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

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.
Timecodes | jump straight to it
0:00 - Intro
0:47 - Who is Dr Marcus Collins?
5:33 - From academia to practice
8:45 - What is culture?
16:07 - Segmenting culture
23:03 - Counter-culture and the Gaussian Curve
30:59 - When brands attempt to tap into culture
36:16 - Authentically tapping into culture
37:49 - What you do doesn't define you
41:46 - Making a dent in the world
46:38: How Marcus looks outside
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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