The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Conversation with Marcus Collins — The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be
Episode Date: August 31, 2023Marcus Collins, the head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York and a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, joins Scott to discuss his new book, “FOR THE CULTURE: ...The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.” Follow Marcus on Twitter (X), @marctothec. P.S. Scott is on holiday, so we’ll be back with our business analysis and Algebra of Happiness in September! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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Episode 265.
265 is the country code belonging to malawi in 1965 the medicare program was established
and the f-word was used on television for the first time don't judge a person for drinking
and swearing judge the quiet sober ones those are up to something. Go, go, go!
Welcome to the 265th episode of the Prop G Pod.
We're still on vacation.
That'll be ending soon.
I know, you miss me.
You miss me.
I'm coming home.
I'm coming home.
I've taken off.
I'm trying to come up with a roaming dog metaphor.
Several dogs in the area are pregnant.
They tried to capture me.
True story.
When I was about 15, my closest friend, Adam Markman, he had a German short-haired pointer.
We couldn't have dogs.
It was just me and my mom.
We didn't have the capacity for a dog.
But anyways, Adam had dogs.
And at first, he had a German short-haired pointer.
Sweet dog, way too hyper.
Difficult dog to have in the city.
And then he had a series of Mastiffs.
And one of his Mastiffs, Bruno's, by the way, Mastiffs are wonderful dogs, got lost or just took off.
And we literally drove around for a couple hours and went down.
We went down to Culver City even.
And we kept asking people if they'd seen Bruno, a large Mastiff.
And we started to zero in.
This is before GPS. This is beforeiff. And we started to zero in. This is before GPS,
this is before anything. And this dog would stand out. And we found some people literally in West LA down by, I think, Pico and Culver that had seen Bruno. And just talking to people on the street,
we zeroed in on Bruno. And oh my God, you have never seen a 220-pound dog jump into a car so
fast to get back to its cushy life in Westwood. Anyways, that has almost
nothing to do with what we're talking about here. For our final conversation in August,
we're sharing our interview with Marcus Collins, the head of strategy at Whedon Kennedy, New York.
Whedon Wine. I never know. I never know. By the way, I have recently met, no joke, the former
CEO of Whedon Kennedy and the current CEO, and they're both super impressive people, as is Marcus.
That firm continues to hire or attract pretty interesting talent. Marcus is also a clinical
assistant professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.
Professor Collins is one of the highest-rated professors at my higher ed startup section
and an inductee into the American Advertising Federation's Advertising Hall of Fame.
That's kind of a weak flex, Professor Collins.
Anyways, we discuss with Marcus insights from his new book, For the Culture, the power behind
what we buy, what we do, and who we want to be.
Marcus, where does this podcast find you?
I'm in Austin, Texas at the moment, though I live in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Let's bust right into it.
In your new book, For the Culture, you explore how culture influences behavior. Let's start there.
How do you define culture and what is the role it plays in our lives as consumers?
Yeah, culture is one of those words that we often use but seldomly have a really good
understanding of. And I think about culture through a Durkheimian lens. Emile Durkheim,
one of the founding fathers of sociology, who talks about culture as this system of
conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and what are expected of people like us.
Since we self-identify by these communities, these cultural givings, we end up adhering to the expectations of what people like us do. So the beliefs that we hold, the artifacts that we don, the behaviors that are normative,
the language that we use, we adopt these things not because of what they are, but because of who
we are, which in turn has an impact on our consumption, the social affiliations that we're
part of, how we vote, how we recycle, how we worship, if we worship, where we bury the dead,
if we bury the dead, who we marry, where we go to school, and is wrong. I'm not, you know, there's obviously a lot of controversy and a lot of conversation around our founding fathers being slave owners.
But I don't think people really appreciate how much you are a product of your context and your culture.
So let's start there.
A, I'm going to assume you agree with that.
But B, what are the drivers of culture and what have been the most significant changes in American
culture and what have been the drivers of that?
So we think about culture as a system of systems.
It starts with our identity.
How do we self-identify, right?
If I identify as a Christian, I hold a set of ideologies and beliefs, truths that I hold
about the world, right?
I believe Jesus Christ is the son of God.
