Marcus Collins and the Cult of Culture

[MUSIC PLAYING] College of Brand. Welcome to the Cult of Brand, the podcaster. We unravel the mysteries of brand marketing in the holy creative doctrine. We are your conduits. You are our following. And our guests are divine truth tellers, offering us their wisdom on the worship of their chosen idol. I am Melissa Banana. I am Walmart. This week, we have the sacred honor of speaking to Dr. Marcus Collins. Dr. Collins is a clinical professor at the Ross School Business University of Michigan. He's also the author of the best selling book for the culture. Prior to that, I had met him when he was a chief strategy officer at Widenkending, New York, doing great work with brands such as Nike and McDonald's. And before his time there, he worked at translation and many other agencies, collaborating with artists, he'd just be out there. Hey, Marcus. Hi, Marcus. Hey, man, I have a so kind of you. We have to make sure, we've got to do our due diligence. You have a lot of credits and credits. We want to make sure we're hitting the key beats for those listening. There are many more. So you can find those if you want. They're all on his LinkedIn. They're on his website. So I mean, I guess we can kind of dive right in. And unfortunately, we were two pretty big nerds of the book. So we're going to get kind of in the nitty-gritty. And if you think we get ahead of ourselves at any point, feel free to reel us back in and explain kind of the inception of the idea. But in your book, you cite John Branch's definition of culture as the program for everyday living. And I really loved that. But I couldn't help it coming back to the thought of are we all in the same program? Are we on the Dr. Marcus Collins program? What program would you say we're all abiding by? Yeah, well, we all abide by a specific program that is a translation of how we see the world. Very much culture is anchored in our identity and the believes that we hold, right? The collective acceptance of what is true among people like myself. And if I abide by a certain ideological representation of the world, then there is a set program for people like us. But if you abide by a different program, then I would probably think that you're crazy, just like you would for me. So these operating systems, they're not only sort of the code by which we navigate the world. It makes sense of the world. They also become away by which we identify who's one of us and who isn't. It's interesting because I like that us-- you're going us first them out the gate, which is great. I mean, this is obviously a podcast about culture. But generally, when you think of culture as a whole, you don't necessarily think of there being dual link cultures. Do you see there being many active cultures at one time? Oh, 1,000%. Many, many cultures. In fact, even us as individuals, we are negotiating many cultures in ourselves. Like if culture is anchored in identity, our identity is made up of many hyphens. We call it intersectionality. There are individual reference. I'm a professor. That's one way by which I self-identify their group references. Like I'm a fraternity. That's one way by which I self-identify. I'm a father of two little girls. That's an abstract reference, one way by which I self-identify. And each one of those reference have their own set of conventions and expectations. Their own programming for everyday living for each one of them. And in some cases, they work together. In other cases, they may be in conflict. And as a social animal as a cultural actor, I am negotiating when and what I do with who. So by its very nature, there becomes this bit of in-group out-group. I can define myself by defining what I'm not. And culture becomes a way by which I not only identify the moniker by which I subscribe my personhood, but also it becomes sort of a criteria for belonging among these people who are like myself. God it. OK, I mean, so out of curiosity, then, for you, how significant are artifacts and language in creating that culture? Oh, man, they are the outward expression of inward beliefs. It's the only way that we know at a glance that you're one of us, that you're like me. And they become ways by which we make our culture material. Be the things that we wear, the behaviors that are normative for people like us in the language that we use. And these things move beyond just religion-- at least religions, we think about them in a theological sense, but also in our consumption that we consume religiously because of our commitment to it. So what-- I mean, what connection do you see or replacement? In the book, you talk pretty openly about being someone that wears Nike versus a data. Do you think that there has been a massive substitution in modern culture for brands of a religion? I don't know if there is a-- if a one for one substitution, but I certainly think that we are operating by the same mechanisms, the same cultural drivers that inform our religious affiliations. They have form consumption as well, because culture is-- it's not context dependent or context specific. Culture is culture. So I think it's no surprise that the same way by which we engage with religion, we would apply those same sort of