How Your Culture Impacts Sales
With Guest Dr. Marcus Collins
Why marketers should prioritize cultural insights over demographics for deeper audience connections
The How to Sell More Podcast
//
May 29, 2024
Traditional marketing segments customers by demographics and psychographics. Dr. Marcus Collins suggests this misses the deeper story of how people make decisions.
As Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York and author of "For the Culture," Collins points to a fundamental shift in understanding customer behavior. While demographics describe surface traits, they fail to predict actions.
Through the example of Patagonia, Collins illustrates how shared worldviews drive purchases more than product features. When comparing a Patagonia fleece to competitors, customers see identical products. Yet they pay premium prices based on alignment with Patagonia's environmental stance.
This principle extends beyond consumer brands. Collins reveals how B2B companies often lose deals not through inferior products, but through cultural misalignment. When team cultures clash, even superior solutions struggle to gain traction.
The key lies in understanding how people translate their world. Rather than focusing solely on data points, Collins advocates getting closer to how customers think and behave. "They mistake information for intimacy," he notes of companies that rely too heavily on analytics without human connection.
The episode explores why some organizations thrive while others falter despite similar offerings. The difference often comes down to cultural fit between company and customer.
Demographics consist of the hardware - age, race, gender, household income, geography. But our behaviors are not predicated on our hardware. They're predicated on our software - the beliefs and ideologies that we hold, and how we self-identify. These things make up the operating system that governs what people like us do. -- Dr. Marcus Collins
Top 3 Reasons to Listen
Win Without Competing on Price: See how cultural alignment lets you command premium pricing even in crowded markets.
Pick Perfect Clients: Learn to identify and attract customers who match your company's values, leading to longer relationships.
Build Lasting Loyalty: Understand how shared beliefs create bonds that competitors cannot break through features or discounts alone.
Follow Dr. Marcus Collins on Social
More About Today's Guest, Dr. Marcus Collins
Professor | Best-Selling Author | Keynote Speaker | Culture Scholar | Chief Strategy Officer | Forbes Contributor | MG100
Dr. Marcus Collins is a renowned marketer and cultural translator, blending practical expertise with academic insights. Formerly the Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, New York, Dr. Collins now imparts his knowledge as a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. His profound grasp of brand strategy and consumer behavior bridges the gap between theory and practice, benefitting both blue-chip brands and startups.
Dr. Collins' accolades include Advertising Age's 40 Under 40, Crain's Business' 40 Under 40, and induction into the American Advertising Federation’s Advertising Hall of Achievement. He was recently honored with the Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award for ideas poised to shape the future of business management. Additionally, he has served as a jury member for the Cannes Lion International Festival of Creativity.
Before his tenure at Wieden+Kennedy, Dr. Collins was the Chief Consumer Connections Officer at Doner Advertising and led Social Engagement at Steve Stoute’s agency, Translation. His career is marked by creating culturally impactful ideas that inspire action. He started in music and tech, co-founding a startup and contributing to iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple, as well as running digital strategy for Beyoncé.
Dr. Collins' work centers on the power of cultural proximity. His best-selling book, *For The Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be*, explores how culture influences consumption and provides actionable insights for marketers and activists alike. The book uses literature, case studies, and academic data to explain the mechanisms behind cultural influence, empowering readers to apply these lessons effectively.
He holds a doctorate in marketing from Temple University, specializing in cultural contagion and meaning-making, and an MBA focused on strategic brand marketing from the University of Michigan, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in Material Science Engineering. As a Forbes columnist, Dr. Collins is a trusted voice among CMOs and business leaders. Above all, he is a proud Detroit native, a devoted husband, and a loving father to Georgia and Ivy.
Key Takeaways
- Culture Shapes Choices - People make decisions based on beliefs and self-identity rather than demographics. Understanding these deeper drivers leads to stronger connections.
- Alignment Over Features - When products reach parity, cultural alignment determines who wins. Companies succeeding today focus on matching customer worldviews.
- Human Connection Beats Data - While analytics provide insight, true understanding comes from genuine engagement with how customers think and behave.