And therefore, the stories I tell myself about the
world is through that lens. And because I identify as such, and I hold those beliefs, I therefore
dress a certain way. Symbols mean certain things, right? If you're Catholic, maybe you use a rosary,
the crucifix means something. I behave a certain way. There are behaviors that are normative for
people like me. And then there's language that I use, right? So because of who I am, I see the world a certain way. I share a way of life with people like myself. And then I express
who I am through cultural product, right? The literature that I read, the music that I listen
to, the movies that I watch, and the brands and branded products that I consume. So our
cultural practice is governed by these mechanisms. Now, what changes have happened
in American culture, to your point, they're always changing. Exogenous shocks to the system take
place, and then we discuss it. Is this okay? Do people like us do something like this? And it's
through this discourse that we decide what's acceptable behavior for us. And considering
there's so many shocks to the system, especially as
technology continues to evolve, we learn more, we see more at a faster rate, and therefore we see a
faster change in at least fast culture, the things that are manifested, while our anchored beliefs
sort of change slowly over time. Talk a little bit about what do you think have been the biggest
impacts of social media on
our culture? Well, in some cases it's been good. And of course, with all things there, there's,
there's some bad there. I think about technology, particularly social networking platforms,
sort of like Marshall McLuhan would say, that technology merely extends human behavior,
like feet are extensions of the, wheels are extensions of the foot,
glasses, extensions of the eyes,
clothes, extension of the skin.
And I would say in that case,
social networking platforms
are extensions of our real life
social networking, our social networks.
On the other end though, of course,
it exacerbates a lot of things
that are terrible about social experiences.
Spreading misinformation,
creating these clusters of people who share hate. And just as one thing could be positive,
the other thing creates these negative situations. And we have to navigate that as a society when
it comes to technology available to us. In your book, you introduce concepts from
social psychology,
specifically tribes. Can you walk us through this concept and what its implications are for culture?
Sure. We are, as a human species, we are social by nature. As Aristotle says,
we are social animals by nature. So everything about us is meant to connect. Evolutionary
anthropologists would argue that that's how we're able to evolve is our ability to socialize.
So since we are bound by connection, we're trying to find people who are like ourselves.
And at the explosion of the Industrial Revolution, people left their tribes, their communities, their villages, and went to the major cities to find work.
And when they came to these major metropolises, they bumped into
people who operated by different cultural characteristics, different meaning frames.
And they were introduced to new ideas, new perspectives, new ways of life. They began
to adopt them. And as such, we started to create new identities and find new people,
new tribes, new communities. So by and large, we're given to be
in these network communities.
And technology, as we mentioned earlier,
become ways by which we facilitate that.
And within these communities,
the cultural characteristics govern
what people like us ought to do.
And to remain good standing members in these communities,
we adhere to them.
And we abide by these conventions and expectations in an effort
to promote social solidarity among ourselves. And the brands, politicians, activists, clergy,
managers, and leaders who better understand that or best understand that are able to leverage
these mechanisms to get people to adopt behavior. Where do you think the intersection between culture and kind of shareholder value is happening
or not happening?
Sure.
I think that there is no external force to human behavior more powerful than culture,
full stop.
So from an economic perspective, culture becomes a cheat code.
It becomes a massive weapon in our ability to compete in the marketplace. I think about early, early years,
for centuries, the global GDP was practically zero. It was like nothing because people weren't
engaging in exchange, in commerce. And if it was, it was utilitarian focused and it was very,
very minimal. Of course, until 16th century, Queen Elizabeth says, I'm going to use consumption
as a means of aggrandizement, where royalty will have a lot, the people closest to them, nobility will have a little bit more,
and peasants will have nothing. And the idea there is that peasants will look up at nobility
and royalty and say, I want to be that. And consumption began to expand in the 18th century.
Dutch Revolution happens as well. Company starts making a little bit more money,
paying their employees more money, and they went and spent more money. So companies made more money.
You had this cycle of consumption happening, not because of what things were, but because who
people are and what they wanted to be. That is, consumption was primarily driven by these social
and psychological impulses to help signal where I am on the social hierarchy. The same thing is today that we use
brands, the most powerful brands, not because of their utilitarian value as much as their social
value. What do they say about me? How they signal to the world who I am. And those powerful brands
are used as identity marks, as receipts of identity. And the companies who have fiduciary
responsibilities to their shareholders, when they start to build these vessels of meaning that we call brand that encapsulate
the cultural characteristics of a given group of people that abide by a cultural convention or
cultural system, they create great opportunities for brands to grow in massive ways.
