“Who the hell is going to tell you they bought the SUV because they can’t stand being in the kind of close proximity to their own kids and their friends mandated by the Subaru wagon?”

That’s exactly the sort of thing he was looking for. He was trying to get below the justifications. That was the whole shtick he was selling. I’d guess his system is way more likely to get it than focus groups.

The apt comment was clearly for the ‘it just works’ code.

Well, when you say that you thought it was an “apt” description, that switches what you’re saying from merely reporting his thoughts to indicating you agree with them. Which is what I disagree with…

People will tell you all kinds of delicious bullshit in focus groups, especially in self-justification and to get you to leave them alone. Whether or not that really means anything…? Well, that’s up to your interpretation, and the bets you make based on that may or may not be connected.

I look at the whole SUV question in terms not of what the usual left-wing diptard frames it as, which is “Oh, people want big cars because they want to feel powerful…”, but in terms of practicalities. You ain’t fitting a healthy chunk of your kid’s soccer team into a Subaru, and still be able to retain distance and sanity, so… What the hell do you buy? Oh, yeah… The Suburban. Ain’t nothing else in that size range on the market, anymore, so… Your choices are constrained by that fact.

And, yet, the leftard will say that the American car-buying public ain’t doin’ what’s right by their lights because… That car-buying public ain’t right-thinking. Reality? They’d be buying full-size station wagons, if those were really available. Which, they aren’t, because CAFE.

Practicalities outweigh perceptions. You can ascribe behaviors all you like to what people will tell you, and focus groups are notorious for that–But, what they actually do, and the real reasons…? Who the hell is going to tell you they bought the SUV because they can’t stand being in the kind of close proximity to their own kids and their friends mandated by the Subaru wagon? No, instead, they’re going to happily agree with the focus-group leader’s proffered justification of “feeling powerful on the road…”, and the whole cluster-f**k of delusion is going to keep right on going.

His thesis is there are emotional drives hidden by rationalizations and that you can use these to sell to people. He has his method getting the emotional reasons out of people. Rapaille got rich trying to figure out what they are and selling his ‘codes’ to corporations who use them in their marketing.

Don’t know much about SUVs but I’ve been given rides in plenty of them by people who would never haul more than groceries. The first time I got in an X5 I laughed because it was a lifted BMW wagon and I knew the driver would never take it off road. Why did my coworkers buy these SUVs? Don’t know/don’t care but the sales teams at car companies do. Rapaille lists a lot of them as his clients including Ford, GM and Chrysler.

Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. `Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone.’

Vis-à-vis the idea that “Domination” drives American choices for the SUV…? Yeah. No.

What drives the choice for an SUV-class vehicle is the fact that the EPA killed off the large station wagon due to fuel economy, and the SUV and truck were the only damn things big enough to haul things with. Absent the EPA’s meddling, I can about guarantee you that the SUV and truck categories would still be in the utility-only niche, and the station wagon and large sedan would still dominate, as they did in the 1960s.

People keep trying to ascribe these things to nebulous crap like “American’s want big cars because they have an innate drive to dominion over the world…”, when the reality is more like “Americans have a lot of crap to haul long distances, and they like to do it in comfortable vehicles…”.

Freud had it most succinct when he said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…”. In an alternate universe where the CAFE standards were sane, there’s a good chance that the market would still be dominated by big station wagons.

Offhand I can remember a couple of codes — “it just works” was the code for the USA, which as an immigrant I thought was an apt way to describe American design philosophy. “Domination” was the reason why so many people drove SUVs. When you get through all the bullshit about space and safety people just like driving bigger vehicles and looking down on others. It doesn’t seem earth-shattering but the process he goes through to find out these “codes” was instructive. Corporations paid him bucketloads no doubt. I found myself digging in to everyone’s inner motivations. This was pre-Twitter so life was a bit simpler compared with the ridiculous signal-fests we have now.

Since I used to read his blog and I read his previous book, when Coyle mentioned he was thinking of naming the new one The Culture Code I pointed out, idempotently, that Rapaille had a book of the same name that was pretty good. Coyle ignored me, since who takes literary advice from a livestock farmer?

I heard about Rapaille from this PBS Frontline documentary that some evil pirateer has put on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qtUO-9iUpE

MSFT took years to build shit with endless meetings. People would get promoted, become team leaders and change groups before shipping anything.

AMZN would be constantly shipping small increments then seeing how they worked. Every now and then something game changing would happen (e.g. Prime). There seemed to be was a lot less ‘status management’ but hey, ymmv.

Look at the way that Space-X has trumped NASA with the latest product; NASA looked at the SSTO reusable concept with the X-33, screwed it up, and now we have Elon Musk landing (LANDING!!! Just the way God and Heinlein intended rocket boosters to land…) his rockets back at the pad they left from. Now, tell me again how all this finely studious work actually produces workable, real-world solutions…?

Go look at how a lot of the basic engineering formulas were originally worked out; the Victorians like Brunel had to do the risky work of throwing things up, and evaluating what happened. That’s how it’s done; the pioneers iterate, and then the pedants come in and formulate, reducing their work to a cookbook recipe for success. Which approach works better, though, in coming up with the original formulation leading to success?