No more secrets.

• Author: Brown, Greg
• Position: The Culture Code, Clotaire Rapaille - Rese

The Culture Code By Clotaire Rapaille Broadway Books US$24.95

Marketers have long understood, thanks to years and years of focus groups and surveys, that making a product tick with consumers has little to do with its features. Fast cars are not sold on horsepower but on sex appeal. Lingerie has to do its job, but if it doesn't feel and look glamorous under clothes--even if no one else sees it--it fails miserably in the market.

You would think there were no more secrets. But French child psychiatrist Clotaire Rapaille begs to differ. In fact, he writes in The Culture Code, companies often make huge mistakes when launching or rebranding products, particularly in foreign markets, because they just don't get it. In short, he argues, people are terrible measures of their own desires, since they too often say what they believe is expected of them. Quizzed on cars, they talk about safety. Asked about food, the yammer on about calories. Deep down, though, in the part of the brain that really knows what's up, they carry the secrets, what Rapaille calls, in the typically mock-serious way of French intellectuals, The Codes.

He's chalked up a few big wins over several decades at the head of something called Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, which seems essentially to be him and his assistants jetting around the planet advising Fortune 100 companies about to dump millions of dollars into ad campaigns. Instead of traditional focus groups--handpicked demographic slices in sweatbox conference rooms--Rapaille employs the tools of therapists: He adopts the persona of a visitor from another planet, asking seemingly obvious questions ("What is money for? Can you eat it?") until the third hour, when the subjects are lulled into a half-sleep on the floor and asked to recall first memories of specific experiences.

Not products, but experiences: First time driving a car. Young love. Leaving home. Going back. Rapaille is after what he calls the "reptilian brain," where fight-or-flight instincts live, and where, he claims, the real answers lie. From just such a session, Rapaille...