Clotaire Rapaille

Gilbert Clotaire Rapaille, known as G. Clotaire Rapaille, is a French marketing consultant and the CEO and Founder of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide.

Rapaille is also an author, who has published on topics in psychology, marketing, sociology and cultural anthropology.

Rapaille was born in France and immigrated to the United States in the early 80s.

Rapaille attended The Paris Institute of Political Sciences for a degree in Political and Social Sciences and later went on to receive a PhD in Social Psychology from Paris-Sorbonne University.

In addition to his books, he is known for advising politicians and advertisers on how to influence people's unconscious decision making.

Rapaille's work identifies the unstated needs and wants of people in a certain culture or country as cultural archetypes.

Rapaille developed his theory on the brain after working as a psychologist for autistic children and studying Konrad Lorenz theory of Imprints and John Bowlby theory of attachment.

This work led him to believe that while children learn a given word and the idea connected with it, they associate it with certain emotions.

He called that primal emotional association an imprint.

This imprint determines our attitude towards a particular thing.

These pooled individual imprints make up a collective cultural unconscious, which unconsciously pre-organize and influence the behavior of a culture.

Rapaille subscribes to the triune brain theory of Paul D. MacLean, which describes three distinct brains: the cortex, limbic, and reptilian.

Beneath the cortex, the seat of logic and reason, is the limbic, which houses emotions.

Camouflaged underneath those is Rapaille's theorized brain—the reptilian.

Rapaille believes that buying decisions are strongly influenced by the reptilian brain, which is made up of the brain stem and the cerebellum.

Only accessible via the subconscious, the reptilian brain is the home of our intrinsic instincts.

It programs us for two major things: survival and reproduction.

Rapaille proposes that in a three-way battle between the cortical, the limbic (home of emotion) and the reptilian areas, the reptilian always wins, because survival comes first.

This theory has become the basis for his thoughts on what a product means to consumers on the most fundamental level.

His theory that culture gets imprinted into the "Reptilian Brain" during early childhood has been heavily contradicted by scientific evidence.

His practice of leading managers into regression sessions to tap into their unconscious in an attempt to discover a "code" word, has also been cited as "primitive" and has been heavily contradicted by scientific evidence.

In the opening of his book, 7 Secrets of Marketing, he says, "Cultures, like individuals, have an unconscious. This unconscious is active in each of us, making us do things we might not be aware of."

This collective cultural unconscious can be further defined as a pool of shared imprinting experiences that unconsciously pre-organize and influence the behavior of a culture.

Rapaille's claim of technique of "archetype discovery" stems from the psychoanalytic methods pioneered by the Viennese psychologist Ernest Dichter.

This technique doesn't ask what people want, but why they want it.

These research methods focus on finding what he calls the “code”, the unconscious meaning people give to a particular product, service or relationship.

Rapaille posits that sublimated emotional memories occupy a place between each individual's unconscious (Freud) and the collective unconscious of the entire human race (Jung).

Rapaille Associates worked on Philip Morris's Archetype Project, an effort to study the emotional reasons why people smoke, presumably so the company could better leverage these emotions in advertising and promotions.

Rapaille noted that typically peoples' first experience with smoking involved seeing an admired adult do it, and having a feeling that they were excluded from the activity and strongly wanting to be included.

Rapaille ultimately linked smoking with adult initiation rituals, risk taking, bonding with peers and the need for kids to feel like they belong to a group and can partake in an "adult activity".

Rapaille's recommendations explain why PM supports—and advertises widely that it supports—restricting sales cigarette sales to minors and moving cigarettes out of reach of kids.

Asked this, Clotaire Rapaille admitted that he did not work for the government, but instead for the foundation created in 1970 by the president's wife Claude Pompidou.

[...] Clotaire Rapaille's client list contains more than 75 company names, including AT&T, Boeing, Pepsi, IBM, GM and Procter & Gamble, to name but a few.

But how could his company, which was founded in 1976, have been hired by a statesman who died in 1974?

Rapaille appeared in a Frontline episode about marketing entitled "The Persuaders", which first aired on November 9, 2004 on PBS in the United States.

Rapaille was hired in February 2010, at the approximate cost of $300,000, by Quebec City's mayor Régis Labeaume to analyze the city's image on an international level.

But an article published by Pierre-André Normandin in Le Soleil de Québec revealed that Rapaille's client list and CV contained several falsehoods and exaggerations.

Premier contrat dans le public pour Rapaille, Le Soleil, March 27, 2010.

Quote: "At the beginning of February, the Frenchman and naturalized American went before the Quebec City press to try to quiet the controversy surrounding his $250,000 contract (plus $20,000 in expenses). In the meeting, he explained that he'd worked for several big cities, ranging from Singapore to Dubai (United Arab Emirates) to Macao (China), not to mention Paris (France) and Venice (Italy). [...] Except that no cities appear in his client list, available on his website. An omission which is easy to explain: 'It wasn't for the mayor, it was for clients,' he admitted in an interview with Le Soleil while he was in Quebec City this week. 'Working directly for the mayor, yes, it's the first time.' In fact, his work for a group of companies was not so much to improve the cities' images as to break the 'codes' of the city-states of Hong Kong and Macao, in China, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore.

Of all the clients named by Clotaire Rapaille on his website, there is only one government: that of French president Georges Pompidou.