convention expectations to consumption because they are operating by the same sort of underlying physics, if you will. That's what religion is by definition. It means to bind or to commit to. So we say things like, I do it religiously. It means you are committed to it. But the same thing happens when it comes to our consumption. If you are a sneakerhead, you have to have a certain kind of sneakers. You have to abide by a certain behavior. You have to speak in a way that is reflective of being a sneakerhead in the same things that bind us to our theological connections if we have them at all. The same thing happens on the consumption side. Do you think in the decline of religion across Western societies we've seen the rise of brand and brand worship? I think we've seen the rise of new branded concentrations. So by that, I mean, concentration is about making something holy, like lifting something up, which is what we would do with a spiritual deity. We would consecrate it and lieu of having a deity that we sort of raise up to some totem status. Instead, we concentrate things. We consecrate artists, people. We have lifted these things up in such a way that they transcend a category. And they mean something beyond what we see. I mean, right about this in the book, as you know, is there's no surprise to this when we see religious services called the Beyonce Mass. Now, she's not the deity that they're worshiping, but they worship through the lens of women's empowerment, which is what Beyonce represents. So when people are like, hey, I'm spiritual. I'm spiritual. That is, I believe that there's something higher than me. But my practice is not bound by an institution. But instead, I consecrate other things that help me sort of create space between what is temporal and what is celestial. Let me see if I can get this to work. So the idea, you know, running digital strategy for Beyonce, this is in 2009, 2010. So you got Facebook is popping. Twitter is a thing. Remember those days? I thought this is going to be easy as pie, man. Like, you know, Beyonce is one of the biggest artists on the planet, moving her fan club offline to online, seemed like it's going to be pretty straightforward, right? You just set it up. You just say, hey, the party's over here, come through. And the focus was on getting fans to join all these online temples, these online destinations that we created. And there was so much hubris in this. And the team was referring to her collection of fans as the Beyoncé rush. And at the time, like, you know, Beyoncé, I mean, I once was a big show. I get it. I get it. It was like a play on words. Like, back in the day, you know, well, like, I'm hanging out with my aunt. Oh, I see the deck, man. I see the deck. I know the pitch. Yeah. Exactly. So you're absolutely getting it. 100%. We were actually kind of proud of ourselves. And we launched this thing. And man, it was a party no one showed up to relative to her stardom, like relative to who she was. You expect this thing to just be kaboom massive? Man, it was like dribs and drops. It just wasn't anything sort of significant, you know? And the team was like freaking out. Like, what is going on here? So they started to kind of pursue, you know, try to sort of look across the social web to see what was happening, right? People were talking about. And they bumped into this small community that called themselves the beehive, right? And they weren't just fans of Beyonce. They believe what Beyonce believes, right? Beyonce has always stood for Women's Empowerment. Where was this team hiding? Like a little small blog. It was like a little small community. Yeah, it's like a little community of people. And they had their own name. They called themselves the beehive. They had their own language. That they had created. They had their own artifacts. And they believed what Beyonce believed. The team was like, yo, let's just cut bail on this beyond tarage nonsense. And like, let's partner with them to make the beehive the official fan club. And that's what you got. It's a switch from fans to believers, which I think you speak a lot about. Exactly. And that's the thing is that there's just two things. One, to your point, spot on, we all that. We weren't, we were focused on fans. And that's a very kind of transactional thing, right? But we talked about believers. Oh man, now you are, now you are transcending. Sort of just being a musician or just being an artist. The people believe in how you see the world. And then they follow you because of the shared belief, because of the congruence between how they make meaning on the world and how you make meaning on the world. And for Beyonce, at that point, her music becomes less of a thing is about entertainment. But they become cultural production. They become expressions of shared beliefs, shared ideologies, shared way of seeing the world. And the second thing I learned was that you don't build communities, you facilitate it. That is, you don't go out and say, I'm going to put a community together, people, and then I'm going to kind of convince them. So you know, you preach the gospel. And they go finally, someone said it. And there are people out there who believe what you believe. Your job