Being sold on the subconscious: marketers mine mind field in search for new ways to promote product.(Dr. Clotaire Rapaille, Dr. Robert Cialdini)

Daily Variety, August, 2005 by Bing, Jonathan

DR. CLOTAIRE RAPAILLE wants to get under your skin. Rapaille is a French psychologist-turned-marketing consultant who specializes in mining the subconscious drives of American consumers. He's earned millions of dollars shaping the ad campaigns for Folger's coffee, Crest toothpaste, Jack Daniels and Chrysler's PT Cruiser.

Last month, Rapaille inspired a segment of "60 Minutes," which showed him knocking around his Versailles-like home in Tuxedo Park, N.Y., ruminating in his heavily accented English about "the reptilian brain" that controls our shopping decisions, and presiding over focus groups whose participants roll around on the floor, free associating about childhood memories. Fifty years ago, the idea of an eccentric scientist...