprints throughout our lives. Most Americans of the Boomer generation can remember where they were and what they were doing when they learned of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Most Americans alive today can vividly relive the experience of watching the World Trade Center towers fall. This is because these experiences are so emotionally powerful that they are effectively seared onto our brains. We will never forget them, and the simple mention of the topic sends us back to that moment when we imprinted it.

In Normandy, peasants have a strange and unpleasant ritual that exhibits an innate understanding of this concept at the same time that it shows a misguided approach to utilizing it. When the first son in a family reaches his seventh birthday, his father takes him out to the land the father owns and walks him to each corner of the property. At each corner, the father beats the child. While the practice is repellent and probably doesn’t do much for the father-son bond, it does create a very strong emotional connection for the child to the boundaries of the property. The father knows that having this experience will cause the child to remember forever the bounds of the land he will someday inherit.

I had my own unforgettable experience with learning an American phrase when I began teaching at Thomas Jefferson College not long after I arrived in this country in the seventies. I had only begun to learn how to speak American English. My class took place in a large, windowless lecture hall, and on the first day, I’d just started to explain my goals for the class when one of the students yelled at me, “Watch out!” I’d never heard the phrase before and therefore had no idea what the student meant. Instantly, my brain searched for some kind of definition. “Watch” meant “look.” “Out” could mean “outside.” Did the student want me to look outside? I couldn’t, though, because there were no windows in the room. Of course, all of this happened in a fraction of a second—after which a part of the ceiling fell on my head and I was suddenly lying on the floor bleeding and waiting for paramedics to arrive.

To say the least, I now know what “watch out” means. In fact, whenever I hear it, I still look toward the ceiling first, just in case it’s about to fall on me.

In our discovery session for cars that led to the PT Cruiser, it became clear that the emotions associated with the experience of driving a car were very strong indeed. When people spoke about the moment when they were allowed to drive for the first time, they made it sound as though their lives began right then. Conversely, when elderly people spoke of the moment their car keys were taken away, they reported feeling as though their lives were over. Those first sexual experiences that for so many Americans take place in the backseat of a car (more than 80 percent of Americans have sex for the first time this way) send an incredibly strong emotional message about cars.

It became obvious to me that because the emotion associated with driving and owning a car is so strong, the PT Cruiser needed to be a car people could feel strongly about. It needed to have a distinctive identity to justify such strong emotions. To create a strong identity and a new car at the same time, we decided to tap into something that already existed in the culture, a familiar unconscious structure. The one we chose was the gangster car, the kind of vehicle Al Capone famously drove. This became the PT Cruiser’s signature. It lent the car an extremely strong identity—there is nothing else like it on the road today—and the consumer responded. Again, if the Cruiser had been just another sedan, the public probably wouldn’t have even noticed it, but its distinctiveness tapped into something very emotional.

PRINCIPLE
3:
THE
STRUCTURE
,
NOT
THE
CONTENT
, IS
THE
MESSAGE

Unlike the sessions I did for the Jeep Wrangler, this new discovery had to do with cars in general. Predictably, participants spoke about all kinds of cars—minivans and roadsters, Model Ts and concept vehicles. How could I come to any conclusions about the Code when participants had such a wide range of cars in mind? By looking at the structure rather than the content.

In the play
Cyrano de Bergerac,
by Edmond Rostand, Cyrano has a dramatic swordfight. The Cyrano story was retold in the 1987 movie
Roxanne,
starring Steve Martin. Martin’s character, C. D. Bales, has a similar encounter, but he uses a tennis racket. When one is looking for unconscious messages, the difference between swords and tennis rackets is irrelevant. They are merely the content. One can tell the same story with either a sword or a tennis racket, which means that the content isn’t essential to the meaning. You could say the same thing about
West Side Story,
whose “content” is different from
Romeo and Juliet
’s but which tells the same tale.

What is important is the story’s structure, the connection between the different elements. For both Cyrano and C. D., the fight is about defending honor. The need that leads to the fight is the important thing to identify, and it is the same in the two stories, even with different trappings.

One can say the same thing about a melody. You can play the same melody in the morning or the evening, on a piano or a violin, in the summer or the winter. The performers may be young or old, rich or poor, male or female. Even the notes are largely irrelevant, because a melody played in a different key or at a different octave is still the same melody. All of the aforementioned elements are the content. The structure is the space between the notes, the range between each note and its successor, and the rhythm.