now is just to connect the dots, to your resources to bring them together. And then you facilitate the community. You groom the community. And you help them do the things that they want to do by removing the points of friction that keep them from doing that. And if you look at everything that Beyonce has done with the B-Hive, certainly Taylor Swift and Swifties, good night. Oh, man. Those aren't fans. They are community members who believe. And Taylor Swift just preaches the gospel. No, 100% man. I think the thing that always kills me in like agency corporate life is like, our brand is going to create culture. Our brand's going to be the one creating at the center of culture. And I'm like, your brand can help enable it. Your brand can become a platform for culture to be shared, be a kid and discussed. But like the arrogance to always think that like our brand is going to be culture, I don't know, kills me, man. Have you seen any failures of brands trying to almost corral in a certain way? We've had a few encounters where brands have said, we have this existing fan base, but we might not necessarily like the behavior that's active there. Can we reshape? And we've found that there's almost never works. But I'd be curious in your frame of reference if anything like that has ever occurred. - Off the top of my head, I was kind of hard because I think that there's baggage that comes along with it. If you're already moving in direction, and people associate certain thing to you, it's hard for you to sort of detach from that meaning. And while you may not want to mean that, that's still how people see you. Like, you know, good example, this is like a Papa John's, right? - Yes. - The owner of Papa John's goes on this like, race is tyrant that they caught him on a hot microphone. And then, you know, Shaq comes in and he buys some shares and he's like, you know, part owner. And he's like, I'm a turn this thing around. It's like, Shaq, we love you, man. But come on, fam. - It's too far gone at this point. People already have that association. It's too difficult to kind of reel that back in. And that's actually, is there a path forward for brands that are experiencing that kind of backlash? Or is it, is it brand death to have something like that happen? - I think that the American culture is that we love a good comeback story, right? So there's always opportunity, right? There's, we're optimistic in nature. It's just kind of the ethos of the country that like, you know, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps and, you know, all the lore that we have. And I think that when brands, be it an artist, be it a consumer package good, or whatever it can say be, when they rise up to a certain standard, and then the floor drops from under them, this kind of a part of us is like, come on, let's see what you could do. Let's see, pull yourself back up. - Let's see if you got it. Come on, fight the good fight. - And when they do, we're like, yeah, I mean like, Ruben LeBron James is like the most hated athlete on the planet after the decision where he chose to take his, his talents to Miami. And then fast forward a couple of years later, he's now the most beloved athlete. I mean, they're turnaround stories all day long, but that's a matter when we, when we shift our meanings about the brand, the person, the entity, the artist, et cetera. The challenging part is when they're already, to your question that there are already people who believe a certain thing and see you a certain way, and you go, I don't wanna be associated with y'all people. That's a hard thing to shake. - It's tricky. I mean, in the book, you referenced the caper network that Nike did, and I feel like there's only a few examples of brands that really drew a line in the sand and said, this is who we're for and this is who we're not for. So I mean, a question based on that would be tribes versus demographics. Does one of the other work better for marketing segmentation in your opinion? I feel like we both been in the room and people are like, we're for folks in this age, in this city, and this ethnicity, and I'm like, none of this is gonna work. It's completely the wrong way to be breaking this down. It's absolutely ridiculous. I mean, demographics are, they are very efficient, but terribly ineffective. They're an easy way to describe things, but they certainly don't depict what people are going to do. There's nice little boxes that we put people in because it's easy. And the thing is that it's easy for us to describe people by demography because if we go back to that, the point about culture being an operating system, that's because that's the hardware that we see. But we don't run on the hardware, we run on the software, and the software is the cultural subscription, the operating system, the beliefs and ideologies that govern who we are, generationalism. We say like Gen Z or Gen X or millennials. It's a 20 year age span, we're talking about here. You mean tell me everybody 35 to 55 are the same? 