| |||
|
Arts & Entertainment Books Comics Health & Body  MediaMothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Media stories, go to the
Media home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Media Alt Media Media Media Media - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - |
The return of the hidden persuaders | page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
David Bostwick, director of market research at Daimler Chrysler, is one of the beleaguered executives struggling to adapt to the new order. An engineer by trade, Bostwick is frequently called upon to decode the all-embracing parables of Dr. Clothaire Rapaille, the Palm Beach-based Jungian whose "archetype research" inspired the design of Chrysler's latest sports-utility vehicle, the PT Cruiser. Asked how the company settled on Rapaille, Bostwick, a genial, soft-spoken man who rose to his current executive position from the shop-floor ranks, rattles off trendy academic models with the ennui of a harried grad student. "There is so much out there," he says. "For a while, we had a collagist working with us. He was trying, through collages, to have people express certain cognitive and emotional connections. Then there was linguistics. Basically, you take the words that people say, and try to find a pattern." Boldly rejecting the work of Saussure, Sapir, and Chomsky, Bostwick proclaims linguistics "a disaster." "Linguistics doesn't get you anywhere," he says. "It provides you with what I call a 'map of ignorance.'" In search of a new theoretical synthesis, the Chrysler crew happened on Dr. Rapaille. "He takes traditional Jungian archetypes and applies them to a business situation," Bostwick explains. "He helps us figure out a thought process." But Rapaille's real value, it seems, is in reassuring Chrysler executives that their products actually mean something; that they serve real human needs; that they form part of a greater whole. "The more we learn about American culture, the more we see how these vehicles fit into our psyche -- the more we see how it is that we fit into the overall scheme of living," Bostwick says happily. Under Rapaille's tutelage, Bostwick says, the Chrysler team has come to understand why their old consumer research was bound to fail. "We told people to make collages, but we didn't understand the deep structure of what they were thinking," he says. "We were using the logic of logic, not the logic of emotion." Thanks to Rapaille, Bostwick and his colleagues now employ a kind of Freudianism Lite in all their market research. "Our theory now is that people express things according to patterns," he says. "And so, in focus groups, we listen differently. We listen for slips of the tongue. We listen for changes in inflection. We listen for long pauses. We ask, Why did they pause? Our assumption now is that nothing happens by random chance or accident." Rapaille's greatest triumph came last February, when the consultant was asked to preside over the design of the PT Cruiser -- a Mad Max-type vehicle described by the Wall Street Journal as "part 1920s gangster car, part 1950s hot rod, and part London taxicab." The vehicle, which hits dealerships in January 2000, is a focus group on wheels -- an actual, chrome- To ensure maximum lovability, prototypes were spot-checked against the collective unconscious at every stage in the design. Rather than convening traditional focus groups, Rapaille used a proprietary method known as "archetype research," in which participants lie on soft mats and free-associate in the dark. The idea, says Bostwick, was to recreate the same brain activity you have when you first wake up from a dream. "It's a very special brain activity," he says. "It allows us to actually access some of those unconscious thoughts." Asked to respond to an early prototype of the vehicle, the somnolent participants expressed a desire for a more pronounced retro look. "They said they wanted to go back to a simpler time," Dr. Rapaille told me. Apparently unfazed by the possibility that the respondents might have fallen asleep watching reruns of "The Untouchables," the designers changed the prototype to incorporate protruding fenders and big, bulbous headlights. Traditional Jungian archetypes came into play as well. "Freedom, in America, means something different here than it does anywhere else," Rapaille told me. "It is tied in to this notion of wilderness. We like to describe where we live as the wilderness, whether it's suburbia or downtown. We have to have wilderness, so that we can point to it, and say, 'It is a jungle out there. But I am in the wilderness.' If there is no wilderness, there is no America. Do you understand what I am saying?" No, actually; but never mind. "What that said to us is that people are looking for something that offers protection on the outside, and comfort on the inside," Bostwick clarified. "We communicated that to our design team." As the Chrysler engineers scrambled to respond to these atavistic stirrings, tempers were quick to flare. "You have to understand, this was such a learning experience for those of us who participated in the analysis," Bostwick says. "We all came back with a great deal of enthusiasm, because we personally found this such an effective tool. We felt like we had to solve the mystery of the universe, and we only had 10 days." The problem, Bostwick reflects, is that some of the findings "were very hard to explain to the rest of the crew. I mean, we were talking about deep structure, and the logic of emotion. We were saying, 'Hey, the stuff we're doing here is related to Jung. It's layers.' And they were saying, 'Well, should the windshield be on a 15-percent grade or a 12-percent grade?"
| ||
 |
 |
 |
 |
Next page |