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Motivation Research

Chapter · December 2010

DOI: 10.1002/9781444316568.wiem02006

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Motivation Research

by

Robert V. Kozinets

Schulich School of Business, York University Toronto, Ontario

Canada

Citation:

Kozinets, Robert V. (2010), “Motivation Research,” in Wiley International Encyclopedia of Marketing, Vol. 2: Marketing Research, ed. Wagner Kamakura, West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 198-

196.

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ABSTRACT

“Motivation research" is a term used to refer to a selection of qualitative research methods that were designed to probe consumers' minds in order to discover the subconscious or latent reasons and goals underlying everyday consumption and purchasing behaviors. Motivation research was derived from an application of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic personality theories and became the premiere consumer research method in the 1950s. It has had a lasting influence on the areas of advertising and consumer research, as well as advertising practice. Dr. Ernest Dichter, a trained psychoanalyst, was the first and foremost practitioner of Motivation Research. Critics of Motivation Research disliked its small sample sizes, its subjective interpretations, its basis in clinical methods, and its exotic explanations. Despite its controversial past, Motivation Research is still regarded as an important technique by marketers who want to gain deeper understanding into consumer motivations. Current techniques in wide use derive directly from Motivation Research. These methods include projective tests, metaphor analysis, storytelling, word association tasks, sentence completion tasks, picture generation, and also photos sorts. Some of the most prominent contemporary marketing researchers such as Gerald Zaltman and Clotaire Rapaille use techniques that are recognizably affiliated with Motivation Research.

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Do you know where Betty Crocker’s maternal appearance came from, or the famous

Exxon logo “Put a tiger in your tank”? How Nestle tried to crack the cultural code and market

coffee to the tea-drinking nation of Japan? Or how ice cream containers became round? The

answers will likely surprise you, as they're involved with a very surprising and controversial

form of consumer research called "Motivation Research,” which continues to be influential and

contentious to this day.

"Motivation Research" is a term used to refer to a selection of qualitative research

methods (see wiem0258) designed to probe consumers' minds in order to discover the deep,

often subconscious or latent reasons and goals underlying everyday consumption and purchasing

behaviors. Motivation Research was the premiere consumer research method in the 1950s,

leading to lasting influence on the areas of advertising and consumer research, as well as

advertising practice. In academic circles, however the rapid rise of Motivation Research was

followed by an equally rapid decline (Stern 2004).

Sigmund Freud's psychoanalytic personality theories provide the foundation for the

development of Motivation Research in marketing. The theory was built on the premise that

unconscious or deeply hidden needs and drives underlie all human behavior. Particularly

influential are sexual drives and other deeply-seeded biological ones such as the need for

dominance and aggression. Freud's theory was constructed from his own patients’ recollections

of the early childhood experiences, combined with analysis of their dreams, as well as the

specific nature of their problems with mental and physical adjustments to their situations. In

Freudian theory, these needs are assumed to lie at the very core of human personality and

motivation.

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Ernest Dichter was trained as a psychoanalyst in Vienna and moved to New York in 1938

(Stern 2004). He began adopting Freud's psychoanalytic techniques to the study of consumers

buying habits in the 1930s. Up until that time, marketing research has mainly focused on what

consumers did—descriptions of their behaviors (see wiem 0202). These studies tended to be

quantitative as well as anecdotal, what would be commonly known as descriptive statistical case

studies. Providing a fresh and refreshing change to this, Dichter used qualitative research

methods not to describe what was actually done, or even said. Instead, he tried to delve deeper

into why consumers actually performed as they did (see wiem 0204).

Enchanted by his new approach, engaging presentations, and skilled writing style,

Dichter’s renown quickly grew. The advertising and marketing world became fascinated by the

entertaining and usually surprising explanations offered for different kinds of consumer

behavior, particularly since many of these explanations were grounded in sexual motivations. For

example marketers were told that cigarettes and lifesaver candies were bought because of their

sexual symbolism. Men, it was claimed, regarded their convertible cars as surrogate mistresses

(Dichter 1964). Before long almost every major advertising agency in the country had a

psychologist on staff who conducted Motivation Research studies. Some of Dichter’s more

influential and long-lasting insights can help us to understand the basic principles of the analysis.

