A Psychic Journey

Dr. Rapaille is a market researcher who first got his start studying psychology in Europe and working with autistic kids. When he worked with them, he tried to figure out what they were trying to say to him without actually using words, which lead to his trying to decode their behavior. Rapaille came to the conclusion, that if he could decode people’s behavior, he could determine their reasons for the buying the products they buy. Just asking people isn’t good enough because he doesn’t believe what they say. He wants to know why people do what they do.

According to Rapaille, consumers are driven by unconscious needs and impulses; they themselves do not know the reasons for buying what they do, and many times their justifications for buying a product do not make sense considering the product’s actual use. An example he gave was people in Manhattan driving a Hummer to go buy groceries. A Hummer is more of an off-roading type of vehicle which is hardly the type of vehicle needed in a city like Manhattan, much less to go grocery shopping.

In order to discover these unconscious needs, or as Rapaille puts it, the “reptilian hot buttons” that compel consumers to action, Rapaille conducts a series of focus groups. For the luxury sector, the focus group began with Rapaille asking people how they felt about luxury and what associations came to mind. This is the easiest part of the exercise, and the part that seems to be the most normal. After this segment, the focus group gets a break. When they get back, the focus is on their emotions. This time Rapaille asks the group to pretend that he is a five year old child from another planet and asks the members of the focus group to tell him a story. By the time the focus group leaves for their second break, the members are very confused, which Rapaille likes. When the group comes back for the third session, all their chairs are gone. Rapaille has everyone lay down on the floor while he turns off the lights and tells everyone to relax. He wants them to go back to the state of mind they are in when they first wake up in the morning because he believes this is the time people remember things from long ago, and this is the key to unlocking the “code”. This is the code he can read and understand why consumers like certain products and not others. Using this code, he told car companies to make SUVs bigger with tinted windows because SUVs portrayed dominance in the code.

Rapaille considers his focus groups to be a “psychic journey” where he takes participants through three stages and tries to get to their psychic core. This kind of research, to me, is very unusual, but I think that’s why I like it. In this field of market research, you have to do something different in order to stand out, in order to obtain information that hasn’t already been found. I’m also a firm believer that psychology and business go hand in hand, not only in just marketing but in other areas as well, such as management. Understanding how people behave is fundamental in understanding how to work with them, manage them and figure out what they want. I think Rapaille is 100% correct in saying people do not know why they want or like the things they do – and it is up to market researchers to figure that out (as far as retailing goes). I think any industry that is looking to upgrade or renovate a product would really benefit from this kind of research. The product already exists, which is a good start, but people are always looking for bigger and better. What better way to do that than by trying to go into their minds and figuring out their “code”? As strange as Rapaille may be, I think there must be some method to his madness.