It’s never been easier for brands to push their message out. But building true connections is  in today’s fragmented landscape.

Dr. Marcus Collins has advice for cutting through the noise. His new book, “For The Culture”, is full of insights. Marcus has worked with Beyonce, Apple, Nike and more. He’s the Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, and a marketing professor at the Michigan Ross School of Business (Go Blue!).

Marcus believes people use brands to express who they are. To win now and in the future, the most successful brands will have to double down on identity, not on value proposition. Here’s everything we covered:

[3:20] How media fragmentation is affecting community-building 

[5:35] Brands have to activate people, not algorithms  

[8:45] Ideology creates cultural consumption

[10:44] Brand ideology transcends industries

[19:18] How non-visible companies can use tangibility to brand build

[20:04] Effective market research goes beyond just data

[23:57] Great marketing taps into the moment

[30:04] Why Marcus wrote this book

[31:30] How to reach Marcus

Listen: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | SoundCloud | Stitcher | Overcast | Amazon | Google Podcasts | Pocket Casts | RSS

Host: Dan Runcie, @RuncieDan, trapital.co

Guests: Marcus Collins, @marctothec

This episode is sponsored by DICE. Learn more about why artists, venues, and promoters love to partner with DICE for their ticketing needs. Visit dice.fm

This episode is also brought to you in collaboration with Primary Wave. James Brown would have turned 90 this month. Let’s revisit his cultural legacy and check out his greatest hits.

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TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:00] Marcus Collins: The hope for me personally, is to scale my impact like I believe that reasonable, my ideology, my belief, my conviction is that we're put in this world to serve God, and serve each other. That's what I believe, and the way I serve is by helping people realize the best version themselves operate the highest fidelity. So the book is a way to scale my impact.

[00:00:21] Dan Runcie Intro: Hey, welcome to the Trapital Podcast. I'm your host and the founder of Trapital, Dan Runcie. This podcast is your place to gain insights from executives in music, media, entertainment, and more who are taking hip hop culture to the next level.

[00:00:45] Dan Runcie Guest Intro: Today's episode is all about culture, culture's ability to drive the decisions we make in business, in society and more. And our guest is the one and only Dr. Marcus Collins. He is an award-winning marketer. He's a professor at the Ross School of Businesses, university of Michigan, go blue. And he has done a number of impressive things in his career, working on campaigns like Apple Music, Budweiser, made in America's Festival, Bud Light Platinum, Beyonce and her digital work, especially in the Sasha Fierce era. He's also worked with Matthew Knowles, Steve Stout, and many others in the industry today, and he is the author of a new book that just came out called For the Culture. So in this episode we talked a lot about brands reaching that ideology level, which Marcus describes as that top tier that a brand could reach in terms of how it connects and identifies with people and in communities.

So we talk about what that looks like. We also talk about Marcus' goals for this book, how that shapes his viewpoints and some of the challenges that brands can face. With regards to branding and reaching that ideology level, whether certain industries are more or less disposed to being able to get there and more.

I give Marcus a ton of credit, him and I had met over a decade ago, back when I was in business school at Michigan as well, and seeing his career path and a lot of the decisions that he was able to make a transition into doing something he truly loves and is one of the best people in the world at what he does, gave me inspiration to not only see that there were plenty of other non-traditional career paths after going to business school, but I think a lot of that also informed the type of work that I now do at Trapital today and how I try to continue myself on the path that makes most sense for me.

So really great conversation, always great to have him on a second time on the podcast. So here's my conversation with Marcus. Hope you enjoy it.

[00:02:41] Dan Runcie: All right. We are joined today by the one and only Dr. Marcus Collins, author of For the Culture, an award-winning marketer and a Ross alum. Go Blue. Welcome back, man.

[00:02:51] Marcus Collins: That's right. Thanks man. Thanks for having me, doc. Always a pleasure to be with

[00:02:55] Dan Runcie: Likewise and your book. Great job on it. Great job on the release too. You got a bunch of heavy hitters giving support for this. And one of the things that I wanna start with, you've talked about this before, the ideology hierarchy that brands go through and that journey. So for the listeners, can you first explain what that is and then an example of a brand that you think has gotten there and done A good example of that.

[00:03:20] Marcus Collins: Yeah, so we think about ideology, it's about the way the brand sees the world, like the point of view that the brand has it's conviction. Some call it as purpose. It's really the driving belief that dictates where the brand goes, what it says, what it does, and with whom. it shows up in the world.

And we all think about strong brands as brands that people know. Oh, I know that brand. we're strong. Where a lot of brands that we know that we don't consume from, right? Like Sears, we know that brand Blockbuster, we know that brand, but clearly people weren't showing up. So awareness isn't enough. One step up, we go, well there's, I know that brand and it has good quality, right?