'Cause they're born in a time, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. But this is what we do all the time. And these things, they become this very shorthand for us to describe things, but they certainly don't give us any idea of predictability. What people are likely to do. So will to your point, if our job as marketers are to influence behavior, to get people to adopt behavior, then we should be defining people based on what is actually influencing their behavior in our demographics. It's not our age, race, gender, household income, geography, or education level. It's who we are and how we see the world, right? That's why for some a cow is leather, for others the deity and for some it's dinner. Which one is it? It's all those things depending on who you are and how you see the world. And even psychographics aren't as good as using tribes or cultural subscription as a way to identify people to segment them. You know what's saying? I think they're for I am. In this case is I am therefore I do. Because of who I am, I therefore do what I do. And as we said earlier, consumption, artifacts, behaviors, language, they become ways by which we make our culture and material, not because of what it is, but because of who we are. Demographics never get at who we are. Ever, they just don't represent us based on how we self-identifying how we see the world. So it can never be a predictor of what we're likely to do in the world, which makes it an inefficient, blunt, lazy instrument to describe people. - So we've spoken a lot about tools for marketers and for culture as a whole. But I do think that there's definitely a sub-sector of our audience that could use a little bit of a brush up on, you know, kind of understanding the difference between marketing as a whole and then brand. Could you articulate that distance for us and explain that? - So what is marketing, right? Marketing by definition, with 1455 extraditionary definition, is marketing is going to market. Not the market place, but the market, right? And the market is made up of people, right? No, things in the market, but really people. So marketing is going to the people. And why do we go to market? We go to market to get people to move, to buy, to download, to watch, to subscribe, to listen, to share, to vote, to take action, to recycle, right? Whatever the case may be, well, then what is brand? Well, brands are identifiable signifiers that conjure up thoughts and feelings in the hearts and minds of people, relative to a company of product, institution, organization, or entity. And because of those thoughts and feelings that we have about said product, person, institution, organization, or entity, we are more inclined to consume because of what it makes us feel and what it makes us think. Not because of what it is objectively, but because of who we are, and how we make meaning through our cultural lenses. - Exactly. - So therefore, like I would say, you cannot talk about brand. You cannot talk about brand with any level of intellectual rigor without talking about culture. Because culture is the means by which we make meaning or interpret the world. And brands are, by definition, vessels of meaning. They are identifiable signifiers. They hold meaning. And that meaning is mediated by our cultural subscription. - So I think even on the bit of brands holding meaning, what I found really fascinating was the notion of brand starting as brand mark. Way back when the brand cataloged basically Mark ownership. And then evolve into trust marks, love marks, and ultimately end with identity marks where we are today. And I feel like that's become identity marks are such a crucial part of culture. You might explain that like that transition and how brand has evolved. - The first brand to be trademark was by Josiah Wedgewood, 1700s, right? He made pottery. He'd bring his pottery to market. And he'd look as pottery, say, I've seen his other guy's pottery and this guy sucks. I don't want you to confuse my pottery with this pottery. Some put my name on it. And that essentially became the first incorporated brand, the first legalized trademark brand. And those were the vibes back in the day, right? Like iconography and labeling is how you did brand marketing. And that was the case about two and a half centuries. It's a 1950s where markers start to leverage psychology, start leveraging the behavioral sciences to understand how people cognize. So if not enough people to know that we own it, we want people to buy more. So we started studying how they think, how they process information. And out of that's how we got psychographics, for instance, value propositions, positioning statements, frequency, all these things that we use to play at the synapses of how we cognate such that people would be more inclined to consume. And the idea is that the more familiar people came with things, the more they trusted, the more they saw it, the more they trusted. There's a psychological phenomenon called the mere exposure effect that we tend to like things, the more that we're exposed to it. These are the psychological phenomenon, the dynamism that happens within us that marketers play to. So familiarity, like constant repetition, recency and familiarity is help drove people to like a thing, right? So much so that they saw it, they begin to trust it, right? As they're saying, no one's ever got fired for buying IBM, those are the vibes, right? We trust