Clotaire Rapaille is a French-born American market researcher and author. He advises half of the Fortune 100 companies and several governments on how to influence people’s unconscious decision making and has appeared on TV shows such as 60 Minutes and in newspapers e. g. New York Times. He is the author of The Culture Code and more than ten other books. Dr. Rapaille received a Masters of Political Science, a Masters of Psychology, and a Doctorate of Medical Anthropology from the Universite De Paris - Sorbonne.

Rapaille has wide experience of the car industry – especially the American. Among the brands he has worked with are General Motors, Ford, Jeep, Citroën and Daimler Chrysler (for which he developed the Chrysler PT Cruiser). He now writes at carwinism.com on cars and identity from his American perspective.

Is an electric car that makes no noise and no pollution a real car, like a smoke less cigarette, or a non-alcoholic beer? Are these mutations what people want?
The American car industry is failing. It is now run by unions, politicians, and the government (“Washingtroit”). Can you expect any real creativity from these people?
 
The problem started when Detroit forgot its mission. Engineers took over and forgot about the American dream. No more marketers, no more anthropologists, the dreamers were replaced by bean counters. GM's culture became The Soviet Union and what was good for GM was not good for America anymore.

Americans wanted strong identity, uniqueness and Reptilian appeal (sexy cars like the Thunderbird, the Corvette, or the Ford Mustang). Detroit started producing generic cars, with no identity and no sex appeal, all built in the same plant, on the same platform. Engineers created Badge engineering, inventing a new product just by changing the Badge on an old one. They said "people just need to go from point A to point B". The magic was gone. The bureaucrats took over; the lawyers with their long and costly procedures and the unions took advantage of the weakness of the management. The result was a desperate run to cut costs that damaged efficiency and quality.
 
Then the Japanese arrived with better systems and as a result better quality. The Americans lost the Reptilian identity. So if all cars are generic, the Japanese are better generic manufacturers. At the same time, American car companies bought many brands to assimilate them and swallow them without respecting their identity. This is the American melting pot archetype; Jaguar was built at the same plant as Lincoln and became half a Lincoln.
By using the same suppliers, they lost the strong identity of Saab, Volvo, Jaguar and many others. Detroit wanted quantity, not quality. GM had a neurotic fixation on wanting to remain No 1 with the biggest share of the American Market. (The goal was not quality or profit, but quantity. This is the same dumb business plan that the American air transportation industry has been using - losing billions of dollars, for decades.
 
Remember the three brains? The cortex is numbers - the intellectual alibi. The limbic is emotion - love, identity, (people will call their Mustang "my baby"). Then there is the reptilian brain: power, big, sex, survival and reproduction. See the Cadillac of the 60’s, now that was a reptilian car, proud to be reptilian, with all its symbols: fins, hood ornaments, chrome etc.
 
The engineers then took over. They asked questions, believed what people said and built boring cars that nobody wanted to buy. So if there are no more reptilian cars available, let's buy a cortex car, a generic car. In this respect, the Japanese prevail. The Japanese did not win the American consumers; the American car companies lost them. Today J. D. Power says that Cadillac and Buick are better quality than Japanese cars! Nobody believes it. Too late!
 
In the US, a car must have a strong identity and must be a deep unconscious expression of who you are (your identity). People who drive a Hummer vote republican and people who drive a Volvo vote democrat, so there is a strong connection between political position and car ownership. But American car companies did not understand the deep need to preserve their brands' identities. They tried to change their brand codes, and in doing so confused the customers and lost them. Volvo was safety. They should have built on that and not forgotten it.
 
They forgot the niche market and wanted quantity (volume) and they lost the symbolic added value that they brought with the brand. When you own a Swedish brand you should be proud of the Swedish culture and promote it. If you Americanize it, you destroy it. Land Rover and Jaguar were British, not just an Americanized version of English class.
 
I have told car brand managers, "Your mission is not to sell cars, but to preserve and perpetuate an element of the culture your brand is coming from.  You need to remember your village of origin. Only when you understand what your contribution to the world is, can you have a chance to go global.”
 
Of course you have to keep reinventing your brand, but you must always be loyal to its code. Some brands are doing it; Mini Cooper, Bentley and Jeep Wrangler. Jeep is the only brand that has seen its sales going up in the US and this is because it never lost its identity. Let's hope that Porsche is not going to become Volkswagen, Jaguar to become Tata, and that Saabs and Volvos will become real Saabs and Volvos again.

Does the American car industry have a future? Never underestimate an American, they just have to go back to basics, re-activate the Reptilian brain, make it simple (they say KISS:  Keep It Simple Stupid) and own the dream again. GM has a bureaucratic culture, centralized and run by engineers who don't understand the market and Chrysler is still traumatized by the German invasion (the joke use to be: "How do you pronounce Daimler Chrysler? Chrysler is silent“). Ford might be the one who will survive and thrive if they think Image, Symbolic Added Value and Marketing and send the single minded engineers to retirement. We need to see visionary marketers on the Detroit boards, who just want to make a car that people want to buy. People want size (big) and power. Detroit has to deliver this with enormous improvement in fuel economy. They have the technology to do it. They can do it, but do they have the mind set, the spirit, the dream?