Blogging

The other night I found myself at the bar of one of my favorite restaurants, Cedric in Harlem and sadly watched Roger Federer lose a match in the quarter finals in Flushing. After getting over my Swiss pride being hurt, I started a conversation with the gentleman sitting next to me and we soon where in a deep conversation about blogging and selling.  His wife has a flower boutique, Katrina Parris Flowers a few blocks from my house and they are big on social media. 

The Culture Code

There’s a book with that title I wish I had read after a year or so of living in the States.  The Culture Code found me in 2006, the year it was published and it was a veritable “aha” experience.  Clotaire Rapaille, cultural anthropologist and marketing expert (not without controversies), originally from France takes an advertising approach of distilling each experience, i.e. cultural differentiator into one word.  He gives the example of car advertisement in The Culture Code. 

 

What would the one word be that comes to mind when advertising cars to Americans?  It would be “freedom” – look at the truck commercials in particular – the car in the wild-wild west scaling some desert mountain, or roaming freely deserted down town streets:  it screams freedom to move around as you please.  How would you sell a car to Germans?  “Precision” – Germans want to know their car is of highest quality precision engineering possible.  No “over-engineered” Mercedes would ever come out of Detroit.