A Transcription of The Talk
Mark Drager: As you are the author of the book "For the Culture," which is getting rave reviews, I've been really enjoying it. Admittedly, I have not had a chance to work all the way through it. So I always preface that because I don't want anyone listening to think I'm just making stuff up. But you're kind of blowing my mind a little bit. You know, I've been in the marketing realm for 20 years. And of course, early in my career, I was introduced to the idea of segmentation and the power of personas, being able to identify who we are targeting, and maybe those are based on demographics, maybe they're based on psychographics or motivations, perhaps based on signals, because in our businesses, we've been able to develop such strong buying signals in automation to help raise leads to the surface for us. But you suggest that culture is the most powerful perhaps, of all these. And so I'd like to just start there if you can explain the difference for our listeners between personas and demographics and psychographics. And ultimately, why do you believe culture is the most powerful signal of all, I suppose?
Marcus Collins: Sure thing. You know, demographics. They consist of the hardware, right? Age, race, gender, household income, geography, college education, right? They are things that we can see on the outside for the most part and get a sense of what's what. They're very tangible, right? But our behaviors are not predicated on our hardware. They're predicated on our software, right? The beliefs and ideologies that we hold, and how we self-identify, these things make up the operating system that governs what people like us do. And as marketers, our job is to get people to move. That's why we go through the entire segmentation process, as Professor Wendell Smith told us in the '50s, that marketing segmentation is the act of taking a heterogeneous group of people, putting them in homogeneous-like clusters where they're more alike than they are different based on some characteristic. We choose which segment or segments we want to go after, based on their proclivity to move, and the likelihood that they're going to adopt behavior. Right? So we go through this process so that we might get to a better representation of who people are and what they're likely to do. Demographics, while they are descriptive, they are not predictive of what people like us are going to do. But do you know, all women love to shop? That's just not true, right? Or, you know, all Black people do something, fill in the blank—that's racist. Like, it was like when he talked about like...
Mark Drager: Okay, and I don't want to vary too much on this one point. But surely, things like household income, zip codes, or the areas you choose to live within, crown education, type of industry or company you might be a part of, where you sit maybe within seniority within a company for focusing on B2B, these would fall within the demographic areas, and they, I mean, they're still helpful, or they're not.
Marcus Collins: They're better than nothing. But imagine, Mark, if I set you up on a date. She's a millennial.
Mark Drager: The income in a certain zip code doesn't really help me, right?
Marcus Collins: Exactly, but if I say she's a millennial you'd ask, but what does she like? What is she into? You would want more information because you know, that descriptor doesn't do very much. Or does she live in this zip code? You go, okay, that doesn't help me. Because we know intuitively that doesn't say a lot about who people are. But as marketers, we cling to that, because it's better than nothing. It's better just kind of looking out into the ether and saying we just kind of go after people. So demographics are helpful in that way, that they're better than nothing. But like, we got to raise the bar beyond that, say, well, let's use psychographics. Because psychographics give us a better understanding of what people do, right? What their affinities are, what their interests are, and absolutely, 1,000% psychographics are better at describing who people are and give you a semblance of what they're likely to do. But psychographics are merely by-products of our cultural subscription. Like what we like, what we listen to, where we go, where we eat, where we vacation. Proclivities are by-products of how we see the world. And how we see the world is a function of our culture. This is a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. And because of who we are, we see the world a certain way and navigate life a certain way, which means that our psychographics are by-products of our culture, making culture a far better way to describe people, to segment people. The challenge for marketers though, is that I can't look at you and go, I know your culture. And therefore marketers go, but that's too hard. No, no, no, too hard. So just focus on demographics. And you go, Okay, that is efficient, but it's not effective. So the idea then is how do we marry effectiveness with efficiency and our ability to get closer to people, basically identify, and the way they see the world gets us there?
Mark Drager: So help me understand because I run an agency. We're all day, every day in the weeds of trying to take these frameworks and these concepts and ensure that they're actionable, that we can actually gain insights and strategies and tactics from them. But they're not just interesting. You know, I never want to sit down with a client and go through something where they're like, "Well, that was interesting. How do we use it?" and we go, "I don't know." So, if we're working out, parsing out the difference between psychographics—the idea that we can target prospects and customers through their motivations, their fears, their desires, and elements like that—and culture, help me understand how we take that next step.
