Can marketers really get inside a consumer's head to influence the choice they will make? For market researcher Clotaire Rapaille , the answer is yes. He believes all purchasing decisions really lie beyond conscious thinking and emotion and reside at a primal core in human beings. As chairman of Archetype Discoveries Worldwide, he helps Fortune 500 companies discover the unconscious associations for their products -- the simple "code" -- that will help them sell to consumers: "When you learn a word, whatever it is, 'coffee,' 'love,' 'mother,' there is always a first time. There's a first time to learn everything. The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection that you're going to keep using the rest of your life. … So actually every word has a mental highway. I call that a code, an unconscious code in the brain." This interview was conducted on December 15, 2003.

Part of my work was in Switzerland, and I was working with children trying to learn French, Italian or German. And my second discovery at the time was that there's a different imprint for these different cultures. What I discovered was that the code for each culture was different. "Coffee" in Italy doesn't mean "coffee" in America. I mean, if you drink American coffee the way you do, and [then] you switch, and instead of American coffee you drink that much coffee, but it's Italian coffee, you're dead at the end of the day. So obviously with the same word, we have a completely different relationship with what the word means, what is behind this word, and so on.

One of my discoveries was that in order to create the first imprint of a word -- when you learn a word, whatever it is, "coffee," "love," "mother," there is always a first time. There's a first time to learn everything. The first time you understand, you imprint the meaning of this word; you create a mental connection that you're going to keep using the rest of your life. And to create this mental connection, you need some emotions. Without emotion, there is no production of neurotransmitters in the brain, and you don't create the connection. So actually every word has a mental highway. I call that a code, an unconscious code in the brain.

Originally I'm a child psychiatrist. I used to work with autistic children, children that don't speak, and I was just trying to find a cure. I made several little discoveries of the way the brain functions at the time. For example, these children are usually quite intelligent -- some kind of "intelligent." I don't know if you remember Rain Man , that [in the Dustin Hoffman character] Rain Man you had this kind of computer intelligence, but they have a little problem with emotions.