The Culture Code Conversations

By Bob Hughes - Sep 26 , 2011

The other day I was explaining to some French friends about Clotaire Rapaille’s illuminating book The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do. Needless to say, they were interested in his findings about their culture, and how they look at the world.

I began by saying how he came to be intrigued by the subject because Clotaire himself felt ill at ease as a young Frenchmen in his native country. He found the French — his fellow countrymen! — too pessimistic, too envious, too different from what he considered to be his own more optimistic and generous spirit. When he moved to America, he met some other transplanted French people, and he found in them the same, more American, less French tendencies.

We were also talking about how I’ve been one of those rare Americans in Paris to make many French friends. Many Americans in Paris stick to English-speaking groups of people and have a tough time breaking in. I said that perhaps I was lucky because someone introduced me, and then someone else introduced me (in France, it helps to be introduced – the French are more formal about things like that, way more formal than Americans).

But then my friends said that what probably happened was that I met people who were open to meeting others – people like me. Just as what Clotaire Rapaille discovered in moving to America, I discovered in spending time in France – you hang with people who respond to you. The French people who’ve become my friends are perhaps a bit more “American” in their outlook.

I explained the idea behind The Culture Code, and how Rapaille identified certain national traits and helped companies shift or tailor their marketing to appeal to those national traits. In a way, this is like the work that I do, which is writing toward what we call “personas,” which are fictionalized representations of an audience or clientele or marketplace, drawn up according to the four major personality types. These types are, in effect, drawn from personal choices (they’re not moral judgments), and help you visualize whom you’re writing to. In the same way, a country’s culture code helps you reach the consumers within that country in a way that speaks to them more directly or at a more personal level.

When I told my friends that Rapaille’s research showed that the French notion of its own cultural character, its code, was “idea.” They nodded. “I guess that’s true,” one said to me. “Well,” I said, a bit facetiously, “the French like to think of themselves as thinkers.”

“That’s true,” another friend said. “Not that they think much, but that they think they think.”

Exactly. How we think of ourselves isn’t always how we act – but getting into the minds of others is about understanding, and capitalizing on those differences – and understanding the many varieties, the contradictions, in each of us. Even on a national level.