In one set of studies, Dichter describe baking as an essential expression of femininity as

well as motherhood. It was also very sensorily fulfilling, evoking nostalgic memories as

delicious odors pervaded the house when the mother was baking. Dichter (1964) postulated that,

when baking a cake a woman symbolically linked to the act of giving birth. The most powerful

moment of the experience occurs with a product is actually pulled from the over, symbolizing the

moment of birth. When a woman bakes a cake for a man she is offering it to him as a symbol of

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her fertility. At the time, the envisioning of Betty Crocker’s appearance was apparently based on

Dichter's analysis of baking as fertility. In our contemporary times, we can only speculate what is

symbolized by the baking of a cake by a husband for his wife (Hitt 2000).

The amazingly long-lived Exxon/Esso logo "Put a tiger in your tank" and its related

campaigns had their genesis in another Ernest Dichter study (Dichter 1964). According to

Dichter the automobile allows consumers to convert into reality two powerful subconscious urge.

The first is the aggressive urge to compete with, beat, best, and destroy that psychoanalysis finds

present as a real force in all human psyches. The second is Thanatos, the powerful encounter

with mortality, the fear of death. For example the expression "step on it" comes from the desire

to feel power. The phrase "I missed hitting that car (or baby stroller) by inches" reflect the

profound desire to play with danger, to come close to the edge of mortality. Dichter's idea was to

develop a slogan that allow the fuel company to tap into consumers unconscious aggressive

motives for driving a car (Patton 2002). The outcome emerging from this research insight, added

to the creativity of Exxon’s hired advertising copywriters was an image that mixed control of a

wild force with a tamed viciousness: a tank full of striped feline fury.

And how did ice cream boxes become round? After an analysis conducted for a dairy

food company, Dichter (1964) found that ice cream was a type of sexually satisfying, orgiastic

food. It melted in one's mouth providing a extremely sensual and pleasurable sensation. Like

mother’s milk, it didn't need to be chewed, but invited sucking. It was sweet and creamy, a pure

hedonistic pleasure. Its sweetness and richness signify incredible abundance and people ate it as

if they wanted it to run down their chins. Because of these aspects of pure abandon and

hedonistic excess, Dichter recommended an ancient symbol of limitlessness. The circle, the line

without end, the ceaseless pleasure of abundance and earthly delights, was the best packaging for

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ice cream. Further, the box should have illustrations running around it periphery to show the

unending delight of the delicious ice cream within.

This form of analysis may seem foreign and unscientific, and some of these examples

might seem overblown and hyperbolic. The fact that Motivation Research seems strange to us

really is not very strange at all. It is based on the premise that we, like all consumers, are not

usually aware of the reasons that underlie our behaviors (see wiem0236, wiem0204, wiem 0258).

One of the reasons we react with embarrassment when we have these explanations is because

they deal with such central, deep-seated needs. As Motivation Research digs deep into these

needs we gain insights that allow the marketer to better understand the underlying feelings,

attitudes, and emotions that concern the use of a product or service a brand, or other consumption

goods such as experiences and ideas. Perhaps it is therefore no wonder that, although she’s had a

little cosmetic work done, Betty Crocker is still Betty Crocker, Exxon still puts tigers in our fuel

tanks (and in their advertising campaigns), and ice cream containers are still round. As we will

see later in this chapter, Motivation Research, repackaged into contemporary forms, continues to

exert a major influence on advertising and marketing practice.

Evaluations of Motivation Research

By the early 1960s, marketers began to believe that Motivation Research was flawed

(Stern 2004). First, because of its intensive nature, qualitative research sample sizes had to be

small. Traditional, statistics-driven marketing researchers worried about generalizing the

findings of a small group of consumers to the totality of the marketplace (see wiem 0215, wiem

0258). Second, marketing researchers also worried that the analysis of projective test and depth

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interviews were highly subjective (see wiem0210, wiem0255). In fact, it seemed that the quality

of the interpretation depended very much on the acuity and even brilliance of the interpretive

researcher (however, the same might be true of any technique, such as the detailed analysis and

interpretation of sophisticated quantitative data).