the thing. And that was about the 1950s. Then about three decades later, 1980s, Marker said, you know what? It's not enough people just to buy our stuff. Who are people to love the brand? Love us, right? So Marker's went from moving beyond transactions, it's like relationships, moving beyond telling facts about the value propositions to telling stories, right? And the idea here is that they moved from being noticed to being loved by telling these rich narratives where the brand basically played a character in the story and people fell in love with the character and air go, fell in love with the brand. And irrationally, they would consume over and over and over and over again because of the love they felt. And that was the case in the 80s. Fast forward to today, you know, the brands that we use now, they become ways by which we communicate our identity based on our beliefs, their identity projects, right? Their ways, but which we signify who we are based on what these brands mean. And considering the media that we use to project our identities, i.e., social networking platforms, things that normally were inconspicuous are now unbelievably conspicuous. You know, we use consumption as a way to make our culture and our identity material, right? And therefore, the brands that are expressions of our identity, the ones that are closest, most congruent in what it believes or what it means and who we are and what we want to mean in the hearts and minds of people, those things inform our consumption all the time, right? One scholar puts this way that culture influences a consumer social need which in turn is satisfied by the use and ownership of innovative products, right? We buy these things not because of what they are because of who we are such that these consumption as Ivan Ross refers to this as self congruence theory that we buy these things if they are in line with, enhances our some way fit well in the conception that we have of ourselves and the presentation thereof. And these marks today are identity marks. - Can you give me an example of what some identity marks are like supreme for skaters or a supreme for skaters mean back in the day, apple for sure, good night. I mean, I remember, I wrote about this in the book. I remember like being an early convert to apple and I bought it, I pod second generation. I'm on a train in New York city with white earbuds. I'm the only one to look down the train. See somebody else with white earbuds. Look at each other go, yeah, we know what's up. You know, you're one of us. These brands became ways of signifying that, right? They're identity markers. They become extensions of our identity so much so that you can have in your mind who they are and what they must be because of their adornment, because of the artifacts that they have used to consume and consecrate to become a cultural production. - I love even the notion of brand is character because then that does also imply that, you know, you're willing to have this character be a part of your own narrative, which is its own can of orange to unpack. But thinking about you personify brand really heavily in your book. And for example, you define taglines as an expression of the way brands see the world. And I love the notion of a brand seeing the world. I think oftentimes people get kind of brand intent or brand message really confused with tagline. Could you give maybe a good example of a tagline for a brand that you think perfectly encapsulates that brand belief? - So I'm a little biased, but you gotta go with Nike. I mean, is there a better one, right? And at one point, Apple think different was another one. But let's do some Nike because wide and vibes. You know, Nike believes that every human body is an athlete. That's the ideology. Big small short tall, we're all athletes. And the only thing keeping us from realizing our best athletic self is us. So what does Nike tell the world? Just do it. Like that is an outward expression of inward belief. And everything that's embodied in that terminology is a reflection of what the brand believes. And that brand's belief, it's so, it's so, it's so concrete, it's so tangible. Because then only do they express it in their language, but in everything the brand does, it exudes that. And you go, oh man, that brand just, it just got it. You know, just got it. It's tight. Yeah, it's tight. It's immersive. It's a world. I've been a part of so many of these where like brands will create these lofty promises or these ideas for a tagline or a platform and they usually fall short and don't connect. What are some reasons why brand platforms normally don't do that? Lauren Hill said it best. How are you going to win if you ain't right within? They don't know what they believe. They know what they do, but they don't know what they believe. They, they, we make razor blades. Great. You know, we make shampoo. Awesome. You know, great. Why do you do it? You know, in the words of Simon Sennick. I mean, they just don't know. I mean, and I say that not to be disparaging about brands. It's a hard undertaking. Like it's business school kids are taught. You come to school and your job is, you have a fiduciary responsibility to increase value for shareholders. That's