So I'll put forward a couple of theses, and I'm just curious to get your thoughts, pushback,
validation. When I think about our culture, American culture, over the last 20 or 30 years, I think technology has had the biggest influence. We are where we pay attention a refusal to face adult realities, too much virtue signaling, too much pride and presenting yourself as a victim, a lot of identity politics.
And then on the right, it's just this culture of cruelty, this culture of finding a vulnerable group and weaponizing them. And it seems like things have gotten, our discourse has become so coarse. And it feels as if literally the fabric of America is being torn apart at the hands of social, that our culture has become a series of microcultures. And the only thing we share is that we hate each other,
that people are more distrusting of people in the other political party than they are
of China or Russian troops pouring over the border. One, do you agree with that?
And two, do you see it getting worse, getting better?
I think there's great polarization for sure. I mean, if you think about like the left side and the right side, the right side, to your point, a culture of cruelty, what it is, they're actually built a culture of inclusivity and exclusivity, kind of borrowing from Edward Bernays' propaganda theory, that you can unite a people by declaring an enemy of the state. And doing so, they have been able to encapsulate power and encapsulate people who abide
by the cultural characteristics
of what it means to be right-wing.
And as a result, we feel more like in-groups and out-groups.
And what happens is as the right
gets further more to the right,
and people say, that's too far for me,
they wanna maintain their identity
and find a new encapsulation within the right. I'm a moderate Republican or I'm a conservative
Democrat. And we find these new sort of labels to affix ourselves so that we're not mislabeled or
mischaracterized. But I do agree that while the polarization is happening, I think the technology and the way it's going might be able to facilitate more community.
Think about things like Web3, Discord, for instance.
They're about decentralizing the network to find people who are more like yourselves.
And while that may seem like, oh, that's exclusive, that's sort of kind of how we
were meant to be. We're meant to be in these collectives of people like us. And while we might
find our people in a very, you know, homophilic way, I think we also should be thinking about
how do we exist in a broader context. We'll be right back. for. And to help us out, we are joined by Kylie Robeson, the senior AI reporter for The Verge,
to give you a primer on how to integrate AI into your life. So tune into AI Basics,
How and When to Use AI, a special series from Pivot sponsored by AWS, wherever you get your podcasts.
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I want to talk a little bit about your industry. You're the head of strategy for Wheaton Kennedy.
And I can't get over, or it's shocking to me, I was in your world. My first company I started when I was 26 called Profit Brand Strategy, focusing on brand. I used to work a lot with
ad agencies, including yours. And I would go into boardrooms and they would have
Lee Clow, or they would have Lee Clow or they
would have Nigel Bogle from BBH. The ad men, Don Draper, they were the masters of the universe.
I haven't seen an ad guy or an ad gal in a boardroom in 20 years. It just feels as if the
industry is just shrinking its way to oblivion, that no one really cares what the ad people have to say. One, do you agree with
that? And two, you know, what's happened? Is it just that the oxygen's been sucked out of the
room by Google and Meta? But it's hard for me to identify a part of our economy that has lost
so much relevance in terms of its impact on culture and on, or just generally in the business world,
you know, Google and meta lose the value of the entire ad industry in like a trading day.
What happened?
I think it goes back to your point about the biggest disruption in culture being technology,
that when advertising is defined as marketing communications, right? Art and copy to get people's attention.
In a world where there is tons of things grabbing at our attention and attention-based economy, that becomes a commodity, right?
If your job is to create art and copy, then you've got things like AI today that can create art and copy just as good as the mediocre average agencies. So it starts to
pull all the value out of that offering as an industry. I think that what it means for us as
an industry is moving beyond the art and copy and think about how do we get people to move,
which really is what marketing is all about. Advertising, as you know, is just one lever
that we pull in the four Ps, if you think of it
that way, right? But there are other ways that marketing communicators can add value to the
value chain that requires us moving beyond making beautiful Fabergé eggs that get people's attention
and think more so how do we design for behavioral adoption, which is one of the reasons why I wrote
the book is that if we can understand the underlying physics that govern human behavior, then we can leverage those things
to inform how we put things in the world across all the media surfaces, be it television print,
out of home, and every other sort of communicative object at our disposal, then we can get people to
adopt behavior in a meaningful way that it becomes much
more important to the shareholders, much more important to the C-suite that are making decisions
on behalf of the company. Would you advise a young person to go into the agency world right now?
It depends on what they want to do. I would tell them that if you want to make ads,
go into advertising. If you want to move people, then you need to be very,
very careful about which agencies you go to and think about all the options at your disposal.
