Decoding hair to sell soap

Thinking about hair and its various cultural and social associations made me wonder how the advertisers of hair products navigate this difficult semiotic terrain.

A bit of digging led me to Dr. G. Clotaire Rapaille, a former student of Lévi-Strauss who puts his background in structuralist anthropology and psychiatry to work for corporate marketers, through his company Archetype Discoveries Worldwide.

While Rapaille's ideas are grounded in a type of theory that would strike contemporary anthropologists as pretty old-fashioned, they seem to work for the purposes of advertising, which is a hit-or-miss form of cultural communication at the best of times.

Dr. Rapaille's approach is to collect the earliest personal memories of focus group participants with regards to a type of product. He then examines these personal narratives for recurring themes. By analyzing these themes, he "decodes" the collective emotional references of the product in the context of a given culture.

He was once asked to come to the rescue of a British shampoo manufacturer's failing Japanese ad campaign. A pdf of his "case study" can be downloaded here.



I first heard of Dr. Rapaille in a Frontline documentary on contemporary advertising, called "The Persuaders", in which he gave a very entertaining and convincing account of why a French cheesemaker's commercials were failing miserably in the US, and how he helped to turn the situation around.

You can watch the documentary here. Dr. Rapaille is featured in segment 4, "The Science of Selling". His case study on the cheese problem (which is better written than the shampoo one) is here.