your job. And we think about we, the role we think about going to market through exchanges. And this fluffy, touchy, feely culture stuff, what you're talking about? And our razor sharper battery lasts longer. We got 25% more floor and a toothpaste. That's why people are going to buy you. They go, okay, maybe, maybe, but there are a ton of parody brands that are one more argue to their products are inferior to, to a superior products that people buy more of. Beats by Drays Up. Perfect example of this. Right. You ask someone, what is the best pair of headphones you can buy from Best Buy? And you know, it's going to be great. You want to hear it. You know, it's going to be great to go buy those. You can't go wrong. You can't go wrong, buy those. Right. But beats by Drays was being bullies by 48% of the category. They own four year percent of the market, headphone market. One company whose products, what we would say is inferior. Why? Yeah, they're fine. They're fine. They're fine. They're not terrible, but they aren't great. But again, Bose, Bose doesn't make me feel like I'm part of a community. They don't mean anything. They mean headphones on my ears as I believe I'm wearing Bose right now, which now is making me. They're great. They sound great. Right. And the idea is I think that brands fall short because we we marry ourselves to what we do as opposed to why we do it, how we see the world. The what is so small, the, it's the, the why, the how I see the world. That's so much powerful and I can connect with people in a way that's far greater than just the talk that I give. And I think that's where brands fall short, that the connection doesn't happen through the transactional right through the features and benefits. That's just the way that we realize it. But what what's the most powerful is the ideological congruence when people go, I see the road just like you do. We should be friends. We should hang out. We should be whatever. We get tighter. Do you feel as times evolves and brands need to be tighter? Do you feel the role of keeping a really tight brand exists within a brand or within an agency? Like I think a lot about like there's a few good in house teams out there. A lot of really bad ones. There's a few great agencies. What are your thoughts on the role of agencies as relates to brand? A just think about what their job is. Some agencies, as you know, all too well, is that they'll say our job is ideas. Ideas are our job. Creativity is our job and is our job. They go, well, that's what you do. Like what is the client want from you? They want to partner and brand stewards. That's what you hear to do to be sort of an outside perspective. But with the shared belief on a thing or the shared investment on a particular outcome. I think that the brands who are like, oh, we're in this with you. Your brand is our brand, we are one and the same, but this is the it. So much so that you think they're internal, an internal agency because of how connected they are. Like those are the brands that the brand agency relationship is just so strong. But if like, if the client is just, you know, just a way to get like, you know, points on the board to get my book full or, you know, get a can lie in, oh, man, that's a, that's a really, that's a crummy relationship. It requires immersion for success at a certain point. Yeah. And then having been in brand and you've been in house too many times too. It's like, it can become a bit of an echo chamber. And I feel like agencies at times can offer a lot of new ideas and new fuel in the fire as long as they're stressed in the partnership. Yeah. And that's the, that's the important part of partnership, not transaction. The same mechanisms that drive consumption culture are the same mechanisms that drive organizational culture. So if that's the case, would you then say kind of that early indoctrination from your childhood and from your family beliefs influences all of your later beliefs? And ultimately, your later consumption and behavior, then, is that, is that what the ultimate period at the end of the statement is? That's where it starts. Right. You know, it, you are interpolated, right? As altitude is put it, you're interpolated in that, you know, your, your parents, your family, your community, your tribe, pour into you in such a way that there's going to be uniformity and what comes out? Right? Just like culture, which means to harvest, to nurture, to cultivate, it's how we get agriculture, we harvest and cultivate grains. So there's some uniformity in the grains. The same thing happened with a culture rating children so that they are predictable on what people like us do. And that was the, for a long time, like you stating a tribe, you live in your small community, and that's just what happened, into the duster revolution, where people started bumping out of people and they go, y'all believe that? You guys are doing this over here, hold on, you're doing this, I want to do that, interesting. And they go, I never saw that before, I played it again, I never heard that. Wow. And you started getting this influx of points of view about the world. And then people go, "Hull, I'm not who I once once," I'm like, "I'm not Marcus from