Whats on Your Mind?

Do you ever wonder what it is about something you’ve bought that made you want to buy it? When people are making purchase decisions, they try to think rationally about the product’s attributes to make the best decision, but how do we know that they haven’t already made up their mind about what they want? The film The Persuaders, gives light into this phenomenon of how people decide what they want or why they do what they do.

This film introduces Dr. Clotaire Rapaille who has discovered a method that can reveal people’s unconscious desires and impulses. His method has grabbed the attention of many Fortune 500 companies as they believe that this can give them a competitive advantage by figuring out how to keep their customers happy. His research started when he was working with Autistic children. He had to figure out a way to decode their behavior without the use of words since they can’t communicate verbally. In this time, he learned that messages are engrained in people’s minds from the first time they have the experience related to that certain idea or thing. This is not something they remember though; this explains why people buy certain things without knowing exactly the reason that they want it. Dr. Rapaille discovered that people create mental connections for every word that leads to his method of uncovering this unconscious code. First of all in his method, he leads focus groups that try to get past reason and emotion down to the core of the human being. To get to the actual code, Dr. Rapaille has people lay down in the dark and write out anything that cross their mind which leads them to their primal urges when considering the specific word he is trying to break down. The results from this method give off the hidden reasoning behind why people think the way they do about certain ideas or words. One example that is given in the video, is that the code for SUV’s is domination, so this led to Hummer beefing up their models and tinting the windows. I also found one comment Dr. Rapaille made to be very interesting. He said that he “didn’t believe what people [said]; [he] wanted to understand what they do.” This is a very enlightening statement because I think in reality it is very true. People say one thing, but the most important thing to consider is what they do and the reasoning behind that action. The point is that people have actually no idea of why they do what they do. What Dr. Rapaille does is trying to uncover the hidden desires of people for marketers to understand what it is that their customers ultimately want whether they know what it is they want themselves.

As a marketer, this is a huge development when trying to develop products and services to satisfy our customers. My personal opinion is that Dr. Rapaille has figured out a great way to learn what is in customers’ minds that they don’t even know is there. It’s really quite incredible because by finding out what is in the customer’s subconscious, a company can really cater to what their customers want in their product or service. The best part of this method is that the customers are happy and they still don’t know that you tapped into their unconscious to give them the best product or service for them. They go on being satisfied and rationalizing to themselves why they need to purchase what they do; it’s a win-win situation for everyone!