The key to understanding the true meanings behind our actions is to understand the structure. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss studied kinship, saying that he was not interested in people but in the relationships between them, the “space between the people.” An uncle does not exist if there is no niece, a wife if there is no husband, a mother if there is no child. Kinship is the structure.

When looking at why people act in certain ways or do certain things, we need to look past the content and into the structure. In any situation, there are three distinct structures in action. The first is the biological structure, the
DNA
. Monkeys, human beings, cows, and giraffes are made of the same content. However, each species is unique because the organization of its DNA—its structure—is unique.

The next structure is the culture. All cultures have a language, an art, a habitat, a history, and so on; the way all these elements, this content, is organized creates the unique identity of each culture.

The final structure is the individual. Within the
DNA
that makes us human there is an infinite variety. Further, each of us has a unique relationship with our parents, siblings, and family that shapes our individual mental scripts and creates our unique identity. Even identical twins end up with unique identities. One was born first, the other second. They are never going to be at exactly the same place at the same time, and, little by little, they will start developing different perspectives on the world. They begin with the same content but develop different structures.

When I read the third-hour stories participants tell in discovery sessions, I pay no attention to the content; instead, I focus exclusively on the structure. In the sessions I held for Chrysler, it was irrelevant that one participant told a story about a sports car while another talked about the family sedan and yet another yearned for his 1950 Packard. It didn’t matter if they took their cars into the city, down country lanes, or out on the open highway. What mattered was the connection between the driver and the car, between the experience of driving and the feelings evoked. These connections—this structure—gave us the clear sense that Americans derive a strong sense of identity from their cars, and led to the development of a car that would reinforce that sense of identity.

PRINCIPLE
4:
THERE
IS A
WINDOW
IN
TIME
FOR
IMPRINTING
,
AND
THE
MEANING
OF
THE
IMPRINT
VARIES
FROM
ONE
CULTURE
TO ANOTHER

I like to say that you never get a second chance to have a first experience. Most of us imprint the meanings of the things most central to our lives by the age of seven. This is because emotion is the central force for children under the age of seven (if you need proof of this, watch how often a young child’s emotional state changes in a single hour), while after this, they are guided by logic (again, try arguing with a nine-year-old). Most people are exposed to only one culture before the age of seven. They spend most of this time at home or within their local environment. Few young Americans are exposed in any meaningful way to Japanese culture. Few Japanese children are exposed to Irish culture. Therefore, the extremely strong imprints placed in their subconscious at this early age are determined by the culture in which they are raised. An American child’s most active period of learning happens in an American context. Mental structures formed in an American environment fill his subconscious. The child therefore grows up an American.

This is why people from different cultures have such different reactions to the same things. Let’s take, for example, peanut butter. Americans receive a strong emotional imprint from peanut butter. Your mother makes you a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich when you are little, and you associate it with her love and nurturance. Since I was born in France, where peanut butter is not a household staple, I never made this connection. I learned about peanut butter after the closing of the window in time when I could form a strong emotional association with it. Because it didn’t carry with it the weight of my mother’s love, it was simply another foodstuff. I tasted it and didn’t find it to be special in any way; in fact, I didn’t like it. Cheese, however, which has a prominent place in every French household, is another matter entirely. I can’t possibly taste cheese without my subconscious layering that taste with emotional connections from my youth.

My teenage son, Dorian, is very much an American in most ways, but because he has always spent time with me in the house I keep in France, he has learned about certain things the way a French child learns about them. One example is champagne. In France, people drink champagne, as they do all wine, for its taste, not its alcohol content. The purpose of drinking wine in France is almost never to get drunk, but to enjoy the flavor of the wine and the way it enhances food.

French children get their first taste of champagne at a very early age. They dip sugar cubes or cookies into it and in doing so learn its flavor and distinctive qualities. Dorian would often have a taste of champagne with us in France; thus he learned to appreciate it and to associate it with celebration, since in France, we most often drink champagne when we are celebrating something. One time, a group of us went to an American restaurant for a celebration and ordered champagne. Dorian, who was seven or eight at the time, asked for a glass, and the waiter scoffed. When I told the waiter it was okay, he still didn’t believe me (or perhaps he felt legally bound to ignore me). He mixed a concoction of club soda and a dash of orange juice in a champagne glass and handed it to Dorian—who tasted it and immediately rejected it because he was well aware of the flavor of champagne.