When I saw the piece in Fast Company about Clotaire Rapaille, showman anthropologist, I wondered if my acquaintance Grant McCracken would comment on the article. He has, and brilliantly. Both articles worth reading. Take particular note of Grant's definition of good research, which is bang on.
When I was a bank employee some time ago, I recall hearing about this Rapaille guy from my boss, who was enthralled. He made people lie on the floor and remember their first experience of a bank branch. His big insight was that people remembered pillars as part of bank branches, and that this solidity was an important part of bank branch design. Therefore, don't give up on solidity. At the time, this sounded so facile I thought I must be missing something. I was: this guy is a genius at marketing the Rapaille brand.
There is no single "code" for a culture. Do you think someone unfamiliar with Canada could talk to a bunch of us for a while and understand what makes us tick? What would they make of the 300,000 people we import from the rest of the world every year? And translate that code to marketing a product? Maybe, maybe not. We love Kraft Dinner, but think Red Lobster is boring. Frankly, we struggle to understand ourselves.
If you've been reading my blog recently, you know I was working in Jamaica last week. Jamaica is itself an amalgam of many cultures, including Chinese, Portugese, Lebanese, and many African nations, plastered over by the British, and now being re-engineered by Jamaicans themselves. "One Love, One Heart". It is not an easy culture to understand, even though they speak English better than I do, for the most part, and share many British traditions. I have definitely had some insights that have helped my client. But I've also been run into the boards quite painfully a few times for reasons I still don't fully understand, and continue to obsess about. [Run into the boards is a hockey analogy, BTW]
Let me give you one simple example. My hotel put little cards on the pillow with Jamaican phrases in Patois and their meanings. Here's an example: Dawg mawgre but him head big. Translation on the card: no matter how much the dog's body shrinks, his head cannot shrink: some things cannot be changed. My hosts at dinner one night said this was all wrong. One thought the saying referred to someone you would underestimate who was smarter than they looked. Others thought it meant that even a mangy dog thinks well of himself. These were smart, well-educated, Jamaican-born executives who speak Patois as well as they speak English and THEY disagreed about the meaning of the phrase. Is this part of "the code"?
I often ask people what jokes they tell about themselves to try to understand what I don't understand. [What's a joke accountants tell about themselves, for example? What's a joke Canadians tell about themselves? What jokes do the French tell about the Belgians?] What is most remarkable to me is that the jokes are almost never funny to an outsider.
In any event, I don't think there's one code. And this is the beautiful complexity of humanity. I know lots of elegant models, lots of psychology, lots of social science and I speak business reasonably well. And none of this stuff explains it all. And thank God for that.
Technorati Tags: Jamaican culture, cracking the code, Clotaire Rapaille, Grant McCracken, Anthropology