Third, critics of Motivation Research noted that many the projective test that were used at

originally developed for clinical purposes of diagnosis of mental illness rather than for studies of

marketing or for consumer behavior (see wiem0255). Consumer behavior however was

interested in finding explanations for the behavior of typical consumers. On the other hand,

Freudian theory was developed in an entirely different social context -- 19th century Vienna –

and applied in the 1950s into postwar America.

Finally, many Motivation Researchers would inject highly exotic and usually sexual

reasons into what seemed to many to be rather prosaic and everyday consumer purchases and

behaviors. For example, was it better to sell man a pair of suspenders as means for holding up his

pants, or as a type of protection to help him cope with his castration anxiety? Should a car be

sold to a woman as an efficient vehicle or as an impressive substitute penis to help her compete

in a world of aggressive men? Marketing researchers concerned with the dignity, reputation, and

legitimacy of their scientific field began to question the often rather spicy explanations that were

offered by the Motivation Researchers. It seemed that in the eyes of the Motivation Researcher

almost any mundane product or service also have had a profoundly symbolic—and usually

sexual—side. But for many marketing and consumer researchers, it was beginning to seem like

Motivation Research had forgotten Freud’s famous saying that, sometimes, a cigar was just a

cigar.

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Motivation Research Today

Despite its rocky history and many critiques, Motivation Research is still regarded as an

important technique by marketers who want to gain deeper understanding into why consumers

act in the way that they do. These insights are often thought to be much more revealing than the

information provided by traditional descriptive and quantitative marketing research methods (see

wiem0210). Although the term Motivation Research is most often used to refer to qualitative

research that is designed specifically to discover consumers’ hidden, tacit, latent, or unconscious

motivations, the term can also be used to reference any form of research that seeks to explain

why people do things rather than simply describe what they do, or offer correlates to that

behavior (see wiem 0204).

Over time, we have learned that many of the motivations driving consumer purchases

indeed are motivated by sexual, dominant, violent, other biologically basic needs identified by

Freud. We need look no further than the worlds of fashion, sports, entertainment, pornography,

and videogame production and marketing for examples. The recent boom in design and attention

to design oriented and user oriented design principles and submit and simplicity draw our

attention to the fact human motivations to buy and use products and services are indeed complex

and social. In fact, because Motivation Research can often reveal unsuspected consumer

motivations that underlie the use of a particular product or brand, one of Motivation Research’s

main uses in marketing is in innovation. Today, Motivation Research is popularly employed as a

source of valuable, creative, front-end insights that are later quantitatively tested on larger

representative samples of consumers. In a competitive global environment in which insight and

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innovation are keys to success, it is no wonder that Motivation Research continues to play an

extremely important role.

Motivational research has a long, proven track record of being able to help deliver ideas

that spawn new products and market categories, to act as a valuable input into the brainstorming

of new products and services, to help in reposition and enlightenment existing brands, as well as

to develop new ideas for promotional campaigns. Motivation research offers novel ideas and

somewhat surprising that can penetrate the consumer’s conscious awareness by appealing to their

needs, fears, dreams, and desires that lie hidden under the surface of their conscious awareness.

By the 1980s, qualitative consumer and marketing research had evolved to encompass a

variety of research approaches, including and encompassing ethnography (see wiem 0236),

semiotics, content analysis (see wiem 0262), literary techniques, historical methods, discourse

analysis, phenomenological methods, and conversation analysis (see wiem 0204). For some time,

these two techniques --- the depth interview (see wiem0210) and the projective test (see

wiem0255) --- were the methodologies most commonly associated with Motivation Research.

The psychoanalytic interview developed in marketing and consumer research, as it did in other

social scientific fields, into the "depth" or (later) "long" interview, and the clinician’s Rorschach

and thematic tests evolved into a variety of projective tasks.