back home," and that old hamlet of a town I grew up in, I'm Marcus in the big city, I'm Marcus in the big city, listen to this and go here, there's that to believe this. And therefore I behave differently, since I'm a social animal, I go, "Who else out there is like me?" And that leads us to the future of brand, brand as a communal mark, that I consume as a way to signify my identity, and then I find other people who are like me and go, "You do that so do I," best friends. Wow. There's a Brian coin to term called "senius," which was the communal concept of genius. And when groups come together and vibe off each other and create an ultimate work product that's superior to what you would do on your own. And I love the idea of brand as a communal mark, I haven't heard of that before. Oh yes. It's a communal mark. It's the fanaticism because it's a part of our identity and therefore community happens very quickly. Why do you think that fanaticism isn't met with the same skepticism that say cult fanaticism is? Generally, that kind of fanaticism or even that kind of indoctrination is praised, whereas when you look at it, "Nexium, you mentioned, children of God, you mentioned," obviously all of that we recognize as negative, bad, scary. What point does something tip that scale for you? One's community is another man's cult. You look at someone's group of people and you go, "Yo, cult over there's like, no, we just love each other. And no, we just believe the same thing. And no, we just the thing." If we were using the language of today and the biblical times, we'd call Jesus' disciples cults. They'd be like, "They're crazy. They're people crazy." And that's what we do. I mean, when we talk about companies, we say those companies have a cult-like following. Their culture is material, being cult is short for culture, your culture is material. And we praise it. When we praise it, when we talk about companies. That's right. That's right. We consecrate it. Now, it gets dangerous. It gets dangerous when it becomes harmful. That's when we go, "Oh, getting the cult vibes, getting the cult vibes." That's the connotation we put to it. But at its core, it is a strong devotion to a thing. Where the culture of said thing is very tangible, is very salient. But you know what? No one joins a cult, say, "I'm joined a cult." Nobody does. Everybody joins it. Because I love these people. And we believe the same things. And we see the world similarly. Right? You guys have Amanda Matello. And we talk the same way. Wow. I mean, language is the front door to community. The culture's too cult. When people start talking like you, you go, "Oh, someone says, "Yo, what's the hack on that?" You go, "You're a marketer." All the jargon is such a dead giveaway every time. What are the KPIs on this? Get over here. Come hang with me. What are you just seeing? What do you do? Immediately we know it. Because that language is a way of signifying that we are a part of this profession, which a lot of ways is its own community. And here's the thing is. So I mean, I came to advertising and marketing sort of as a second career. So I always felt like I was out of the loop. Everyone knew all the abbreviations, D-D-B-O-M-D, B-B-B-B-B, I didn't know any of that stuff. Like I was like, "Okay, I'm like taking notes, trying to keep up." Right? And the more you knew the language, the more of a marketer you must be. The more sort of legit you must be. Language is a big part of this. It just becomes a way that you know that you're one of us, right? And like these things, you know, we're constantly looking for our people. It's just how we're wired, right? Social animals by nature. Right. Right. I mean, and become, are almost impossible to define or nail down as one singular thing. I was reading something recently and I think it might have been a New York Times article where it was saying the U.S. as a society, we've switched from being producers to consumers. So the most we can express ourselves is largely through our consumption. If the only way we can have a culture or the only way we can have a community is via what we consume, what does that mean for us then for the next phase of this? That poses a very existential question about like, so what do we value? You know, in some ways one could argue that well, we've always consumed as a way of signaling, you know, who we are, right? Like, you know, someone had to make a rosary beat if you were Catholic and therefore I did some exchange, like I gave you, either I gave you money, some, some currency or we did some barter, right? There was some exchange happening there. Right. But then if the idea now is that the creation of things, especially in the AI world, the creation of things no longer sort of sits with the individual's ability to go from here to some, output, instead it's my curation through consumption, then you go, well, where's that lead us? We'll use consumption as a means of signaling our, where we are in social hierarchy. Kanye West said it best, right? Oh, Kanye, don't judge me. Yeah. No, Kanye. Now, yeah. Prior, Kanye. He says, you know, and I spilled from a hundred bucks on this just to be like, you ain't up on this, right? This becomes a way by which we're