Analyze this: how culture shapes our inner shopper.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, David
• Position: The Culture Code - Book review

The Culture Code By Clotaire Rapaille Broadway, $24.95

In the late '90s, Chrysler was having trouble selling its Wrangler Jeep. The flimsy two-door convertible, adapted liberally from the American military model after World War II and given somewhat improbable second life as a devil-may-care dune-buggy in the '80s, was being outpaced in sales by the giant, reassuringly roofed SUVs that had begun to flood the market earlier in the decade. Some executives at the company thought there was little demand for an impractical fetish object like the Wrangler, and that the time had come to mercifully put the model down, just as profit-conscious executives had retired the classic versions of earlier iconic American automobiles like the Ford Mustang and the Thunderbird. Chrysler considered comprehensively redesigning the Wrangler, and toyed with the idea of junking the car entirely. They believed that American consumers wanted more comfort, and sturdier construction, than the Wrangler offered. They believed that Americans wanted car safety in the form of doors and roofs. They believed that Americans wanted SUVs, and that they wanted their Jeep Wranglerss--if they wanted them at all to look more like Jeep Grand Cherokees.

Chrysler believed all these things because their customers had told them so. The focus groups had been nearly unanimous, the market research conclusive. The Wrangler had been a consistently profitable model for many years, however, and several decision-makers at the company remained ambivalent about reworking one of their signature brands. One consultant, a former clinical psychologist named Clotaire Rapaille, was particularly skeptical of the research and asked to personally conduct a new series of studies on the car. This investigative episode is one of many crusades against conventional wisdom Rapaille proudly recounts in The Culture Code, his new iconoclastic marketing primer.

Like many pollsters and social scientists, Rapaille--whose advice was sought in 2004 by advisers to John Kerry--had come to understand that interview subjects are animated much more by a desire to please than by a searching, contemplative sincerity, and that they overwhelmingly provide those answers that they believe will satisfy the expectations of their interlocutors. Worse, Rapaille writes, even those participants prepared to bare their feelings about the Wrangler didn't make reliable subjects, since so very few of them had ever bothered to think in any...