Looking Outside Culture: Dr Marcus Collins, Marketing Professor & Culture Scholar

In this episode of Looking Outside, we’re exploring Culture and the role of brands leveraging or influencing it, with University of Michigan marketing professor and best selling author of For the Culture, Dr Marcus Collins.

Marcus has one foot in Academia and the other in marketing practice, having led strategy Wieden+Kennedy New York, which allowed him to go deep on the theory and science of culture, while helping brands to understand those systems of cultural norms to activate their marketing strategies in a more relevant and impactful way. To be able to balance the theory and practice, Marcus studied the social sciences, making his knowledge of culture less shallow and deeply nuanced.

On the show, Marcus explains how culture is shaped, defined and cultivated by people, to create uniformity and ‘normality’. Because culture is a curation process to find others like us and create synergy in commonalities, Marcus explains that the curation process evolves from the definitions of ‘how to behave’ that you’re born into (that are ascribed to you), through to the cultures to subscribe to once you’re older.

Jo and Marcus discuss the challenge for marketers to more deeply understanding human beings, their values and behaviors (which often do not match) in the effort to predict human responses and effectively persuade towards a favorite action for our brands. To achieve this, Marcus’ advice is to follow the path of least resistance; to seek out the ‘collective of the willing’ as he calls them, those people who are already leaning into the behaviors you’re looking to amplify. It’s a marketers job to spot those collectives and to reflect in their work things that make these people feel ‘seen’. This requires a certain level of intimacy with the customer that goes beyond easy segmentation by demographics or even psychographics.

In a world where brands are more intertwined with popular, social and sometimes political issues, it’s important to know what you stand for, your role to play and your right to play in responding to cultural movements (or not responding, purposefully). Marcus stresses that first and foremost brand owners must pay attention to changes in culture, because the mainstream, normal or ‘middle’ customer base is not necessarily representative of your future customer. After all, everything that started in the fringes, that was once small or weird, later became popular.

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To look outside, Marcus speaks to his nine year old daughter to get her transparent and unfiltered perspective. Her responses help Marcus poke a hole in the wall as she usually sees something that he does not see.

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Dr. Marcus Collins is an award-winning marketer and cultural translator with one foot in the world of practice—serving as the Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York—and one foot in the world of academia—as a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. He has spent his career translating culture for brands and translating brands for culture, becoming the architect of some of the best-known advertising campaigns of our time. Marcus has championed strategies for blue chip brands such as McDonald’s, Apple, Google, State Farm, Target, Peloton, and Budweiser, and even ran digital strategy for Beyonce. His honors include being an AAF Advertising Hall of Achievement Inductee, 2022 Cannes Lions Jury Member, a member of the 2023 Thinkers50 Radar Class and one of the favorite professors of the University of Michigan MBA class of 2022. He is also the recipient of Advertising Age’s 40 Under 40 award and Crain’s Business’ 40 Under 40 award.

His much-anticipated book, “For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be”, examines the influence of culture on consumption and unpacks how everyone from marketers to activists...