Clotaire RapailleThe Culture Code

What is the Culture Code and how does it work?

The Culture Code is the unconscious meaning we apply to any given thing via the culture in which we are raised. Rapaille’s discovery was that the code for each culture was different. When there’s a code, it’s more complex than that. There is a code and a consistency checklist. Everything has to be on code. Everything you do should reinforce the code.

When we are born, we are born with our reptilian brain. Rapaille refers to this as our biological scheme. It’s part of survival; it’s breathing, eating, going to the bathroom. But then, in relationship with our mother, we develop the second brain, which is the limbic brain, our cultural archetype. This is where our emotions lie and these emotions vary from culture to culture. In the relationship with your mother, you’re going to imprint, make mental connections about what means love, what means mother, what means being fed, what means home, what means all the things that are very basic for survival.

The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection in the brain – like a reference that you keep using. After a while, this system becomes unconscious…So every word has a mental highway. Rapaille calls that a code, an unconscious code in the brain.

After the age of 7 we develop the last part of our brain the cortex, and that’s what we suppose to be “intelligent.” He refers to this as the personal script. What is interesting is the cortex, we are kind of aware of that. We try to be intelligent, but the reptilian part we are not very much aware of it, and the limbic is more or less completely unconscious.

Rapaille conducts imprinting sessions where he focuses on the verbs used by the interviewees in their stories and recollection, and then constructs a structure (both positive and negative) of their limbic responses. Why?

Part of his theory is that in the human world, nothing happens by chance. When you see people doing something, there’s always a reason why, a code. Rapaille doesn’t pretend that he knows all the codes, but when he works with a client and they try to break the code, then we understand why people do that.

Rapaille’s believes that we need to understand as much as possible about people’s limbic response mechanisms in order to position our products, services, ideas, or behaviors appropriately to motivate and engage them. If we tap people’s reptilian level, we can get complete commitment because to motivate someone on the reptilian level, we would appeal to the individual’s survival instinct. One can evoke very powerful levels of commitment and performance by convincing others that their survival depends on what is being proposed. If we can tap into people’s limbic responses and position our message in a way that resonates with their own emotionally charged, learned reactions and the context in which the learning took place, we can often evoke a superior level of commitment.

Imprinting SessionThings needed:

•Room which can hold at least 20 people

•Chairs

•White Board to write on

•Magazines

•Paper/Notepad

•Scissors

•Pens

•Pillows

•Radio/Boom box

•Soothing music

Number of Imprinting Sessions: 5+

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/interviews/rapaille.html

Rapaille, Clotaire. The Culture Code. Broadway Books, New York. 2006.

Woll, Toby. Report on G. Clotaire Rapaille’s Syndicated Study of Leadership. Cambridge, MA. 2001

Imprinting Session Phase 1: Purge or Washout Session

1. Gather a focus group of 20-30 people and have them sit in a circle on chairs.

2. Bring out the white board with the word for which they are trying to understand.

3. Tell the group that you don’t know anything about this word. It’s foreign to me.

4. Ask for help understanding this word/topic.

5. Have them tell you how they feel about the word.

6. Ask them to describe what they think about the topic under consideration.

7. Ask them when people try to explain this word what kind of words do they use?

8. Take a break.

*For #’s 4-7 record people’s responses.

Purpose:

This fulfills the cortex part of our brain. People want to show how intelligent they are, so give them a chance. Usually they tell us everything that we have told them already through advertising, communication, the media, and the newspaper.

Construct a synthesis of their cerebral responses but we don’t care what they say; we don’t believe what they say.

Category Psychoanalysis

Group Size 20 per focus group

Time 4 hours each imprinting session

+ analysis and consulting

Difficulty

Imprinting SessionImprinting Session Phase 2: Tell Me A Story1.When focus group returns have them sit back in their chairs2.Explain to them that “You’re going to tell me a little story like if I was a 5 year old

from another planet. I’m 5 which means I can only understand things that are very simple. I’m from another planet, which means I don’t know anything your planet, so you’re free to tell me anything you want.”

3. Have someone come up to the white board and have them write down the story.4. Take a break.

Imprinting Session Phase 3: Make Me A Collage1. Remove the chairs from the room and place the magazines and scissor on the

floor.2. When focus group returns have them sit on the floor like elementary school.3. Tell them to make a collage about the topic under consideration. 4. Explain to them the goal here is to tell a story with these words.5. Take a break

Purpose:

Now we are getting into the emotions. We want the people to feel as if they don’t understand what they are doing anymore. We want them to suddenly be in a mind-set that is completely different. They don’t try to be logical or intelligent; they just try to please a 5 year old from another planet, and they tell little stories.

*Focus on the verbs used.

Purpose:

The concept and purpose is similar to phase 2 but the goal here is to get them to tell stories with theses words that would offer further clues.

*Again focus on the verbs used.

Imprinting Session Phase 4: Relax and Remember

1. Remove all magazines and scissors and replace them with a pillow, notepad, and pen.

2. When the focus group returns have them find a spot and lie down.

3. Turn off the lights and play the soothing music.

4. Tell them to relax and take a journey back from their adulthood, past their teenage years, to a time when they were very young.

5. When they arrive, ask them to think again about the topic under consideration and recall their earliest memory of it, the first time they consciously experienced it, their most significant memory of it (if that memory was a different one), most poignant, and most recent experience with the subject.

6. Turn half the lights back on and have them write down what they were able to recall.

Purpose:

We want them to go back to the very first experience, which is usually when you are a child. In order to do that, we want them to be in a mind-set a little like the one you had when you wake up in the morning. Why? Because when we wake up in the morning, the cortex brain is the last one to come to work. When the cortex arrives it cleans the place.

*Focus on the verbs used in their recollections.

Structure of Limbic

Responses

What it is not

MetaphorKeys

Logic of

emotion

Why they do it

What people do

Code

Reptilian Hot Button

Positive Negative

Phase 1 Phase 2 Phase 4Phase 3

Verbs VerbsVerbs

Construct synthesis of responses