Marcus Collins: So I would liken it to starting with, "Who are you as an organization?" Right? So as an agency, you're representing a client, right? Representing a company, and you go, "Okay, so who are you all? How do you see the world? What do you believe?" And they go, "Well, it doesn't matter; we believe we have a really great product. And our value propositions are such that they're better than our competitors. And therefore, people should choose us because our razor is sharper, our battery lasts longer, our car goes faster," right, or "our data stack is greater than someone else's." But the truth of the matter is that for most people, whether it's B2B or B2C, most products are parodied. And that is, there aren't great differences in people's minds regarding your offering and someone else's.
Mark Drager: Or even worse, an entrenched status quo situation where your greatest competition is actually just how much work it is to try and move someone to something new.
Marcus Collins: That's right. "No one's ever got fired for hiring IBM," that's the saying, right? And the idea there is that, hey, because that is acceptable in our organization and the possibilities of getting it wrong are low, and therefore my job security is higher, I'm going to go with that one. So the idea there is that since there is not much difference between products, targeting people based on value propositions alone actually seems like a futile thing. Differentiating myself through that perspective seems actually not that productive. But if I start with, "Well, what do I believe, as a company? How do I see the world?" you go, "Who are the other companies that see the world the way I do? Who believe what I believe?" And that's who I target from a B2B perspective, from a B2C perspective, we'd say, "Who are the people who are the customers out there who share the same worldview as I do?" And those are the people I'm going to go after. And we see brands who operate in both B2B roles and B2C worlds navigate accordingly. So it's about this in the book. Patagonia is a great example of this. Patagonia believes in climate cleaning, right, reducing their evasiveness on the planet.
That's what Patagonia is all about. And that's how they communicate themselves to people who want to buy jackets and fleeces and the like. Put a Patagonia fleece next to a North Face fleece and remove the brand mark, you can't tell the difference. Like, I do this exercise with my students, they cannot tell the difference, even when they're wearing a North Face jacket or a Patagonia jacket. So again, the products are parodied in nature. But as soon as you see the logo, they go, "Oh, yeah, I'm buying the Patagonia one and paying a premium for it, because of what it means, not because of what it is, and because of who I am, what it means for people like me." That's the consumer side. On the B2B side, Patagonia looks at its book of business from the companies that it outfits its merch with, right? Like so you have like a McKinsey, you know, fleece with a Patagonia logo right made by Patagonia. Patagonia looks at its book of business and says, "These companies don't see the world the way we do. They do not align with our worldview. So therefore, Patagonia says, 'We're not going to work with them, even though it means losing money.' They go, 'We're gonna work with them. But is there money?”
Mark Drager: Sorry, I'm going to cut you off. You're touching on such an interesting point. One of the questions I had, and I was hoping we would touch on this, is the idea of alignment. Especially within a service-based business. We have my team, we have our systems, and we have our offer or services, productized or otherwise. And then we have our target customers. And maybe there are more facets, but I want to keep it simple. And so, when I think of culture, when I think of cultural alignment, if we go way back in my own career, we built a very entrepreneurial, small, scrappy agency that was bumping up against large internationally known Omnicom-type subsidiaries, and we were going head to head with them. And sometimes we'd win and sometimes we lost, but we were going after the same kind of corporate Fortune 500 clients. Yep. And I didn't quite account for or realize the toll that placed on my team because I created a team of scrappy, entrepreneurial people who worked for an entrepreneur. And then we went out into the world and we did very good work, and I had a great time helping corporate clients, but I was basically asking my team to live in the corporate 500 world, which they chose not to go into, there was a reason why they chose to work for an entrepreneurial team. It took me about six or seven years to realize this mistake I had made. And it was kind of like grinding down the team.
And so, I've spent the last few years wondering, and perhaps you can help me with this, and even our listeners, I've spent the last few years wondering whether, as we're building these service-based businesses, we're building our team, it's very tempting to select to pull off the shelf, I want to target these types of clients. Because I know my service will do X, Y, and Z for them, I know that I'll be able to sell it, I can stuff it, I can build it. But I'm wondering whether we build our teams around the people that we want to target and sell to, or whether we target and sell to the people that, culturally within our walls, we are most aligned with.