Oh, that's awesome. I know the brand has has good quality. It's a stronger brand. But to go one step higher is to know the brand. Strong, good quality, but it's also considered a leader in the space, right? So you've got like a Hulu and a Netflix and a Tubly. Which one is more trusted? Well, definitely ain't Tubly, right?

Because they're not considered anywhere close to being a leader in the space. A step up from that is trust and confidence. I trust the brand. Not only do I know it, it has, good products. it's a leader in the category, but I also trust it. I have confidence in it. We think about, the headphones that we know to be the most trusted headphones in the market.

We'll say, oh, that's Bose, right? Bose is demonstratively, a leader in the category and the most trusted headphones. Think about audio quality, sonic quality. However, Bose is bested in the market by Beats by Dre. Why is that? Because Beats by Dre operates at a higher level still. It's association and relevance that the brand, it's relevant for someone like me and the association, the imagery I have that's associated to the brand makes it seem cooler, right?

Which is why Beats by Dre owned like 48% of the market when they were before AirPods came out, right when it came to the headphone market. But then it's one step higher than that. And the most strongest brands operate at this zenith, this pinnacle of brand strength. And that's ideology. They transcend the value propositions of the product.

My razor sharper, my battery last longer, my car goes faster, and they operate at a place of conviction. And this is so strong for brands because people consume those brands, not just cuz of what they are and what they do, but because who these people are. And the brand becomes an extension of my identity.

of Who I am, a Patagonia fleece is just as warm as a Columbia fleece, however, where in Patagonia says something about who I am, my identity, that I believe in mitigating our impact on the environment, and that's massively powerful.

[00:06:01] Dan Runcie: This is relevant for musicians and artists as well, because I think they have some of those ideological brands too. I've been looking at the trends, especially with vinyl sales. More than half of the people that are buying vinyl don't have players. They're buying them to put them on display to showcase them.

It is an extension of them. I want you to think that I am the type of person that listens to Drake, that listens to Tyler the creator. That's that zenith that we're talking about. it

[00:06:29] Marcus Collins: It was so cool, and I fully agree with you. A few years ago, Fruit of the Loom, they do partnerships with musical acts like, Metallica, Kiss, Aerosmith, Seal's t-shirts. People got metallic on their, shirts. That's a licensing deal between fruit, the loos, and those musical acts.

And a few years back, fruit looms. Were looking at their book of business to see which. brand, likeness which artists l likeness was doing better than the others. So they can re-up those licenses and they found that the Ramones was outperforming Kiss, Metallica, Aerosmith. They're like, what's going on The Ramones little small little band.

Then they had like two albums out in the seventies, like, what's happening here? So they asked those fans, they said, you know, you must be a really big fan of the Ramones that you bought this t-shirt. They were like, Nah, I don't even know they're music. But the Ramones mean punk rock, and they want to be seen as punk rock, the meaning associated with the brand, that vessel of meaning that is brand.

People use it as an identity mark, not because of what it is, but because of who they are. I mean, the biggest brands that we know, the biggest artists that we know, they all transcend what they do and operate at a level of why they do it. In the words of Simon Sinek,

[00:07:43] Dan Runcie: This reminds me of those Iron Maiden t-shirts. You remember that era? Maybe it was like five, seven years ago when everybody was wearing Iron Maiden t-shirts. I don't know if they were really listened to the music, but I think it's that thing as well where they just wanna be seen like the type of person that would identify with that

[00:07:58] Marcus Collins: Of course not. Of course not. I mean, people are wearing, Red Bull t-shirts. That was a thing, is a way of signaling something about yourself. NASA t-shirts. Exactly. Like just signaling something about yourself. And really, that's all we're trying to do to try to peacock our way through the world signal who we are in hopes that we can find people who are like ourselves and we find connection because that's what we are, we're social animals by nature.

[00:08:21] Dan Runcie: And a lot of this, at least what we talked about so far, are consumer brands. This applies at the enterprise level as well. I think a company like McKinsey aligns perfectly. There is a status that you're able to send both internally within the organization and externally by hiring that firm, spending the seven figures for them to come and work on your project because of what you want to be able to say.

[00:08:45] Marcus Collins: To say, McKenzie is our agency, that's who does our strategy work, McKenzie, and we know this from being in business school, that people want McKenzie on their resume. Because of what McKenzie means, what it signifies, you know, there's a sociologist named Pierre Perdue, who talks about this idea of cultural capital that our consumption, the more conspicuous it is, the more we align, value from it.

There is embodied cultural capital. That is our skills, our knowledge, what we know, like, you know, if you go to the opera and, you know, the literature, you know, the Odyssey, you know the Homer, you know all that stuff. Then you have a amount of, value, of capital, of cultural capital.

