Conversation with Marcus Collins — The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be

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1:06Episode 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 f***ers are up to something. Go! Go! Go!

1:35Welcome to the 265th episode of the Prop G Pod. We're still on vacation. That'll be ending soon. I know. You missed me. You missed 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.

2:09And 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. And 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.

2:48But 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, why? 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.

3:29That'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.

4:01And 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 just about everything associated with social life.

4:51Yeah, it's what struck me when I think about culture. I don't know if you think of it this way, but I think, okay, chances are if you're born in a certain age or a certain period in a certain place, I would say if I was a male born in 1920, I would have been a Nazi. I mean, we'd all like to think that we'd have the wisdom to go, this 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.

5:21A, 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? If I identify as a Christian, I hold a set of ideologies and beliefs, truths that I hold about the world. 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.

5:56Symbols mean certain things. 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 brand 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.

6:35Exogenous 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?

7:11Well, in some cases, it's been good. And of course, with all things, there's some bad there. I think about technology, particularly social networking platforms, sort of like Marshall McLuhan would say, The technology merely extends human behavior, right? 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.

7:54And 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.

8:31So 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.

9:12and 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. How do you, where do you think the intersection between culture and kind of shareholder value is happening or not happening?

9:52Sure. 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. And 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.

10:35And 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. Industrial Revolution happens as well. Companies start 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.

11:07The 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 as 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.

11:44So 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, that we are where we pay attention. We're paying attention to our phones now more time than we're doing anything else during our waking hours. especially young people. And the thing that strikes me is that it's just become so, polarized is the wrong word, on the far left, arguably a refusal to face adult realities, too much virtue signaling, too much pride in presenting yourself as a victim, a lot of identity politics.

12:21And 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 and 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?

13:02I 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 want to maintain their identity and find a new encapsulation within the right.

13:51I'm a moderate Republican or I'm a conservative Democrat. 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. You 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.

14:34And 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.

15:15to take pause and reflect on our relationship with loss, nature, and the need to belong. And maybe that's the modern journey, not domination or conquest, but learning how to live with change, grief, and tenderness without losing our sense of purpose. Train Dreams captures the tension between progress and preservation, between the machines that build our world and the nature that still defines it. In a time when we're all searching for purpose, Train Dreams feels timeless because the frontier isn't just a place, it's a state of being. Train Dreams, now playing only on Netflix.

16:12holidays. Switch to T-Mobile in just 15 minutes from your phone. Check out in 15 minutes or less per line. T-Mobile is the best mobile network in the U.S. based on analysis by Google Speedtest Intelligence Data 1H 2025. I want to talk a little bit about your industry. You're the head of strategy for Whedon 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, and 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 Nigel Bogle from BBH.

16:44The 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, 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 or just generally in the business world. Google and Meta lose the value of the entire ad industry in a trading day.

17:28What 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, art and copy to get people's attention, in a world where there is tons of things grabbing at our attention in an attention-based economy, that becomes a commodity. 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.

18:18Advertising, as you know, is just one lever that we pull in the four Ps, if you think of it that way. But there are other ways that marketing communicators can add value to the value chain that requires us moving beyond making beautiful Faberge eggs that get people's attention. I 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 much more important to the shareholders, much more important to the C-suite that are making decisions on behalf of the company.

19:09Would 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, you know, how do I get into the ad world? It's like, well, that's just one option.

19:43There 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.

20:22And that's because we mistake information for intimacy. And those old marketers of the day, those outward advertisers of the day, the Lee Klaus of the world, the Dan Wyden's 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 Weiden Kennedy. It's actually Weiden Kennedy? Yeah, but it's okay.

20:55If you were German, it'd be V-ed, 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? I think that there is, there are a lot of veneer 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.

21:33There 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 appealing. 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. And that's problematic.

22:10Last 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. Each one of us operate by different meaning frames based on our cultural subscription. For some, a cow is leather. For others, it's a 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.

22:51So 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. And 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?

23:27You 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 crazy, right? Those people don't know nothing.

24:02Those people are insane. Well, they're not 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 Wyden 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.

24:35He joins us from Austin, but lives in Ann Arbor. Dr. Collins, Professor Collins, appreciate your time. Thank you so much, Scott. Appreciate it.

24:50This episode was produced by Caroline Chabron. Jennifer Sanchez is our associate producer and Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G Pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network. We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn, and on Monday with our weekly market show.