Marcus Collins: I 1,000% believe that you target the people who see the world the way you do because not only will you get the work that you want, but you'll actually enjoy doing the work with them. I mean, how many times have you pitched a client—you know, name any—that you picked a client you go, "Man, that looks so sexy on our website. Oh, man, the building's going to be great for that, you know, it's been a lot of money when we do a lot of work, and everyone's going to be happy because we're creating tons and tons of work." And then you work with them. And you realize it's a meat grinder and you go, "Oh, man, our cultures just don't match. The way we see the world is different from the way they see the world, the way they go about operating through the world is actually antithetical to how we go about operating through the world." So the whole time, we're just butting heads, and it is miserable. And not only does the work suffer, but your people suffer. And they go, "I didn't come here for this.
I came here because I believe this. And now I'm working in a way that is antithetical to my beliefs." This is the power of culture; it's not only a way for us to find the right partners that we work with from a B2B perspective but also helps us identify the right people that we should hire. Like, I believe this, and therefore, as the leader of this organization, this is the North Star that we're guiding toward. You're more inclined to get people who see the world the way you do to be more loyal, to be more sort of operating in their genius, when they are in space and in an environment that facilitates that cultural belief to be manifested in how they work, than someone who's like, "I'm just here because it's a good pay check, or it's close to work, or the benefits are awesome. Or is this the next step to the next thing?" You're going to get much more out of the employee who believes than the ones for whom it is convenient. And the same thing goes, if you think about the partners that we work with our clients, you're more likely to get better work, and a more enjoyable experience from people who see the route the way you do, than from people who just pay very well. And then you go mad, but how to pay the bills? But at what cost?
Mark Drager: I know that you've spent a large portion of your career working within the agency space, and your list of clients is impressive. You know, your time at Apple, working with them on the GI integration, McDonald's, State Farm, and you also spent time as the head of digital, if I understand correctly, for Beyoncé. And so, I'm curious though, because you are also very busy. You're also a clinical professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. And so this overlap between theory and academia, and the actual practice I find fascinating because I think marketers like myself, strategists like myself, we love the way things should work. But then you go into practice and the chaos of, hey, it turns out, things don't work the way that we think they should work. I find it very fascinating. So I'm curious in terms of your work, within the entertainment side of things, in terms of culture, your work on the corporate side of things, in terms of segmentation and culture, or the work that you do working with students, where do you learn the most?
Marcus Collins: Oh, man, I think I learn the most sitting at the convergence of the two. Because just like in the real world, nothing goes as it should. So it is the same with science in the academic world. You know, I go in with a hypothesis based on my understanding of the literature, and then I go into to see reality and reality doesn't match that because there's a new thing. There's a new phenomenon, there's something we don't know. And out of that, we're able to acquire new knowledge that has been disseminated. I learn sitting in the gap between academia and practice. As an academic, I'm studying people who are way smarter than I am, and who have really invested themselves in a particular subject matter from which I'm able to glean their brilliance.
As a practitioner, I start to apply that to the world and realize that it's not that the world is acting incorrectly, it's that we're applying the wrong theory to the wrong situation. Right? Without using the right causality-based theory to describe a thing. So finding theory, and reality fit becomes a big part of what it means to translate one thing from the other. You know, it's like, you know, we say things like, you know, all millennials do this. And then we put something abroad and go, why didn't millennials do the thing they're supposed to do? Because they all do that. Yeah, as if they acted wrong. It's like, no, your understanding of them was flawed, the theory you used was flawed. And I think as practitioners, this is where we fall down often because we discount the power of theory, we go, "Oh, that only works in theory." As if theory doesn't explain everything, the theory is the most accurate explanation of reality. The challenge is that our repertoire of theory is typically anemic. And therefore, we apply the wrong theories to the wrong scenario. And those things don't marry up. Being an academic, immersing myself in this world, helps me create a better, stronger, wider repertoire of theory. So I can find a closer connection that leads to more predictive outcomes. Is it 100%? Never. But it's those failures that I learn from that either gain new knowledge or a better connection between theory and reality.
