Crack This Code

"Hahaaaaaa!" Rapaille exclaims, like a detective stumbling onto critical evidence. "Do you hear that?" His clients nod, thinking he's talking about the fascinating details of India's enigmatic caste system. But Rapaille is hearing something entirely different--the dramatic change in the intensity of the conversation. "Remember," he warns, "I never believe what people say. I want to understand why people do what they do."

According to Rapaille, we all have an alibi. Our alibis are the ways we explain our motivations--the surface responses typically served up in market research. Which is why, he argues, focus groups don't work. To get to the "why," Rapaille stages something closer to a three-hour psychotherapy session--where participants ultimately find themselves lying in fetal position on the floor being asked to channel their earliest childhood memories.

Rapaille subscribes to the triune brain theory, which describes three distinct brains: the cortex, limbic, and reptilian. Beneath the cortex, the seat of logic and reason, is the limbic, which houses emotions. Camouflaged underneath those is Rapaille's baby--the reptilian--the layer wired by our biological primal needs like sex, reproduction, and survival.

"The reptilian always wins"--that's Rapaille's mantra. "So you have to discover the reptilian hot button, whatever you want to do--design an airplane, sell diamonds--what is the reptilian brain?" Whereas bad advertising only taps into the cortex ("Buy this paper towel to clean up a spill!"), mediocre ads appeal to the cortex and the limbic ("Buy this paper towel to clean up a spill and reduce stress!"). But truly effective campaigns nail all three ("Buy this paper towel to clean up a spill, reduce stress, and satisfy your maternal reptilian desire to relieve your son's shame at making the spill in the first place!").

Find out what Indians' earliest reptilian associations are with what it means to "be Indian," says Rapaille, and you've cracked the Indian code. By feeding the group concepts like "caste system," he's looking for patterns and structures that are true across the culture. In this case, Rapaille observes, Indians are at root a practical people. While they claim to be strict rule followers, for example, their political system is corrupt, and business and educational institutions are riddled with bribery. In the Hindu religion, Rapaille says, "you can buy [gods], you can bribe them, you can change gods depending on what you need." Even on India's streets, no one abides by traffic rules. "Deep down they're just practical," he says. Rapaille is quick to point out that these insights aren't positive or negative, or even judgments, but merely expose the flexible, adaptable structure of the Indian people. So the caste system--which to most of the world seems oppressive--is for Indians a triumph of practicality, clearly signaling to all their places in a complex society. "It's not a problem, it's a solution," he concludes, oozing a mischievous grin.

The first time Rapaille visited India, he recalls, he drove from Paris in a rickety Citroën. It was 1964; he was a 23-year-old grad student, broke, so he camped in his car for a month. By his second trip, nearly 25 years later, he was worth millions of dollars and piloting his own helicopter.

The saga is all about theater and contrast, like all of Rapaille's tales. He talks of his childhood in Normandy during World War II, when his father and grandfather were captured by the Germans (now he owns a ninth-century Norman castle). There's the one of becoming a TV celebrity in France during the late 1970s, only to abandon fame to chase the American dream. (He moved to the United States 30 years ago and lives in a mansion in Tuxedo Park, New York. He proclaims, "I am more Amer-ee-khan than other Amer-ee-khans, because I choose to become an Amer-ee-khan!")

He repeats these stories so frequently, so indiscriminately--with seemingly choreographed brow gestures and verbal exclamation points--that the line between fact and mythology feels blurry after a time. What's really real, and what has simply acquired authority by constant, unchallenged retelling?

Rapaille's favorite tale, and the one most frequently recycled by corporate devotees, starts with his study of autism. As a young psychologist in Switzerland, he says, he tried to determine why autistic children couldn't grasp language. He discovered a link to emotional experience, leading him to posit that each language really was a unique set of inherited associations. Understand those associations, he said, and you've unlocked a culture's DNA.

This autism theory has long been considered outdated within academia. Says one expert: "Frasier Crane [the TV shrink] may accept it." But in the early 1970s, a Nestlé executive heard Rapaille lecture in Geneva and connected the idea to a business problem. He asked Rapaille to help Nestlé introduce its Folgers coffee into tea-drinking Japan--to crack the coffee code.