The Rules That Make Us: How Culture Shapes the Way We Act, Think, Believe, and Buy

Oliver Sweet is one of the world's leading business anthropologists. He works with brands like Coke, Ikea, Google and Dyson, as well as local councils and national governments, to reveal the secrets behind our decision making.Why do people do what we do? We might think it's our unique personalities and personal preferences that guide our choices, but it is in fact culture that shapes the majority of our actions. From the ways we bring up children and welcome guests, to the products we buy and how we spend our free time, how we live creates who we are.In The Rules That Make Us, Sweet teaches the reader to think like an anthropologist, revealing the secrets to successful people-watching and how we can better understand consumers, voters and our relationships. His decades-long trailblazing work uses cultural insights to help businesses, governments, and NGOs achieve their goals - whether he's working with the Gates Foundation to encourage South African men to get HIV tests, helping a pet food company break into a new market in Brazil, or showing health services how to encourage patients to drink less, have safer sex and eat healthier.Drawing on research conducted in thirty-five countries, Sweet maps culture's hidden rules: how it governs our behaviour and creates our assumptions, how it's shaped by technology, and even how it can help us predict the future. The Rules that Make Us will leave readers with a model for thinking about culture that can be applied to everyday life. This book is an indispensable guide to an essential new way of understanding our families and colleagues, our customers and constituents, ourselves and our world.