I recently interviewed Marcus Collins, author of For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want To Be, for an episode of Live With CMI (with my co-host, JK Kalinowski). Marcus is an award-winning marketer who is the former head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York and a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.
Our chat about the role of culture in marketing covered more than we could fit in a single episode, so we released a bonus video of our entire conversation. Watch it here or read the edited transcript below.
Why should culture matter to marketers?
Culture is an organizing operating system that ultimately influences just about everything we do as humans. And that’s important for marketers because your job is to influence behavior, and there is no external force more influential to human behavior than culture.
When you launch something — a new campaign, a new product — it is negotiated and constructed based on the discourse that’s happening. Say you launched a new carrot brand when an E. coli breakout affects carrots. You are negatively impacted by what’s happening in the cultural zeitgeist.
Influencing and impacting culture means contributing to discourse in a meaningful way. My friend Eric Hultgren says culture is like a car:
- You can drive it: You contribute new ideas or new conventions.
- You can ride shotgun: You engage in existing conventions.
- You can suck tailpipe: You just follow whatever is happening with no point of view and no clear conviction.
The brands that lead culture contribute new artifacts, new language, and new behavior through their works. They are the brands most likely to win.
Does authenticity relate to culture?
Scholar Eric David Brown Jr. talks about authenticity occurring when you are one’s truest self despite the context. The same thing goes for brands. Brands are authentic when they are the same, despite who they’re with or where you find them. They are awarded a level of credence that helps them engage in culture meaningfully.
If you are known to be inauthentic, it would arguably be exorbitantly difficult, and one might say impossible, to engage in and contribute to culture sustainably.
Bud Light taps into culture
In the late 1990s, Budweiser identified a cultural product in the form of a short film by Charles Stone III, a music video producer who wanted to get into Hollywood. Charles and his friends made a (three-minute) film called True. The dialogue was mostly “Wassup?” — it was how they communicated without having to say more words.
The executive from DDB, the advertising agency for Budweiser, saw the short and said, “That’s exactly what we’re trying to capture in this brand.” So, Budweiser commissioned Charles Stone to rework his short film to become an ad for Budweiser. People who saw themselves in that short film — in that cultural work — began to use that “Wassup?” language to talk to each other. This cultural lexicon became a way to signify closeness. It’s a receipt of friendship.
In this way, Budweiser identified the language used by this group. It wasn’t new, but the brand engaged in that lexicon through these cultural creators to benefit from the equity associated with it. And Budweiser was saying “Wassup?” all the way to the bank. And so was Charles Stone, who found his way into Hollywood to make movies.
Everybody associated with the “Wassup?” campaign won not because of any changes to the product but because of the brand’s ability to have proximity to culture.
Beyoncé sees the BeyHive’s real power
Part of my job working with Beyoncé was to help build her online fan club. Take an offline fan club, where people write her letters that would go without replies (as with most celebrities), and build it into an online fan club where these people could engage with each other through their fandom of Beyoncé.
However, we realized that the engagement on the platform we built was nowhere close to the engagement within the (wider) community. In the clubs of the BeyHive, these folks had their own language, their own vernacular, their own artifacts, and their own behaviors.
They weren’t just fans of Beyoncé. They saw the world the way Beyoncé did. Their belief system brought them together. The music was merely the cultural production that expressed the shared belief that was exchanged among them.
What that illuminated for me is that building a community is “I’m going to bring people and rally them around me and my ideas.” Facilitating community is about finding people who already believe what you believe and using your resources, effort, and social capital to help them connect so that they might collectively achieve the things they set out to achieve together.
While one may see that as wordplay, I think that (thinking) is foundationally, if not philosophically, different. When you facilitate a community, you find yourself in service of people. And the best marketing is always in service to help people get through their jobs to be done, whether it’s the functional job, the emotional job, the social job, or the alchemy of all three.
So, marketers should be looking for these communities that may already exist for their brand, their product, or whatever it may be. That requires the brand to be more than a maker of products or a provider of service-based products.
The idea is that these vessels of meaning that we call brands transcend the value proposition, the category in which they operate. Then, they preach the gospel to people who see the world similarly. And those people go, “Yes, totally, I always thought about it that way. Finally, someone said it.” Then, these people preach the gospel for you. They evangelize, creating network effects that bring people toward you.
B2B and B2C brands can do this. It’s just context. Brands are vessels of meaning, and brands that mean one thing when I’m shopping through the grocery store have the same mechanisms as brands that mean something when I’m in my cubicle trying to decide whether to buy this cloud computing system or that one. It all depends on what the brand means to me.
You know that saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM?” That’s because there was cultural credence and trust in IBM. Therefore, the cultural and social expectations are pushed upon that (buyer) so that even if they see a product that performs better than IBM, they are going to go with IBM because they’re likely to get (the purchase) through the system more easily. No one is going to get upset with them. The boss probably would pat them on the back. The buyer gets all the social capital from that, even though another product may be better.
Kamala Harris didn’t get a big network cultural effect
I think people look at Kamala Harris’ presidential campaign and say, “Well, her efforts were not effective enough because she didn’t win.” I say, “Well, no, not really.”
She preached the gospel. She started with what she believed, and people who saw the world similarly went, “That’s my candidate.”
The truth of the matter is that the country didn’t believe what she believed. Should she have said something she didn’t believe to win? Then people would say, “Well, that’s not authentic.”
It’s like brands that say they believe in something, and some people go, “Nah, I don’t choose you.” So, the brand goes, “We shouldn’t have said what we believed.” Well, no. The people who chose your brand (because of what you shared) are the ones to target.
In the game of politics, it’s a binary matter — one winner and one loser. In the marketplace, a brand could not be No.1 and still win. You could be No. 5 and profitable.
Also, in politics, it’s not enough to preach the gospel to the people who see the world the way you do. You have to create the mechanisms by which you ignite the network effects.
Perhaps Kamala didn’t have enough time for that to take hold because she only entered the race in July. She only got the first reverberation of the believers and didn’t get a chance to benefit from their ability to influence other people.
The momentum she catalyzed in a short time is unprecedented. She raised a billion dollars in donations. That is unreal. What she did was a Herculean effort. Was her campaign perfect? No. But was it impactful? 1,000%.
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Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute