Culture in Marketing | Marcus Collins | 544

01/18/24 • 20 min

Why do we do what we do and buy what we buy?What invisible forces drive those actions - and how can they be seen? Today our guest is Marcus Collins an award-winning marketer and culture translator. He is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Ross School of Business and an award-winning author. His newest book is For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be. Marcus shares how there is no greater external force more influential to human behavior than culture! However, if you ask ten people what culture is you’ll get a different answer each time. Marcus explains that you must understand who you are, how you see the world, and what you believe if you are going to create a coherent and positive culture. Marcus’s first solo book For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be came from his exploration of social sciences to understand better who we are as people and what the underlying physics of why we take the actions we do. Marcus states that as a marketer we have to gain that understanding to get others to adopt the behavior we are promoting. While launching the book Marcus chose to eat his own dog food, taking the same approach to his book launch as he would launch a client’s product. Building out from understanding the culture the book represents he reached out to former students who embraced the thinking he taught, enlisting them to boost the signal of the book on launch day. By doing this he created a following of true believers willing to evangelize his book and ideas! Marcus shares smart advice for anyone who feels their culture is lacking clarity or for those who struggle to truly connect to their target audience. Three Key Takeaways: · There is no external force more influential to human behavior than culture. · It's about getting your thinking in the hands and minds of more people. · If you can activate people with shared convictions, then those people will evangelize on your behalf.

Previous Episode

Getting Focused on Growth | David G. Ewing | 543

Should you try to make your thought leadership relevant to everyone? Or, is being focused the answer? To examine the effectiveness of "going narrow" with your thought leadership, I’ve invited David G Ewing to join me. David is a trailblazer in customer experience innovation, and the CEO of Motiv, the world’s largest Oracle CX exclusive partner allowing clients to manage their customer experience (CX) through every step of their journey. David shares how he uses thought leadership to differentiate and drive business, by narrowly focusing on customer experiences using technology from a single vendor. This has allowed him to tackle any challenges a customer might bring his way. David explains that a narrow focus allows him to find the exact target customer which is a match made in heaven for both sides. With thought leadership content focused directly on their pain points the customer knows from the outset the partnership is a good fit. Part of finding that focus came from coming up with a mission and motive. David trimmed that down to a single word “Growth.” Having a one-word mission made it possible to have a lot of creativity while remaining focused. David shares excellent advice for going deep for elevated relevancy! Three Key Takeaways: · The more focused you are the more useful you are despite being relevant to a smaller group of people. · Having a good and clear mission statement can allow you to stay focused on your vision. · It’s never too early to start thought leadership.

Next Episode

Making Ideas Accessible| Keith Goode | 545

AI is a hot topic right now, but many don’t fully understand the ramifications. How do you present data sets and explainable AI to the average person? Today we sit down with Keith Goode, the Vice President of Services at ZeroedIn Technologies which provides HR solutions by combining people data with business data for one source of truth. Our conversation begins by getting a sense of how complex ideas like AI can be used by people who are not familiar with it. Keith shares how he identifies the business issue or concern at hand and that AI could be useful to help solve those problems. From there they seek the right data to answer the questions and then qualify that information by looking at historical data, then aggregating it together to generate an AI model that can predict outcomes based on the predetermined traits. Building a data set is a crucial part of creating an accurate AI model. Keith explains how they use a template that has key factors that have been used in the past coupled with various data elements that are unique and important to the client. Keith continues by explaining how the model can be tested and updated to make the model more accurate. If you want a better understanding of AI in terms everyone can understand you’ll want to tune into this episode. Three Key Takeaways: · If an idea is not explainable, then it is also not actionable. · AI models are not a one-and-done solution. You need to update and retrain them to ensure relevance and effectiveness. · AI models allow for a deeper and more complex dimension of examination of complex topics.