Cracking Open Your Wallet

Why do we buy the things we buy, and choose one product instead of another? The person who can solve those mysteries stands to make a fortune, and many of America's largest companies think they've found him.

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille is a French-born psychologist who believes the best way to crack open the average American's wallet is to dig into our earliest childhood memories. Sound a little weird? Correspondent Jim Stewart reports.

Dr. Clotaire Rapaille may seem more than just a little bit French, but he is an American citizen who understands that what makes his fellow consumers tick is a lot more than just silly commercials.

"All the people that say, 'Oh, if you have a good advertising, you can force people to buy something,'" says Rapaille. "I mean, we are not that dumb. It doesn't work very long."

Says Stewart, "We're the most consumer-driven society in the world. Do you think that a lot of our companies get it wrong?"

"A lot of them," says Rapaille. "A lot of them."

Rapaille advises his corporate clients that to be successful in the marketplace, what they really have to do is appeal to our earliest emotions. That's his specialty: helping open our wallets by divining what he calls our first imprints.

"What I mean by imprint is…the first time you create the mental structure in your brain," says Rapaille. "It varies (at what age it happens) because it depends what. For example, when you are a 2-year-old, you imprint coffee for the first time. Hah! Interesting, because at 2, you don't drink coffee. Ah. So what do you imprint? The aroma."

Aroma triggers fond memories of home for Americans. So in the late '80s, Rapaille helped the makers of Folgers build an entire marketing campaign around that notion, because he believed the best way to sell coffee was to actually sell memories of coffee.

It's a concept that has withstood the test of time. And ever since, Rapaille's fingerprints can be found all over the American marketplace, often in ways that you may not see, but you can certainly feel.For instance, the "Bounty, quicker, picker-upper" campaign, selling something as simple as paper towels. Our intellect may tell us that quicker-picker-upper cleanliness is all that matters. But Rapaille's guidance to Procter & Gamble was to lose "Rosie the waitress," and use mom at home instead, to appeal to a woman's primal instinct to take proper care of her family.

And his work isn't just all about advertising. Companies will sometimes build their products based in part on his discoveries. Daimler-Chrysler found that American women want a warm, safe feeling from their cars, while many men are attracted to something with a tougher look. So, with a little help from Rapaille, the PT Cruiser was born.

"You know and I know some people look at this and just say, 'It's ugly,'" says Stewart.

"That's why some people love it, some people hate it," says Rapaille. "Nobody is neutral."

And that's a good thing? "That's perfect," says Rapaille. "That's exactly what we want. We want the intensity."

Tapping into such intensity is Rapaille's calling. He is a psychologist and anthropologist who earned his Ph.D. in his native France, and who came to America more than 25 years ago not to analyze patients, but to psychoanalyze consumers.

He says he was drawn to this country because of what he calls its adolescent culture. It's the only place in the world where you can pursue your dreams and where success is defined by the financial reward that follows.

"That's why I choose to become American," says Rapaille. "You know, I'd rather be part of an adolescent culture than a senile culture, so that there is no doubt about that."

"In fact, you once said, didn't you, that, 'We're not a country so much as we are a dream'?" asks Stewart.

"Oh, absolutely, we have big dream, you know, and we're only interested in what is impossible," says Rapaille. "And we make it. Because other people say, 'No, it's not possible.' It's not possible? Let's do it."

It's that same kind of drive that attracts executives from all over the world to his French-style mansion outside New York City because, as one client, Steve Beshara, says, for a fee of around a quarter-million dollars, Rapaille offers something traditional marketing gurus could never match.

"He drills into past experiences and reveals what influence that has on our assumptions or perceptions about a product," says Beshara, who is in charge of marketing for a small company called Turbo-Chef, which wants to redesign its commercial oven (now found in fast-food restaurants) into something
Americans feel they have to have in their home kitchens. Given that mission, Beshara, who's has been the business for 20 years, thought Rapaille was the perfect man for the job.

"Some may perceive him as a mad scientist," says Beshara. "And others think that he's brilliant and is able to provide certain insights into the cultural marketplace."

How does Rapaille do it? He sets up imprint sessions, a series of gatherings with a cross-section of consumers. 60 Minutes II watched as he went to work for Turbo Chef, and at first, it looked like the focus groups most market researchers use. But it soon turned into something far different.

He watched from behind a one-way mirror, while everyone was asked to recall memories of growing up around the kitchen. Rapaille only wanted to strip away their conditioned responses and get them ready for the most important part of the sessions, the last hour, where no focus group ever goes. He calls it "discovering the reptile."

"Three brains: the cortex, the limbic and the reptilian. The cortex is intelligence, and I don't care," says Rapaille. "The limbic is emotional and is complex. The reptilian is a key, and that's where I want to go."Rapaille believes our reptilian brain – what he calls that part that drives our primal need for survival and comfort – always wins when deciding what to buy. And to discover that, he takes away the chairs, and takes everyone on a trip down Freudian Lane.

"Even if you're resistant, half an hour on the floor, listening to a relaxation tape, your heart beat starts changing. Your body temperature starts changing," says Rapaille. "And when they go through this process, you know, something else came back that they didn't remember for like 40 years. Amazing."

The point of all this is to find the hot button that makes us want a product. Rapaille calls that the "code." Like the word "aroma" for coffee, it's often a simple thought or phrase that becomes the guidepost from design to marketing, so our unconscious will say to us: stop thinking about it, and just buy it.

"I can understand how that might work with something as visceral to the senses as coffee," says Stewart. "But how the heck do you make that work with an oven?"

"Anything. If there is a word, you have a first imprint," says Rapaille. "But, an oven is so much related to food, and to mother…what is inside here? This may be the first oven. I mean, the food was always at the right temperature there."

Is what Rapaille is doing revolutionary? Has it ever been done before?

"It's revolutionary in market research, that's for sure," says Rapaille. "And there aren't many people that will dig as deep or who are as willing to go into this fuzzy voodoo territory."

That fuzzy voodoo territory is what Turbo Chef hopes will help build a whole new product. After 10 imprint sessions, they discovered the code, which is highly secret and which they will only say has something to do with the warmth and comfort that comes from home cooking. The company thinks one way to evoke that feeling may be to shed its industrial image for a different look, a modern version of mother and apple pie.

"Did you ever think you'd be using a little Freudian theory to sell an oven?" asks Stewart.

"No, but I've always had a sense that you really have to win the battle of the mind and what people are thinking," says Beshara. "And so, the better we understand their mind and their behavior, the more successful we'll be."

And sometimes that special insight is as simple as taking us back to the future. Boeing's newest commercial jet, the Dreamliner 787, focuses heavily on passenger comfort, from the design of the windows, to the lighting, even to the feel of the jet when you enter.

Rapaille was one of only a few consultants to work with Boeing. He ran those signature imprint sessions of his, and the company hopes they will ultimately reshape the way we think and feel about air travel. If that works for you, you can tip your hat to a Frenchman, who thinks he's just about figured us out.

"You're kind of like the secret puppeteer," says Stewart. "You've got all the strings."

"Yeah, yeah, we can say that," says Rapaille. "But...there are so many strings that we're not aware of, you see. I know some of the strings. But there are many, many strings."

"You haven't deciphered all of America's DNA yet?" asks Stewart.

"No, not yet," says Rapaille. "I mean, all my life would not be enough to do that."