The Persuaders

Dr. Rapaille’s technique is a three stage psychic journey. First, he accesses his focus group’s cortex, or past reasoning. During the “luxury” experimentation, Dr. Rapaille asked participants to shout out words that they associated with luxury. After this first session, his focus group feels pretty confident and proud of themselves for their comprehensible contributions. This is just part of Dr. Rapaille’s plan to make the participants comfortable in order to take them into the next phase of his technique: the emotional journey. During the second phase Rapaille asks the focus group to describe ‘luxury’ to him like he is a five year old from another planet. This stage allows Rapaille to translate the emotional aspects associated with luxury. When this phase is over, most of his participants are thoroughly confused. They have no idea what Dr. Rapaille was looking for or how they fared. This is just what the doctor wants. He is trying to discover the unconscious feelings toward luxury. He finds these underlying wants in the last, primal stage. In this step, Dr. Rapaille removes the chairs from the room, turns out the lights and asks his focus group to scribble their thoughts down while they lay on the floor. He is trying to reach them while they are in a dreamlike mindset. He believes this is the key to unlocking, and selling, luxury.

Dr. Rapaille believes that all products are associated with our reptilian code and the reptilian hot button always wins. The reptilian code is linked to the first time we have ever experienced anything. It is our first instincts after we are born. In The Persuaders, Rapaille uses the Hummer to convey the advantages of using the reptilian code as market research. Logically, you would not need to drive a Hummer in order to go shopping because you are, presumably, driving on a concrete road. People are not rationally purchasing Hummers, so we should not rationally market them to people using traditional, cortex-driven marketing. Another example that Rapaille cites is the code for the SUV. Through his focus groups, Rapaille discovered that the code for SUV was domination. If SUV manufacturers can portray this idea with bigger, badder cars, they will be able to sell more SUV’s.

After I finished The Persuaders, I was very curious about Song airlines’ fate. I assumed that the venture was unsuccessful because I had never seen them at an airport or on travel websites. Song’s wiki article confirmed my suspicions; it also mentioned that Song was a victim of “corporate culture taken too far”. I completely agree. I thought the idea behind the airlines was great. Who doesn’t like more legroom, personalized TV’s on every seat, and low-cost tickets? But it also sounded too good to be true. With my experience in air travel there is always a catch. If you want a cheap flight, you can’t have plush amenities (like Southwest). I think this was Delta’s first mistake; it was not a viable business decision to offer everything plus the kitchen sink for a low cost, especially in their state of fiscal woe. Second, they were trying way to hard. You cannot replace the word ‘cool’ with ‘song’ and expect it to catch. It sounds lame, particularly when a bunch of middle age women are saying it. Most cool things start with counter culture and work their way into the mainstream. Song was attempting to push cool onto the mainstream without any credibility and they failed. Also, it doesn’t help that Delta, one of the worst airlines, was its parent company…