By the 1990s, many of these research approaches had become firmly established in

marketing and consumer research. Motivation Research can be seen as one step in a series of

stages in the development of a vast range of marketing research techniques designed to uncover

various facets of people's thoughts, desires, and lifestyles. Although projective tasks are used by

researchers today, they are not nearly as common as they were during the heyday of Motivation

Research. Interviews, however, are a staple of consumer and marketing research, whether in their

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academic one-on-one format, or in the focus group interview format extremely popular in

marketing research practice (see wiem 0210). In the first years of the 21st century, these methods

which had their inception in Motivation Research continued to make gains in enhancing our

understanding of consumers’ deeper motivations, meanings, and understandings of the world.

Through more detailed complex and subtle social analyses, Motivation Research is alive and

well and still very much with us. By emphasizing the less obvious aspects of consumer behavior,

it has helped marketing recognize some of the important forces driving consumer culture.

Some of the qualitative research techniques used in the original Motivation Research

have been developed and are now in common use, particularly among advertising, marketing,

and marketing research practitioners. In the following section, we present an introductory to

some of these tools that you may find useful in your own research.

Motivation Research Tools and Techniques

In contemporary marketing research, there a number of qualitative research techniques

used to delve into customers unconscious hidden motivations. These techniques draw their

lineage directly from Motivation Research. They include projective tests and tasks, metaphor

analysis, storytelling, word association tasks, sentence completion tasks, picture generation, and

also photos sorts (see wiem0204, wiem0210, wiem0212, wiem0250, wiem0255). In marketing

researchers such as Gerald Zaltman and Clotaire Rapaille we have new practitioners of the craft

of Motivation Research who pick up, develop, and make contemporary the approach initially

popularized by Ernest Dichter.

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Thematic apperception test and other projectives. The thematic apperception test was

developed by Henry A. Murray and Christiana D. Morgan at Harvard University during the

1930s in order to explore some of the motivating forces underlying personality. It is a picture

interpretation technique that uses a standard series of 30 pictures about which the research

subject is asked to tell a dramatic story. The pictures themselves are open-ended yet provocative,

showing, for example, a young boy contemplating a violin that sits on a table before him.

For a marketing research example, consider hypothetical research we might conduct for a

new cold medication. In this research there would be an image of a middle-aged woman in a

bathrobe looking into a mirror and a caption underneath it saying “She looked into the mirror

that morning and realized that she had a cold.” When we show this picture to women, what

might we hear? As researchers we would probably discover that middle-aged women consider

their lives to be fast-paced, full of obligations, and socially active. The discovery of a cold

abruptly disturbs the quickness of their lives. An advertisement that could result from this

projective research might show an attractive, busy, middle-aged woman walking down a busy

street. She sneezes and then, suddenly, all of the motion around her stops. She opens her purse,

takes out the cold medication, takes it, smiles, and then her life speeds up to its previous rapid

pace. By providing such an image in advertising, the marketer is to symbolize that they

understand the lived experience and social world of the consumer. This image based positioning

builds strong emotional ties between the brand and the consumer.

Metaphor analysis. Metaphor analysis is a method based upon providing visual images to

consumers, or having them collect their own images, and then using these images for projective

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tasks in which they compare and contrast products, services, or brands to the various images, and

the images to one another. The analytic goal of metaphor analysis is to generate guiding

analogies providing a deep sense of understanding of how consumers relate to a particular

product, category, or brand.

Gerald Zaltman, Professor Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, has popularized this

method in recent years. His approach, which he terms ZMET, or the Zaltman Metaphor

Elicitation Test, is based upon many of the same fundamentals as classic Motivation Research.

Zaltman (1996) offers the following founding principles for his metaphor test: the nonverbal and

unconscious nature of most social communications, the image-based or imaginary nature of most

human thought, the centrality of the form of metaphor to human thinking, the embodiment or

bodily nature of cognition and thought, the linkage of reason, emotion, and experience and the

assumption that deep structures of human motivation can be accessed through projective-style

research (see wiem0255). The relation of the body, emotions, and hidden unconscious

motivations to the projective task of marketing research relates this work directly to Motivation

Research.