I work at the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business, and I hear students say,
I'm really interested in marketing. I love the creative process. I love putting things in the
world. And I go, cool. And they say, how do I get into the ad world? It's like, well, that's just
one option. There are many, many, many options because there are
many, many ways by which you can quote unquote advertise. The idea is to transcend the creation
of communicative objects and think about how do we create stimuli? How do we create these
catastrophes that get people to move? And that requires having a much greater proximity to people.
And I would actually argue that's probably one of the most paradoxical things of technology,
that we have more data than ever before, reams and reams and reams and reams and reams and reams of
data that we've aggregated at an exponential rate. However, our ability to extract insight
from said data has only grown marginally.
And that's because we mistake information for intimacy.
And those old marketers of the day, those old advertisers of the day, the Lee Clowes of the world, the Dan Wydens of the world, those guys spend a lot of time investing themselves
in the cultural contexts of the consumer, of the audience.
And they're able to create things that weren't just communicating the value propositions
of a product, but they were actually cultural productions that people
would use to express their identity, i.e. 1984 for Apple or just do it for Nike.
I said Weedon Kennedy. It's actually Weiden Kennedy?
Yeah, but it's okay.
You think I'd-
If you were German, it'd be Weedon, so it's all good.
You think I'd get that shit right. So you're a young man, but you've been in the industry about, what, about 15 years?
About 20 years.
20 years. So as a person of color, do you think the industry has gotten better, worse, or the same for people of color? in that the numbers don't look great for us. If they've grown, they've grown marginally.
But if you look at the leadership within our industry,
we are quite anemic.
We aren't there.
There aren't very many people
who are chief strategy officers at agencies.
There aren't very many chief creative officers.
There aren't very many presidents and CEOs
that are people of color,
which to me, I think is concerning because
we leverage so much of the predominant black cultural product to make our brands cool,
to make them interesting, to make them appeal to quote unquote, the younger consumer.
And though we use the capital, the cultural capital of people of color, we don't put them
in places where they're making
decisions or they're benefiting from the financial windfall of the production that comes from people
who look like me. I think that's problematic. Last question, you have a magic wand. What would
you change about our culture in America? I would pray and wish that we could just be much more empathetic. I think it ultimately starts with
realizing that your worldview is not objective. In fact, there is no objective worldview. Like
each one of us operate by different meaning frames based on our cultural subscription, right? For
some, a cow is leather, for others is deity, and for some it's dinner. But which one is it? Well,
it's all of them based on how we see the world, based on the ideologies and the beliefs that we hold.
Therefore, the way you see the world may seem true to you, but your truth isn't Scott's truth.
So when I bump into Scott and I bump into you, it's not about me affixing my worldview onto you.
It's me understanding how you see the world. And even if I don't agree, I can say, I get it.
So long as your worldview doesn't mean my oppression, all good. But that requires
tremendous empathy and that we just don't have a lot of. I think that if we had a little bit
more of that, I think we'd see a lot less marginalization of people. And I think that
we would probably see, we would just be in a much more civil world than we're in.
So just taking that down one level, how do you encourage and create more empathy in a
culture? You got to walk in shoes that aren't your own and see through lenses that aren't your own.
And you got to get outside of our bubble. And our bubble, back to technology, technology does a
great job of fortifying the walls that is our echo chamber. And we live in echo chambers. We just do, right? If you are a liberal, you do not have staunch Republican friends. You just don't. You just don't have them, right? But it's not until we have discourse conversations with people who aren't from our world that we start to see how they see the world. Otherwise, we go, those people are crazy, right? Those people don't know nothing. Those people are insane. Well, they're not. They're
just operating by a different meaning system. And if we understand that, then we'll do a better job
of being a little bit more human. Dr. Marcus Collins serves as the head of strategy at
Wieden Kennedy, New York, and is a clinical assistant professor of marketing at the Ross
School of Business at the University of Michigan. Marcus is also a recipient of Advertising Age's 40 Under 40 Award, an inductee into the American Advertising Federation
Advertising's Hall of Achievement, and the author of the new book, For the Culture, The Power Behind
What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. He joins us from Austin, but lives in Ann Arbor.
Dr. Collins, Professor Collins, appreciate your time.
Thank you so much, Scott. Appreciate it.
This episode was produced by Caroline Shaven. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer,
and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropGPod from
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