Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
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, former strategy director at Wieden+Kennedy New York and clinical assistant professor of marketing at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.
Our conversation about the role of culture in marketing covered more than we could fit into 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 almost everything we do as humans. And this is important for marketers because your job is to influence behavior, and there is no external force that influences human behavior more than culture.
When you launch something – a new campaign, a new product – it is negotiated and constructed based on the discourse that takes place. Suppose you launched a new brand of carrots when an E. coli outbreak affected carrots. They are negatively influenced by what is happening in the cultural zeitgeist.
Influencing and influencing culture means contributing to the discourse in a meaningful way. My friend Eric Hultgren says culture is like a car:
- You can ride it: They introduce new ideas or new conventions.
- You can ride the shotgun: They accept existing conventions.
- You can vacuum the tailpipe: You simply follow everything that happens, without a point of view and without a clear conviction.
The brands that lead the culture contribute new artifacts, new language and new behavior through their works. They are the brands most likely to win.
Does authenticity have anything to do with culture?
Scholar Eric David Brown Jr. talks about how authenticity comes from being your truest self, regardless of context. The same applies to brands too. Brands are authentic when they are the same, regardless of who they work with or where you find them. They are given a level of credibility that helps them engage meaningfully in the culture.
If it is known that one is inauthentic, it would be extremely difficult, one might even say impossible, to sustainably engage in and contribute to culture.
Bud Light taps into culture
In the late 1990s, Budweiser discovered a cultural product in the form of a short film by Charles Stone III, a music video producer who wanted to go to Hollywood. Charles and his friends made a (three minute) film called True. The dialogue consisted mostly of “Wassup?” – This way they communicated without having to say any other words.
The CEO of DDB, Budweiser's advertising agency, saw the short film and said, “That's exactly what we're trying to capture with this brand.” So Budweiser hired Charles Stone to rework his short film into an advertisement for Budweiser. People who saw themselves in this short film – in this cultural work – started using the “Wassup?” Language to talk to each other. This cultural lexicon became a means of expressing closeness. It is a receipt of friendship.
This is how Budweiser identified the language used by this group. It wasn't new, but the brand participated in this lexicon through these cultural figures in order to benefit from the equity associated with it. And Budweiser said “Wassup?” all the way to the bank. And so it was with Charles Stone, who found his way to Hollywood to make films.
Anyone associated with the “Wassup?” The campaign won not because of any changes to the product, but because of the brand's ability to be close to the culture.
Beyoncé recognizes the true power of the BeyHive
Part of my work with Beyoncé was helping build her online fan club. Take an offline fan club where people write her letters that would go unanswered (like most celebrities), and turn it into an online fan club where those people connect with each other through their Beyoncé fan base can.
However, we found that the engagement on the platform we built was nowhere near the engagement within the (larger) community. In the clubs of the BeyHive, these people had their own language, their own slang, their own artifacts, and their own behavior.
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 common beliefs exchanged between them.
For me, this showed that building community is about “bringing people together and winning them over to me and my ideas.” Fostering 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 together they can achieve the things they want to do together.
While you might think of that as a play on words, I think (thinking) is fundamentally, if not philosophically, different. When you support a community, you are serving the people. And the best marketing is always about helping people complete their tasks, be it the functional task, the emotional task, the social task, or the alchemy of all three.
Therefore, marketers should look for these communities that may already exist for their brand, product, or whatever. This requires the brand to be more than just a manufacturer of products or a provider of service-based products.
The idea is that these vessels of meaning that we call brands go beyond the value proposition, the category in which they operate. Then they preach the gospel to people who see the world like them. And these people say, “Yeah, absolutely, I've always thought about it that way. Finally someone said it.” Then these people preach the gospel for you. You evangelize and create network effects that bring people to you.
B2B and B2C brands can do this. It's just the context. Brands are vessels of meaning, and brands that have a certain meaning when I'm shopping at the supermarket have the same mechanisms as brands that have a certain meaning when I'm sitting in my cubicle contemplating whether to buy this or that cloud -Computing system should buy. It all depends on what the brand means to me.
You know the saying, “No one ever got fired for hiring IBM?” That’s because there was cultural credibility and trust in IBM. Therefore, cultural and societal expectations are pushed on him (buyer) so that even if he sees a product that performs better than IBM, he will choose IBM because he is likely to get more (purchase) through the system easily . Nobody will be upset with them. The boss would probably pat them on the back. This gives the buyer all the social capital, even if another product may be better.
Kamala Harris didn’t have much of a cultural network effect
I think people look at Kamala Harris' presidential campaign and say, “Well, her efforts weren't 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 said, “That’s my candidate.”
The truth is that the country didn't believe what it believed. Should she have said something she didn't think would win? Then people would say, “That’s not authentic.”
It's like when brands say they believe in something and some people say, “Nah, I'm not voting for you.” So the brand says, “We shouldn't have said what we believed.” Well, no . The target audience is the people who chose your brand (based on what you shared).
In the political game, it is a binary affair – a winner and a loser. In the market, a brand cannot be number 1 and still win. You could be number 5 and profitable.
Even in politics, it is not enough to preach the gospel to people who see the world the way you do. You need to create the mechanisms to ignite the network effects.
Maybe Kamala didn't have enough time for it because she didn't enter the race until July. She received only the initial appeal of believers and had no chance to benefit from their ability to influence other people.
The momentum it catalyzed in a short period of time is unprecedented. She raised a billion dollars in donations. This is unreal. What she did was a herculean effort. Was your campaign perfect? No. But was it effective? 1,000%.
Want more content marketing tips, insights, and examples? Subscribe to CMI weekday or weekly emails.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
Create your very own Auto Publish News/Blog Site and Earn Passive Income in Just 4 Easy Steps