Mark Drager: And so, if I'm listening to this, and I'm an owner, operator, or maybe I'm on a marketing or biz dev team, and I work for an owner-managed business, and I'm listening to this and going, "We need to get better, moving past even the ideas of personas or demographics, but even past psychographics, and look at culture, maybe we want to build a stronger community, maybe we want our content marketing to be more effective. Maybe we want to build a following and become a thought leader, or at the end of the day, maybe we just want our sales team to just go out there and sell more. How would you recommend we approach this, if we're aiming to do those things and understand how we can leverage culture better?"
Marcus Collins: Yep, my advice would be to understand people better. That's what we're after understanding people, revenue, and marketing. Business thinks marketing is all about people; there are people that I'd argue, do you really understand business? So what we're talking about here is how we get better at understanding how people see the world, translate the world, and behave accordingly. For me, the biggest cheat code was understanding the behavioral sciences, because it made my understanding of people better. As a result, I was able to build better teams, were able to create better work that worked better in the market, and therefore got us better clients. Things become a flywheel in just understanding who people are. So if you want to be a better salesperson, understanding people becomes really great. Right? It helps you sort of make a connection with folks and then find where their points of friction are. But if people are the labels, or the boxes that we put them in only for you, you know, always find yourself out of sync. So for owners, operators, leaders, managers, and executives, we had to start with understanding who people are not the labels that we put on them, but how they self-identify.
Mark Drager: In the work that we do, I always find it fascinating because half the time the leaders that we're working with within our brand strategy agency have the answers and they know the answers. They've just either never taken the time to sit down and work through it in a structured way, or never had anyone lead them through a process where they can actually spend a few hours.
We're doing this right now with a company where we're spending about six total hours with a senior executive team, focusing only on putting to paper the different touchpoints with the different types of people who are involved in their sales process. Yeah, but this is a very administrative kind of dull activity. Yet, a few hours into it, as we go in asking, "What about this person? Where do they come in? What do they do? Who do they report to? What do they care about? How tight are you? Do you understand them?" It's just asking the same question over and over again as we work through every possible touchpoint of their entire organization. Oh, surprisingly, we start to see patterns. Yeah, they start to go, "Oh, you know what, it's interesting." Then suddenly, now people start to break out into categories like A, B, or C with these little nuances and differences. And so I'm always so surprised at either how much people really do understand about their customers and their targets and the work they do, but they've just never worked through the exercise, or on the other hand—and sorry, I'm laughing—on the other side, where they have no idea because they don't spend any time talking to customers ever. It's just mind-boggling to me how polarizing those two positions are, and sometimes they say to clients, "Can you imagine you're this successful without any insight or data? Imagine how successful you are when you actually know what your customers want."
Marcus Collins: That's right. That's right. Right. Imagine that...
Mark Drager: And that's your experience as well?
Marcus Collins: I mean, what's wild to me is what you're getting to—that there's typically some intuition, some clarity. In some cases, we intuitively know who our people are because we engage with them. We just haven't done the process of operationalizing who they are and what makes up their constitution. On the other end, there's a bit of hubris. We go, "I know who these people are," but you know nothing about them because you haven't engaged with them at all. And what this really boils down to is engagement. How engaged are you with your people? I often refer to this as sort of the demarcation between how we think about B2B, B2C, or big business and government, right? We say all these things are so different, they are so different. And I go, "Well, yeah, contextually they are quite different. But what's the consistency in all of them? People. This is humanity, right? The same person who's buying your product in bulk for their company, who runs procurement, that person is going down the shopping aisle to buy deodorant, right? And the same cognitive processes that impact them in the supermarket are the same cognitive processes that sway them when they're over the phone, via Zoom, or via email. So getting close to who these people are, and how they translate the world becomes a really powerful thing in our ability to connect with them in meaningful ways. But when we sort of walk around thinking we know them because of this false sense of understanding, we find ourselves really missing the mark, and it's exacerbated when we use the data we have at our disposal. We go, 'Oh, we have all this data. I know who these people are.' But yet we see those markers continue to stumble. That's because they mistake information for intimacy. They have information on them, but don't really know who they really, really are because they lack the intimacy."