able to signal where we are in a social hierarchy. Like all things, they become hyperbolic until they don't and then anti-consumption becomes the new consumption. Yes. Anarchy. What cult are you shamelessly a consumer of? Kind of obsessed with cults, truly, really. I am obsessed with trying to understand why we do what we do, especially when we're in groups. I spent a lot of my time reading about it, talking about it, trying to learn about it and how each subculture has their own rules, right? And in their own rules that dictate what it means to be a part of them. How many times have you reread "Lord of the Fly" as a child? So here's the crazy thing. I was not a big reader as a kid. Really? Nope. Shame, shamefully, we'll admit that. I didn't really start reading honestly until after my MBA program, which is just ridiculous. And my wife says, "Well, won't you read?" And I was like, "Look, I read articles. I don't read books. Just stoop it." And she was like, "Well, my friend, Dan Erielli, wrote this book, "Coperdictively Irrational. You should give it a shot. It's really good." And out of desperation, I was like, "I'll read it because I don't want to get fired." So I felt like a fraud. I read it and it completely changed my life. Like I know Dan now, and every time I talk to him, I go, "Thank you for changing my life, because it completely changed my life." Has that changed over the past decade for you as a teacher? Has it become easier or harder with students? Much easier. Because I realized through the academic journey, as it were, I just realized how many poorly constructed points of view we have in the world. And it's just like the dominant logic that we have about things. It's just scientifically wrong, right? And there were points of view that I had. I know you have points of view. There were just sort of ways I would do things that I would always, that I thought was just kind of how it was. So I spend my time with students doing what I just did there that like, "Here's how you think the world is. This is actually how it is. Let me tell you why that is literature concepts. Let me show you that in case studies, this brand, that example, this example, now workshop it. So you can actually take that learning and apply it. So for me, in the classroom, I'm just Jean Piaget all day long, just using his pedagogy to help people see the world differently. And then on stages, I'm just preaching the gospel. I mean, I'm just like, like, like, fire and brimstone, like I'm just like in the gospel as hard as I can. And the idea is that I'm preaching to the people who go finally, someone said it. So I can't do that in the classroom because it's my job to like bring everyone along. But when I'm on stage, I'm preaching to people to go finally, someone said it, man, I've always felt that way, but never had the language to do it. And then they started to lean in a little bit closer. And they used the book to get a little deeper. And then they go evangelize the gospel, not because of me, but because of them that they see the world similarly. Got it. You have religious foot soldiers. This is great. Are there any rituals or habits that you built that you feel make you a better leader or a? And I think that like the ritual that I always kind of do, it just sort of pour into people. So no, I believe I believe you can do it. And like, and an idea is that if you don't believe it for yourself, my hope is that I believe it enough for both of us and that it's like, all right, I just don't want to let Marcus down. But that's kind of my go to rather in class, definitely in practice. Like definitely. Like if you ever worked for me, like I'm constantly like, yo, you can do this. Don't be afraid. I believe in you. Even if you don't believe in yourself, right? You know, what we call that love bombing, but that's my dude. Exactly. And then they'll turn around. You'll be like, actually, that was horrible. And then they'll look at you again and you'll go, no, you're amazing. Come here, come here. And then that's it. And now you have a confused attachment style. And you fully, and you fully brought them in without a shadow of a doubt. Why do you believe you do what you do? Because I believe that I was called to do it. I believe that nothing is an accident in that things don't just happen. The serendipity is divine. And the gifts that I've been given, the things that I want to do in life that didn't manifest because they weren't meant for me. There were doors that closed that I just could not open. And there were doors that opened that I just could not close. And I feel like I was made to do this in this moment at this time. And peripherally, if I do it well, then I would help someone be better than me. And if I could do that, my living isn't in vain. That's great, man. So if it's very well said, if the brand of Marcus Collins at a tagline or the cult of Marcus Collins had a sacred script, what would it be? All I want is dopness. That's it. I love it. I expect greatness out of everyone, I expect greatness out of myself, and it's all I want is dopness. Amazing. All right. And everyone go by Marcus's book. It's for the culture. One of my favorite books I've read this year. So very well done. Thank you.