In the ZMET test, consumers are either asked to collect a number of images that represent

their thoughts and feelings about a product, service, or brand, or they are provided with these

images in various forms. The forms can be clippings from a magazine or specially designed

graphics and photographs that they select from the computer screen. Research participants are

given the focus of the research a week or more in advance of the actual interview. They are

encouraged to ruminate and think deeply about the topic of the assignment and, if relevant, about

their selection of photographs and images. The research question must be carefully considered in

order to focus the response of the consumers and may include their opinions of a particular

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company or brand, their experiences of a purchase setting or a buying process, they are used of a

service or product, or how they feel about a certain concept. Participants are also directed not to

choose photographs that literally represent a product or service. For example, if the research

topic is mobile phones, the research participant would be asked not to select any actual

photographs or graphics of mobile phones. Forcing the research participant to choose photos that

indirectly relate to digital cameras activates an analogical style of reasoning that, it is assumed,

can help to reveal latent feelings, thoughts, and motivations (Zaltman 1996).

The interview is approximately two hours in length and consists of guided questions

regarding the images chosen by the consumers to answer the focused research question. As the

interview progresses, participants are asked for their opinions regarding other senses that might

express their feelings and thoughts. The researcher's main task is to attempt to elicit as many rich

metaphors from the participant’s experiences and memories as possible. The idea, according to

Zaltman (1996, p. 15), is to allow "deep, latent ideas to emerge as well as for the expression of

the wide range of relevant ideas." Increasingly, the ZMET and other metaphor-based techniques

have incorporated advanced mapping and diagram-drawing techniques to analyze and present the

findings of their research, as well as digital graphical design and even creative animations with

voiceovers. The ZMET technique has been very successful, adopted and used by the top

corporations in the world, from Coca Cola and Procter & Gamble, to Walt Disney, Mercedes-

Benz, Bank of America, Microsoft and Chevron.

Storytelling. In the method of guided storytelling, consumers tell real-life stories about

the meanings or uses use of products under investigation. Although this technique is related to

depth interviews, it is considered to be a distinct form of research. Often the storytelling method

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asks research participants to imagine and relate stories relating to their own product or service

usage. Another application of the storytelling methodology requires subjects to imagine a story

involving another person. So, for example, people who have a fear of tall buildings would be

asked to imagine and then tell a story about why some people are afraid of tall buildings. In this

way, the storytelling process ameliorates people's own anxiety, embarrassment, and social

censoring mechanisms. Doing so, people will be less likely to censor their own apprehension

about heights and to offer an accurate portrayal (see wiem 0204).

As a form of Motivation Research, the storytelling method seeks to plumb the depths of

consumer motivations. For example, Kimberly Clarke used a storytelling method in order to

study current perceptions about diapers (Lieber 1997). They found using this research method

the parents actually considered that diapers were a type of clothing related to a particular stage in

the child's development. If their child more diapers for too long, the result was that the parents

became distressed and embarrassed because they viewed it as a failure. They felt that they had

not toilet trained their children properly and that this lack of success was obvious in from the

children wearing the wrong apparel for that particular stage in their life. Using the data from this

storytelling study, Kimberly-Clark introduced its new and highly successful Huggies Pull-ups

training pants. These training pants introduced a highly successful new category into the US

diaper industry.

Word Association and Sentence Completion Tasks. "What is the first word that you think

of when I mention the word or category coffee?" In word association tests, research participants

are presented with words one at a time, and then asked to respond with the first word that comes

to mind. In a sentence completion task, respondents are asked to complete sentence upon hearing

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an opening phrases. For example “People who drink Starbucks are…” or “a Starbucks latte

reminds me of…” These related methods can be very useful in determining consumers

associations with existing brand names, eliciting related choice sets, as well as determining

associations with new brand names that are being considered and that are currently under

development.

An entire website has been devoted to creating word clouds based on people's reactions

to brand names. It is called brandtags and it is available at http://www.brandtags.net. As can be

readily seen in clicking on almost any brand name, there is a very wide assortment of responses.

