Dr. Rapaille's 3 Stage Technique and Song Airlines

Dr. Rapaille’s 3-stage technique is a unique approach to market research that uncovers the primal instinct or reptilian code (as Dr. Rapaille refers to it) behind a product or product category. Dr Rapaille started this by trying to understand autistic children who couldn’t speak and tell him why they did what they did. His theory is that everyone has this reason to do what they do, but that it can’t be easily explained by their reasoning. His 3-stage marketing research technique is a way for him to understand the code of people’s purchasing behavior. In the Persuaders, many of these luxury brand names are willing to pay money to Dr. Rapaille for that code, in hopes of beating their competition with better advertised products.

The 3-stage technique starts off with the reasoning step in which Dr. Rapaille asks his focus group about why they would logically buy a product in this category. What words do advertisers use to describe their product? Dr. Rapaille considers this step to be appealing to the group’s intelligence and sees it as essentially useless to finding the reptilian code, but needs the focus group to get these ideas out of their heads before he moves on.

The second step is the emotion step. Dr. Rapaille asks the focus group to explain to him the concept of the product or product category as if he were a 5-year old child from a different planet. The purpose is to get to their emotions in how they perceive this product that is relayed through their story on this product to the child. Many of the participants leave uncertain about what that step was all about.
However, the focus group participants are in for another shock with Dr. Rapaille’s third and last step. This step is called the primal core in which the reptilian code underlying the product or product category can be revealed. Dr. Rapaille sets up the room with just pillows and paper and pen while taking the typical chairs away. He asks them to write down their associations with the product or product category during the first time they experienced it. From this, he extracts what he calls as the reptilian hot buttons or code that explains why we buy what we do.

One of the examples of a product category code that Dr. Rapaille gives is for SUVs. He orders that SUVs be made larger and with dark windows (the typical Hummer) because SUV consumers are going for domination. Yes, that is right. The SUV code is domination. I am not sure if I would label it domination. I think that my biggest reason to get an SUV is safety, but perhaps safety is part of dominating the smaller cars that may not fare as well in an accident, in which case I am buying for domination.

As for Song airlines, I really like the idea of them targeting the 30-40 year old women who have 3 kids and are not particularly loyal to any airline. I enjoyed their feel-good commercials especially with the Downtown song that would probably be familiar to that age group. The colors were especially vibrant which makes one feel young and free again, which is a nice feeling when you are arranging travelling plans. I particularly appreciated the variety of bold colors for their airplane seats and excitement of their flight attendants. Song airlines seemed like a viable option to fly when the company launched.

However Song airlines may have spent too much money on commercials that didn’t related to their airlines. They made a great brand recognition, but most people had no idea what the product of that brand was. I think that hiring Andy Spade was a decent idea for creative thought and understanding the emotions and culture that needed to be Song airlines, but they shouldn’t have given him that much control of their marketing. He is specialized to focus on the emotion and forgot about the actual airline company that he needed to be helping. There needed to be a greater link between Song as an airline to the Song as the cultural verb. Overall, they seemed to be on the right start, but unfortunately Delta couldn’t afford to keep them in business anymore and had to shut down Song in 2005.