Chrysler dug deep with archetype research to shape its PT Cruiser

Personal transportation indeed

Since Chrysler’s PT Cruiser looks like no other car on the road, it’s fitting that the marketing research behind it was a bit out of the ordinary. The wildly popular vehicle - part retro-futuristic panel truck, part Munster minivan - is the first DaimlerChrysler vehicle designed using archetype research, a qualitative method developed by G. Clotaire Rapaille, a French medical anthropologist whose Florida-based firm is called Archetype Discoveries.

In a nutshell, Rapaille’s technique focuses on uncovering the deep-seated psychological underpinnings of consumers’ product choices. Mundane attributes like color, size, convenience or price aren’t the drivers of purchase, Rapaille would argue. Rather, it’s the feelings and emotions attached to the product that really influence your choice. These feelings are part of a “cultural unconscious” that differs from culture to culture and country to country. If you can tap into this vein and touch what Rapaille calls the consumer’s “reptilian hot button,” you’ll have the key to designing and marketing the product.

Rapaille digs for these feelings in a standard focus group setting using various exercises to get respondents talking and writing about the product or concept at hand. Insights come by divining the hidden meanings in the respondents’ words. “When Dr. Rapaille first talked to us [about his technique], he talked about the idea that everything that you come into contact with is a symbol which activates something on a mental highway,” says David Bostwick, director of corporate market research, DaimlerChrysler Corporation U.S., Detroit. “That highway leads to a meaning that could very well mean something else that is not obvious to you.

“With this technique you learn that all of the things that [respondents] are saying have some consistency and some relationship and you have to learn what the relationship is so that you can go back and reassemble it. You have to understand the logic of emotion rather than the rational logic which we are prone to recognize very quickly.”

The PT Cruiser (PT stands for “Personal Transportation”) research involved a series of three-hour groups in the U.S. and Europe. Because of the importance Rapaille places on culture, respondents had to have been born and raised in the culture in which the groups took place.

In the first part of the groups, Rapaille told respondents to pretend that he was from another planet and didn’t know what automobiles, such as the PT Cruiser prototype parked in the room, were used for. In the second part, respondents constructed collages of words they felt described the PT Cruiser. For the third hour, the lights were dimmed and respondents went through a relaxation exercise to help them drift into a waking-dream state. Respondents were then asked to think back to their childhoods and record any memories that the prototype of the PT Cruiser brought to mind.

Safety and security

In this case, issues of safety and security appeared to trigger the reptilian hot button. Respondents spoke of a dangerous outside world, a jungle from which they needed protection. They talked about intelligence, about having street smarts that would help them survive a crisis. If the PT Cruiser were going to be the vehicle to take them through the harsh world they were describing, its appearance needed to be beefed up - responses to an early prototype of the car indicated that it resembled a toy. As a result, fenders were made more bulbous to appear more protective, the hatchback window was made smaller to increase safety and security, and the windshield was made more upright to give the vehicle a truck-like look.

Respondents also spoke of nostalgia, but nostalgia occurring in a new context, Bostwick says. “One of the analogies that we developed for the car was that it was like a CD jukebox. It looks like a Wurlitzer from the ’50s but with today’s modern technology.”

Going for the “wow”

As the groups were being conducted on early models, findings from the research were communicated to those working on follow-up versions.

After the first groups, it was clear that the car’s interior, which at that point wasn’t fully developed, would have to match the excitement created by the exterior. Focus groups respondents likened the car to a Christmas present in a beautiful but empty box, Bostwick says. “In the original design, we had achieved some level of interest. People said, ‘I am starting to get interested in the outside but when I open it up I get disappointed.’”

Automobile prototypes typically don’t have fully developed interiors, due to cost considerations, but in the case of the PT Cruiser, interior prototypes including removable rear seats and a passenger seat that folds forward were included in later groups. “We discussed the relationship between the interior and exterior with the people who would be designing the interior,” Bostwick says. “We fed back directly what we learned [in the groups] in general terms of what the interior space was trying to accomplish in consumers’ minds. They executed it very well. So when we did the traditional measurements at the end of the process, and showed people the car in its almost-finished form, their reaction was wow - wow from the inside, and wow from the outside.”

Boot camp

Bostwick likens the archetype research experience to an intellectual boot camp for backroom observers. “It’s quite an intense ride. You’re listening, reading, analyzing, discussing, and dealing with your own feelings at the same time. The people who are involved in it from the company, whether they are creators, communicators or strategists, all have to become experts at interpreting what they are hearing.