Mark Drager: Confirmation bias is also a powerful name. Gracious, goodness gracious. Yeah, absolutely. So in the last few minutes we have, I just have to ask you about your thoughts. You did spend time spearheading digital strategy for Beyoncé. And you say this not really typically—I'm not a huge Beyoncé fan, but I am a massive fan of music industry history, all kinds of music. Yeah. And so I was listening to statistics in terms of the changing demographics on Spotify, and the fact that hip hop still very much dominates in terms of listenership but it actually has had the largest drop over the last two years in terms of listenership, while country music has had the largest gain. And surprisingly, we now have 'Cowboy Carter' out, which you know, is making waves because Beyoncé is stepping into country, and all I can think is, I've been hearing music industry people talk for the last year about the fact that hip hop is losing market share and country music is gaining market share, and then suddenly, we have this album out. I can't imagine that's a coincidence, but maybe it is. But what are your thoughts on...
Marcus Collins: Well, the top streaming songs of last year, if I'm not mistaken, were from country artists, so it was kind of already happening. I liken it to any creative expression, any cultural production, that the genres that innovate the most are typically the ones to have more novel listening, right? The more people want to come to it, they like what's new, what's happening. And for a long time, just the last 20 years I don't think there was any genre of music that had more heterogeneity and more innovation than hip hop. Right there were different forms of expression, there were different kinds of artists, there was southern rap and East Coast rap, you had Detroit hollow where I'm from, you had West Coast rap, you had all these things—it was the heterogeneity of it all that kept driving its innovation.
Mark Drager: And frankly, though, hip hop completely replaced rock and roll. Like, rock and roll disappeared in 2004 or 2005, replaced with hip hop. And where I'm going is, is a country just basically the catch-all now for like a little bit of rock, a little bit of this, a little bit of that? Let's add some twang and Garth Brooks get up and go make some money.
Marcus Collins: While we're seeing a lot of innovation in country music, right? Like Lil Nas X from a couple of years back, introducing a more hip-hop sonic aesthetic to the genre. The different ways he bought contorting and bending the genre create more entry points for people to enter into it, right? People feel more welcome to it. Beyoncé definitely opens the door and holds the door for people to come in, which is really powerful. But if you put some of the biggest hip-hop artists in the genre side by side together and play their music, that doesn't sound all that different. And therefore, we have a lack of innovation, a lack of interest, and fewer people coming through the door.
Mark Drager: So, do you think Taylor should go back to the country then?
Marcus Collins: Well, I think Taylor... I feel like she's operating in her own stratosphere.
Mark Drager: She is. She's the Paul McCartney of this generation, I have to say.
Marcus Collins: I mean, in a lot of ways, she has. She has taken complexity and emotion to simplicity and articulation that makes more people feel like their experience has been captured. As a result, people feel very connected to her.
Mark Drager: So, Dr. Marcus Collins is, of course, the author of the book "For the Culture," which you can pick up everywhere. And in the fall, it'll be out in paperback as well. A question for you based on everything we've kind of covered today. What would be your number one tip or strategy to help us sell more?
Marcus Collins: We want to be better at selling things, we should be better at helping people. We like Clay Christensen. Speaking of innovation, the innovator's dilemma, he brought forward the idea of jobs to be done, that people don't buy products because of products because their value proposition is they buy it to get jobs done: their functional job, their emotional job, and their social job. The functional job is the thing that I actually need to get done, the task. The emotional job is how I want to feel when I'm using it. The social job is how I'm seen by other people. And that rubric works, built in B2B and B2C. In B2B, I have a task that needs to be done. And most products aren't that different from each other. So there's this great parity between who gets that functional job done, but the way I'm seen in the organization is far different. And that influences my choices. The way I feel when I'm using the thing is far different, which influences the way I see my choices. So, for a person who wants to sell more things, whether you're a company, a politician, an activist, an entrepreneur, or wherever the case may be, if we can help people get their jobs done, help people—don't sell them, help them—we drastically increase the likelihood of people adopting the behavior we want them to adopt.
