The primary code

In a world everyday more competitive and   packed of ads, marketers have to play hard to capture consumer’s attention in many different ways so as to make them buy their products.  In such environment in which  consumers have to decide among thousands of products in the market, one of the marketers task  is to find out why consumers decide one or another product among such a huge supply and what is the really cause of buying it and not another. Certainly,  this is one of the current points of Dr. Rapaille lately research.

Dr  Rapaille, a well known market researcher, developed a theory that conducted him to  break in to the psyche of the  consumers. The basis of that research is the theory that humans have unconscious and deeply associations for all products existing in our lives so that every single word has a mental connection in our minds, what he calls a “code”.  In order to find out the code of some markets, Rapaille developed a 3-stage technique described as the following:

·         The past reason

The  research starts with the outer realms of the brain  so that it makes  the attendants  feel comfortable with the situation,  get confident and feel intelligent as it’s easy to talk about.  However, what they are actually saying in that stage it’s not further relevant for the research than making them feeling comfortable and make them prepared for next steps.

·         The true emotions

Next stage consists on going further and entering to the emotions world, the real emotions that consumers experience when they buy products. The logic stops playing any role in that step so that emotions can flow showing off what is behind any supposed logical behavior.

·         The primal core

The last stage  goes directly to the insight of those emotions, our primal  instincs, that is what really make us feel and then behave.  When people stop reasoning and go throughout their emotions, the last realm in the brain is the subconscious, what is the real thing that is in our insight for every single word in this world.

Finally, the result of the research is the code for a specific market, a code that will have to be followed by marketers if they want to connect with consumers and, at the end, make them buy their products.  An example of Rappaile findings could be the difference to sell cheese to French or Americans. For French people, the cheese is alive and that is why they don’t put it in the fridge. In the other hand, for Americans cheese is dead. You can’t approach to both consumers the same way and that’s why they have to wrap up in plastic something not imaginable for French consumers.

 

When talking about one specific case, song Airlines, it is possible to figure out why it did succeed or why it didn’t.  At my point of view, the company went too much throw the emotions and subconscious at a time that people were not still prepared. Even though the insight code might be right, to get to people instincts, as well as the research done by Rapaille, a company has to go throw the 3 stages. In other case, people gets confused, don’t really know what’s going on and despite of the effort of the company, the product becomes a failure.   

At the end, our instincs are what make us move in that world and the actions made in that world will  make us feel  in one  way or another. However, as humans that we are what make us different from any other animal in the world is the reason. Humans will always think they have strong reasons for any of their actions, so the marketers task will be to find out what really is in our insights despite the reason.

KENNA'S DILEMMA

People’s insight is difficult to understand and has been studied by many different ways, as understanding people feelings and interests seems to be the key to any success in that world. After reading kenna’s dilemma, what I’ve found is just lots of more examples in which people amaze and surprise by behaving in a way that others would never expect.


One of the most important lesson and one of the most substantial things that make people differ from any other animal in the world is that we are unpredictable. As individuals that reason, we have the power to change our mind in any moment as well as hide what are our real feelings about a concrete subject. People’s minds are so complex that even ourselves sometimes have problems to understand what are our real feelings or why we are behaving in that specific way.
To put an example, a recent study made by a Supermarket chain in Spain showed that 80% people that go to the supermarket have an specific list of what they want to buy when they get there. However, the study also revealed that about 90% of that people that had a closed list, changed their list and bought some other stuff once they got there. Why could it happen? People is supposed to be rational, and tend to order their life, but there’s so many factors affecting our decisions in any single moment that one little change in that environment can make us change our mind. And that is the big key for marketers, to deal with that environment, to persuade new and current customers to their products by moving as much factors as they are able in our atmosphere.

Another good lesson that I’ve learned by working in a company is that Marketers are usually biased by such many things in their surroundings that they cannot be threated as normal consumers.
As it’s the most easy research they can do, marketers tend to attribute their own characteristics to the market. However, that generally produces fatal mistakes in marketing. On the one hand, because we cannot project at all people’s thinkings and feelings since every single people is different from each other. And on the other hand and even more important, because generally marketers are even more biased than any other person. They know more information about the market than normal consumers and usually perceive much more things and details that are usually irrelevants for another single person. They are so used to their work and have experienced so much that several times what they predict by projection is a thousand miles far away from what a normal consumer would do in a normal way.

Then, as marketers we are going to be, how can we deal with that issue?
From avoiding projecting any of our feelings in our research, we need to pay attention in what our consumers are saying and not only in what they are really saying, which is less important, but in what they really wanted to say, what is, their expressions, their movements, their attitudes, their behavior, and so on. Normally, the key consist on not what they’re saying but what they’re keeping quiet.

“ The only normal people in the world, are the people we don’t know”