Reptilian code & Lifestyle Brands

Clotaire Rapaille is a marketing expert and psychologist who tries to know how consumers make choices, but based on consumers’ unknown decision drivers; it means that he is able to decode behavioral information from unknown needs. As he says “My experience is that most of the time, people have no idea why they're doing what they're doing. They have no idea. So they're going to try to make up something that makes sense.”. They don’t know what they’re doing, so we need to investigate as much as possible what are these hidden drivers to market products as focused as possible.

For him is crucial to understand what he calls the Reptilian Hot Button. To do so, Rapaille has developed a 3-stage technique to find the consumers’ unconscious needs which drive consumption. These 3 stages are based on:

1. Past Reason: the reptilian inner core the most primitive, in other words, basic needs such as appetite, fear, lust, etc. People have different feelings for every single word, an unconscious code or mental highway. The first step is to ask the group about a single word, in this case it was the word “Luxury”. Rapaille thinks that people want to show how intelligent they really are in front of the group.
2. Through emotion (limbic brain): every word or every act has an emotion attached to it, so we need to know what these emotions are to market our products. Here starts the second step of the process. After having a break, the group is told to tell Rapaille a story, but the story has to be told to a 5 year old child from a different planet. At his point, consumers no longer try to be logical or seem intelligent; they only try to tell a story. The problem is that they get confused because they don’t what is intention of this step. Anyway, it evokes emotions that move them away from logical thinking. Rapaille sais that this step is very important because emotions drive you out from logical thinking. Then, the group has another long break, right before starting the last step.                                                                  

3. Primal core (the cortex: higher reason): at this phase to group enters the room where there aren’t chairs anymore, they only find pillows in the floor. Everyone is asked to sit down, relax and take notes about primal experiences (the first experience you had with this word). Rapaille thinks that people act based on primal needs and experiences, so he tries to put them in an estate of relaxation close to sleeping mode, to gather all this basic information.

Once we have done all the steps needed, Rapaille starts looking at all the steps to decode the consumption drivers to certain words. This code, enables a company to develop products or services totally focused on their target market, it also allows companies to save money because they are able to know what is marketable and how is marketable.

A very good example is the one that they explain during the video about the difference between selling cheese in France and USA. Usually in France and even in Europe we never put the cheese in the fridge because the cheese is alive. The problem of selling cheese in America is that Americans think that the cheese is dead, so the insight is totally different. Selling cheese in America is totally different to selling cheese in France. That’s why they decided to market the cheese wrapped with a hermetic plastic bag to put it in the fridge.   

Song Airlines is a new branch of Delta Airlines that was born as a low cost airline but trying to target a different market segment. Song decided to born as an out of the ordinary airline by offering organic products, low fares, entertainment, experiences, etc. It is a very good idea to penetrate such a saturated market this way, and the approach is very creative, but Song must know what really customers want and how much they want to pay for it. Song is trying to create a lifestyle brand but without enough money to maintain the initial strategy and without enough brightness to let the customer know that is an airline and not a travel agency or a fast food chain. I would like to stress that what they are doing is good but there are many companies performing better because they are more aggressive and focused on.

For example, I am from Spain, so I didn’t know most of the American airline companies when I first come here. In 2 months I’ve known a lot of companies, and one of them is JetBlue, but haven’t heard anything about Song, and I think I won’t hear anything about that company. Song is trying to target a market niche, but the problem is that this niche is now extremely limited to allow the company to live long.

I enjoyed Persuaders because it focuses on a different point of view of what consumers want and how to persuade them trying to gather information from their mind. I think this movie will be very useful for our career, because we will be able to find out more information when doing focus groups. 

T.C