Time for another book review… a few weeks ago I made the trek to Page One to cop some books. I had originally picked out no less than seven books. I quickly realized that I felt a little uneasy dropping $150 USD on books… electing to just go with three books in total rather than my original lot. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t so much the monetary value, cause I think education often needs little if any justification, but it was more the notion of where the fuck I would keep an increasingly large book collection. Sucks to have space constraints haha. E-readers are where it’s at I guess… so the other four books will join the collection in e-form somewhere down the line. I think I have my eyes set on the Nook.

Anyways, onto the book. The Culture Code by Clotaire Rapaille is a book that represents the intersection of marketing and the cultural frameworks of respective cultures. Throughout the book, Rapaille highlights and breaks down what it takes to successfully analyze cultures. At the end of the day, each particular movement within a country or culture often can’t be applied on a global scale. That is, how the people of country A consume is often much different than the people of country B.

At the root of all this are “culture codes”, the unconscious meaning a culture places on aspects of their culture. Much of these culture codes are rooted in the early parts of our lives and establish themselves as a relatively hard and fast rule throughout our lives. Once you understand the basic idea behind the concept, it’s really not all that hard to understand.

One of the first examples involves how a country like Japan has been able to transform itself from a non-coffee drinking country to one that consumes mass amounts of coffee, all within a 30 year time span. You see, some 30 years ago, if you asked the Japanese what coffee meant to them, you’d draw more than a blank stare. Nobody drank the stuff, electing to go with the more traditional tea route. As Nestle understood this, they began “implanting” the notion of coffee, children’s treats slowly incorporated coffee flavors. Fast-forward to the present, those same children who witnessed a consumption shift are now consuming coffee as part of their life since it has been with them since their youth. The “code” was created on behalf of Nestle and now they are banking off of it.

Much of the book goes into some general themes which from there often focus on how the American public think of that a facet of culture. Among the topics are adolescent culture, love, beauty, health, dining, money and the general perception of the capitalistic mentality in the US.

Much of the exploration process is quite intensive as Rapaille’s research comes on the heels of 3 hour sessions each time with a group of individuals. Often what you may think as being the code on the surface level is often not the case as you delve deeper through socio and psychological exploration. When the book turns its focus to a particular topic, you read through all the different experiences these people experience. And just before you reach the conclusion, you try to predict what the shared trait or code is… often I got it wrong or was plain clueless. For the common person, I don’t think that picking a topic and defining its culture code is all that simple… it’s actually quite complicated. Perhaps it comes easy to Rapaille cause he is able to conduct these studies which help better equip him to deduce the so-called code.

What I do appreciate about this is how strong the influence of culture is and how it has such a great impact despite the fact it’s largely political, imaginary lines that keep things separated.

The book is quite easy to read but its American-centric focus may not be of interest to all. From the book I understand how it all works but unless you’re specifically in the world of marketing (to Americans) and you have access to the resources much like Rapaille, the stories were only slightly compelling. Of course if your interest does lie in how superpowers behave, definitely worth picking up. I’d like to see a similar approach but for China. Speaking of China, I JUST finished a book today that I can hopefully do up soon.