For example, the word cloud associated with Starbucks includes not only strong, burnt, green,

and trendy, but corporate, mermaid, addictive, ubiquitous, and overpriced.

Picture Generation. Marketing researchers can also use visual images to study

consumers’ perceptions of various brands. They can use an analysis of consumers’ guided

drawings or doodles in order to help understand consumer perceptions, and use that

understanding to brainstorm new strategies for advertising. Consider some hypothetical research

on coffee. Research participants were asked to draw pictures of the typical drinker of Maxwell

House coffee. These drawings might elicit drawings of old-fashioned, chubby females wearing

frilly aprons. When asked to draw pictures of Starbucks drinkers, the drawings might show a

series of slim, cool, "with it" women who were wearing highly heels and miniskirts. For a

company like Maxwell House, these findings might provide important input about the dire need

to reposition its product to seem more in tune with the times.

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Photo Sorts. In photo sorting tasks, respondents receive stacks of photos depicting

various events and are asked to select the pictures from the set that best portray or capture some

particular element that the researcher is interested in investigating. In a photo sort study that was

conducted by an advertising agency for Playtex, the manufacturer of bras, research participants

received a stack of photos that portrayed many different types of women wearing many different

types of clothing. First, the research participants were asked to choose pictures that represented

the typical user of Playtex bras. They chose overweight, old-fashioned, big-breasted women

(O'Shaughnessy, 1995, p. 437). These women, who were Playtex users themselves, were then

asked by the researcher to select the pictures from those that best captured their own self images.

Although many of the respondents may have been overweight, full-breasted, and old-fashioned

in appearance, they selected photos that showed physically fit, well-dressed, and independent-

looking women. The advertising agency then advised Playtex to stop stressing the comfort of its

bras in its advertising campaigns and instead to design a new campaign that showed thinner and

sexier big-bosomed women under the slogan "the fit that makes the fashion."

Contemporary Motivation Researcher: Clotaire Rapaille

One of the great contemporary practitioners of an updated form of Motivation Research

is Clotaire Rapaille, a French-born psychoanalyst and medical anthropologist whose methods for

mining covert motivations have compelled many Fortune 500 companies to spend massive

amounts of money on his brand of “culture code” marketing research. Rapaille’s former research

is based upon a sociobiological idea of ‘imprinting’ that originated with studies of geese:

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"the combination of experience and its accompanying emotion create something

widely known as an imprint, a term first applied by Konrad Lorenz. Once an imprint

occurs, it strongly conditions our thought processes and shape their future actions. Each

imprint helps makes us more of who we are. The combination of imprints defines us...

every imprint influences us on an unconscious level" (Rapaille 2006, pp. 6-7).

To explain how he uses the notion of imprinting in his research, Rapaille gives the

example of working with Swiss food giant Nestlé trying to sell instant coffee in Japan. He

discussed how he gathered groups of people together to discover how they imprinted their

perceptions of coffee. He scheduled a three hour session with each group of research

participants. In the first hour, he queried the participants about coffee usage as if he was an alien

from a different planet who knew absolutely nothing about coffee. In the second hour, he had

them sit on the floor using scissors and piles of magazines to make a collage of words that

represented their impressions of coffee. His intuition was that these visual images would help

them to express stories about coffee that could give him further insights into coffee consumption.

For the final hour of his investigative research, Rapaille asks participants to lie on the

floor with pillows, put on soothing music, and asked them to relax. When he had come to the

group, he spoke to them about the past, taking them from their adult years to their teen years to a

time when they were young. At that point in the guided meditation, yes them to think about

coffee and to recall their earliest memory of it. He sought to elicit the very first time that they

consciously experienced coffee as well as the most significant memory of coffee. Reply says that

he learned that Japanese people had only a very superficial imprint of coffee and many had no

imprint of it all (Rapaille 2006).

