How do big companies make us favour their brand and products, and how do they make us want something we don’t need?
Without you knowing it, big companies use special techniques to make you want their products. The following story will give you some insight into what is going on.
Clotaire Rapaille (personal adviser to ten high-ranking CEOs and kept on a retainer by fifty Fortune 100 companies) was working with autistic children and researching the influences of imprints while he was approached by Nestlé. At that time Clotaire had no experience in marketing, but Nestlé was trying to sell coffee in Japan without success and recognized the use of imprints in marketing. Because Japan is a tea drinking nation, and Clotaire wanted to find out what imprints Japanese people had about coffee, he started his experiments. These experiments are designed to find out the key words and memories about the product, in this case coffee. Since Japanese people hardly knew what coffee was, the conclusion was most of them have no imprints of coffee.
The solution was simple, create an imprint for coffee!
Big companies have time on their hands, so the clever trick they implemented was selling desserts for children infused with the flavour of coffee. This dessert was embraced by the younger generation and the first imprint of coffee is made that could later be used to sell coffee. How and why imprints work later in the article, that they work you can read in this PFD: http://coffee.ajca.or.jp/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/coffee_market_in_japan.pdf
Clotaire’s book The Culture Code begins with a beautiful story that shows how a little change can have a big impact on sales because the reptile brain sees what it was hoping for. The story is about Jeep Wrangler’s struggle to regain its place in the American market in the late 90’s. Most SUVs were bigger and more luxurious, and Jeep needed a change. The problem for Jeep was that they clearly asked the wrong questions about what people want in a Jeep because people thinking with their cortexes tend to answer what they think you want to hear, not what they deep inside dream about. Clotaire’s approach gave him another inside in the car. People’s earliest memories of a Jeep is being out in the open land and going where an ordinairy car couldn’t go. He told Jeep the CODE for the Wrangler is HORSE. The car needed no luxury, open top and removable doors so the drivers can feel the wind around them. Because the executives weren’t moved at all, he had them make one minor change to show he was on the money. He made them change the square headlights into round ones, and when it turned out round headlights were an even cheaper build, they were willing to make the gamble. They tested the new design and the response was instantly positive.
Now they knew this concept of HORSE worked, they began advertising the car as a horse.
Clotaire’s favorite ad shows a child in the mountains with a dog. The dog falls off a cliff and clings precariously to a tree. The kid runs into a nearby village for help. He passes sedans, minivans, and SUVs until he comes upon a Jeep Wrangler. The Wrangler scales the treacherous mountain terrain and its driver rescues the dog. The kid hugs the dog and then turns to thank the driver. But the Jeep is already heading back down the mountain, just like an old Western hero heading off into the sunset upon his steed. The campaign was a smash.
I highly recommend buying one or two of his books to gain more insight into how the reptile brain wants what it wants and how to find out what that is, and also to read about lot’s of examples he already tested for other companies or for himself. But not to end with this recommendation, I will share his patented method in short:
Clotaire structures a three hour session with each of the groups. In the first hour he takes on the persona of a visitor from another planet, someone who had never seen the product or brand or subject before and has no idea on how one “used” it. He askes for help understanding the product.
In the second hour he has them sit on the floor like elementary school children and use scossors and a pile of magazines to make collage of words abot the product.
In the last hour, he has participants lie on the floor with pillows with soothing music and asked to relax. This way he is calming the active brainwaves, getting them to a point just before sleep. When they are in this state, he takes them on a journey back to their childhood. Once they arrive there, he askes them again about the product and their earliest memories of it, the first time they consciously experienced it, and their most significant memory of it.
This way people give insight in what they really feel and think about a product or whatever is asked about. Smart companies make use of this insight to improve upon the products or the story about the product, of the advertisement.
Hope you learned something from this article and upvote :)