“It’s like solving a jigsaw puzzle but without having the box available for reference. And all the pieces are the same color. You have to remove yourself from what you are hearing in order to understand the structure of the puzzle. You learn while you are doing this how to understand things in a new way. It’s like putting on a new pair of glasses.”

In this case, people from marketing research, design, product planning, and marketing attended the groups. “Bryan Nesbitt, the person who did the major design drawing of the car, was an integral member of the team and helped us to crack the code,” Bostwick says. “So when he got back to Detroit after the groups, he drew his interpretation of the feeling that people were communicating. And that’s the car you see. There is very little difference between the sketch he drew and what’s on the road. It’s the closest I’ve seen from sketch-to-the-street. And it’s because the process tapped into his intuition and allowed him to express himself in a way that resonates with a lot of people.”

As you move through the groups, analysis becomes easier, Bostwick says. The responses from the consumers start to exhibit uniformity, once you know how to interpret them, because you are tapping into a collective cultural unconscious - following Rapaille’s theory that long-time members of the same culture share cultural imprints.

“You almost know that every time one thing is said, you’re going to hear the other thing shortly thereafter. And when you first started listening you didn’t see that. A real fun part of this, as you get near the end of the groups, is that you think the later groups are better than the first ones but they’re really no different, you just became a more sophisticated listener.”

Had to have one

Archetype research focus groups don’t require overly-specific recruiting guidelines, Bostwick says. For the PT Cruiser groups, participants had to be native-born and have expressed intent to purchase a new car in the near future. “When you do work with Dr. Rapaille you don’t have to get too specific in terms of the intentions and demographics. You are looking for variety here because the point is, if this is going to resonate with people on an unconscious level, it will do it with people of all ages.”

That’s just what the car has done. “This does not replace a minivan and it isn’t an SUV but it spreads across a lot of different age groups,” Bostwick says. “Something like 40 percent of the people who bought a PT Cruiser in the beginning added it to their family without replacing another vehicle, which is quite high. We asked people why they bought one and they said, ‘Well, I had to have one.’ It doesn’t replace the other functional things that are out there, it’s just compelling. And it’s also useful.”

Ideal in mind

Bostwick’s theory is that people have an ideal product in their mind, one which they can’t explain, and the task is to bring the ideal to life. Rapaille’s approach helps do that. “You are trying to capture that ideal and create something that will recall it. But there is more to what people understand than they are capable of articulating. They can’t say it because a lot of it is unconscious. There is a way of finding it out and that is what people try to do in qualitative techniques, to find that unconscious element. But they do it by asking questions of the conscious brain and I’m not sure that anyone is brilliant enough to determine the unconscious reaction by asking more conscious questions.”

He also believes that companies don’t create new markets by creating new products. “What happens is, it was already in someone’s mind that they wanted to do something and you just created a product to make it happen. In this case it was an all-new concept but the concept had to be refined before it resonated. I use that term because it is like a tuning fork that resonates with their emotions. Once you have that, you know it’s going to work. You show it to them and of course they react positively to it. And when you introduce it in the marketplace you get the same reaction.”

Government regulations

The company’s motivations for developing the PT Cruiser started out conventionally enough: it needed a vehicle to help it meet government fuel economy regulations. “We were looking for something that could share some of the development resources that we already had and would take advantage of things that we were already working on. You almost know in that case that you are going to have to come up with a completely new concept because there is nothing out there that we could just sell more of to accomplish our goals,” Bostwick says.

“The concept that led to the PT Cruiser was a vehicle that was somewhat similar to what we see today. It did have the idea of the two-box shape, based on some of the dimensions of the [Dodge] Neon-size weight class. We knew that it would have to have certain attributes that the government uses to define a truck - removable seats, a relatively flat floor, and a number of other requirements, most having to do with interior versatility.”

Paved the way

Bostwick says the corporate culture at DaimlerChrysler paved the way for developing the strange-looking vehicle. “If you show them an unconventional idea here, people say ‘That’s crazy. So when are you going to do one?’ That’s how you get PT Cruisers. We are structured in such a way that when the designer came back with this idea and put it on the wall, [management said] ‘Go make that car, don’t change it. Don’t take a committee to it and butcher it.’ ”

The same risk-friendly attitude extends to the research department. “People respect our judgement to find new ways to do what we do, just as we respect the engineers to come up with fuel cells or power-operating liftgates. We don’t tell them how to draw the door handles and they don’t tell us how to choose marketing research techniques. We have mutual trust.”