Dr. Clotaire Rapaille served a delectable elixir to a packed room of B2B marketers at BIGfrontier yesterday. His talk spanned business in China, investing in India, a new value proposition for shampoo (think “breastfeeding”), why people drive Hummers to the mall, why French people don’t work and myriad others. Rapaille (“Rah pEYE”) lists half of the Fortune 100 has retained clients because he has a track record with helping them understand the inner structures of consumers’ minds and, therefore, how to communicate with them. Moreover, many of these inner structures hold true across cultures which can enable companies to develop offerings that will hold true globally. Sound impossible? Read on.
As usual, I will share my notes from the meeting and follow those with some of my insights but, unlike the usual custom, I have also interspersed some material from one of his major books to fill gaps. The topics he addressed were intricate and complex, and there wasn’t time to delve into the details of the background research.
Background
Rapaille, a Frenchman who subsequently became virulently American, began his career as a psychoanalyst working with autistic children in Switzerland, which gave him insights into how the brain worked and […]