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His conclusion to Nestlé was that the current strategy of attempting to switch to drinkers

to coffee was bound to be a failure. Nestlé instead needed to begin by giving coffee meaning, in

other words, offering up an imprint for the Japanese market (Rapaille 2006). Nestlé began acting

on this advice by creating desserts for children with coffee flavors but without caffeine. Because

they were gaining a sweet tasting coffee experience as their first imprint, Japanese youth gained

a very positive first impression. The idea was that this impression and imprinting would follow

the youth through their lives. Although cause and effect are difficult to measure in such complex

cultural circumstances, coffee sales in Japan have steadily risen and now approach after billion

pounds per year.

Betraying his psychoanalytic roots, and of course in the world of marketing research the

path from Freud to Dichter is rather short, Rapaille considers that he reveals the ''reptilian'' part

of the brain, which is the home of violence, strong smells, violence, sex, and primal emotions

(Hitt 2000; Rapaille 2006). According to Hitt (2000), Rapaille typically begins a marketing

research session by leading a group of about 20 people through a series of word-association

games. After writing words on a board, the researcher then asks the group to identify themes that

unite the words. He then has them tell stories based on the concepts that have been written on the

board. The idea behind this technique is to generate a lot of little stories. And as in Rapaille’s

(2006), the concluding part of the marketing research session involves having the research

participants lie on the floor, with blankets and pillows, while repetitive and relaxing music plays

for about 20 minutes to calm down the active mind. At this point, the researcher seeks to take the

room full of participants back to their earliest memory of a product or category. After talking to

them he asks them to write down the story of their earliest in their most vivid memories relating

to the product or category. These recollections then become the data which the researcher uses to

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find deep-seated, hidden, archetypal associations. Of course, we have no proof that these

memories are actually valid memories of childhood experiences. Most likely, they are

constructions that the participants rearrange in the present moment in order to fulfill the

requirements of the research. Nonetheless, just like other types of impressionistic research

gathered through Motivation Techniques—a collage, a completed sentence, a creative story told

about an ambiguous picture—they become the basis of researcher insights in this method.

Reading through examples of Clotaire Rapaille’s marketing research conclusions, one

cannot help but be struck by its similarities to Dichter’s Motivation Research. Repaille considers

that his research decodes the existing codes behind product categories discovering people’s true

product meanings and motivations for use. His colorful style, powerful and simple conclusions,

creative metaphors, and usually biologically-rooted bases for explanation evoke the spirit of

Motivation Research. Consider as a final example the way that Rapaille discusses the difference

between the way that French and American people understand the category of cheese:

“The French code for cheese is ALIVE. This makes perfect sense when one

considers how the French choose and store cheese. They go to a cheese shop and poke

and prod the cheeses, smelling them to learn their ages. When they choose one, they take

it home and store it at room temperature in a cloche (a bell-shaped cover with little holes

to allow air in and keep insects out). The American code for cheese, on the other hand, is

DEAD. Again, this makes sense in context. Americans "kill" their cheese through

pasteurization (unpasteurized cheeses are not allowed into this country), select hunks of

cheese that had been prewrapped -- mummified, if you will -- in plastic (like body bags),

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and store it, still wrapped airtight, in a morgue also known as a refrigerator” (Rapaille

2006, p. 25).

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REFERENCES Dichter, E. (1964) Handbook of Consumer Motivations. New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company. Hitt, J. (2000) "Does the smell of coffee brewing remind you of your mother?" New York Times Magazine, May 7, 6, 71. Lieber, R. B. (1997), “Storytelling: a new way to get close to your customer,” Fortune Magazine, February 3. O'Shaughnessy, J. (1995), Competitive Marketing: A Strategic Approach, 3rd Edition, New York: Routledge. Patton, P. (2002) "Car shrinks." Fortune Magazine, March 18, p. 6. Rapaille, C. (2006), The Culture Code: an Ingenious Way to Understand Why People around the World by and Live As They Do. New York: Broadway Books. Stern, B. B. (2004), “The importance of being Ernest: Commemorating Dichter's contribution to advertising research.” Journal of Advertising Research, 44, 2, 165-169 Zaltman, G. (1996), "Metaphorically speaking: new technique uses multidisciplinary ideas to improve qualitative research." Marketing Research, 8 (Summer), 13-20.

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