And the idea is that if you were an equestrian growing up, that signals that you've come from wealth and your friends who were equestrians growing up signals that they come from wealth and who fr what friends, do you have friends like those and those friends open up doors for you for jobs? VC funding and the alike, right?

So that cultural capital that embodied cultural capital turns into financial capital. The same thing goes with objectified cultural capital, the things that we buy, the clothes that we wear, the cars that we drive. This a way of signaling who we are in the world in an effort to meet other people like ourselves, that open up door for financial capital.

The same thing goes for institutional cultural capital where I go to school, where I work, what fraternity I joined, whether I was in Jack and Jill, like these things signal who we are in the world that open up more financial economic opportunities for ourselves. So you're right. So it's not just, B2C as we typically think about it.

These are all the many ways that we signal who we are in the world, the companies we work for, the schools we went to, the institutions that we frequent. These are all consumption behavior to signal our identity. So that we might find people like ourselves that create more social and financial opportunities for ourselves.

[00:10:44] Dan Runcie: Are there certain industries or sectors that hitting that ideological level is extremely difficult or it's almost impossible? I think back to my own career experience. I've had internships at cable companies and airlines, and I think that there's challenges, especially just given the nature of their businesses, how consumers interact with them.

But even I think about companies in waste management and areas like that. Companies that could have strong brands and business businesses, but is there a ceiling of how high certain companies and certain industries can go because of the industry dynamics?

[00:11:19] Marcus Collins: I think that if a company defines itself by what it does, then yes, there is a ceiling. But if a company defines itself by what it believes, I think the possibilities are endless. Cuz even as you name off those companies, we look at them through the lens of their industry, their category. And they are defined by their category.

Oh, you have waste management services. So you are in waste management. You have an airline. So you are in the airline industry. you make microprocessors, so you're the micro processing industry. When you only define yourself by the product services or product goods you bring to the world, then that's the only opportunity you have.

But when you elevate beyond that, you say, we believe this. We just so happened to provide waste management services. Imagine if we said this is arbitrarily speaking. Imagine we said that we believe that a clean environment makes for. a better life. Let's just say that. I'm just make that up, right.

A clean environment makes for a better life, and that's why we have sanitation services, waste management services. Then we go, well, what else could be better if it were clean? Well, what if we cleaned up the oceans? We're no longer in the waste management business. We are in the cleaning oceans business.

Or, well, what if we cleaned up the internet? Mm. What if we went through the internet and found all the smut, all the whatever, the things that aren't as savory. Maybe for kids and we're going to clean the internet up. We're gonna create products to do that. We just so happen to do waste management.

We still happen to clean up oceans. We still happen to create software that cleans up the internet. But what we do that because we believe that a clean environment creates for better solutions. Again, I just riff that but the idea is that if you operate at that level, you are not defined by your category and what you do.

You're defined by your conviction and why you do it, and that is just Superman powerful. And then you bring in people who see the road the way you do.

[00:13:12] Dan Runcie: I think we just gave an entire industry. A market class and a playbook that they can use moving forward.

[00:13:19] Marcus Collins: That's right. We should of held onto that one.

[00:13:21] Dan Runcie: But you're right, because it also makes me think of insurance, and I know you worked with translation and one of their big accounts has been State Farm, and if you look at the product itself, the features of that product don't necessarily align on the surface of what you would think could be something that is something you would advertise in that way, but we look at the benefits. That's how you can think more broadly. We can get to Chris Paul versus Cliff Paul, and so many of the other memorable campaigns we've seen from State Farm.

[00:13:50] Marcus Collins: What's actually quite interesting about that and you're spot on, is that I don't think there's very many industries as commoditized as the insurance industry. They all use the same actuaries. All of them use the exact same actuaries, just some of them are more conservative than others, and they're willing to charge you a premium for their product.

And I suppose the way they, you know, get it, the job done at the end of the day is better than others. But according to the research, from when I was working in insurance, people only report their collisions, their calamities 25 to 35% of the time. So 65% of the time, at best, people aren't even reporting the accidents.

So the brand, the company never comes in to actually make good on their promise, right? We're just really hanging on there based on what this brand is all about. And State Farm exists because they believe that people should live life more confidently every day to help people live life more confidently every day.

This will happen to have 18,000 agents across the country to help people make better decisions. This will happen to have to cover your stuff and help provide financial services, but why they do it? To help people live life more confidently every day. And now you say, okay, so how might we do that?

Well, What does that mean for basketball? The NBA, one of their sponsorships? Where is actual statistic for helping people in the n NBA called the assist? Let's go after that. Now you have a creative platform to be a part of this institution that we call the NBA, but also another way of demonstrating why you exist, not what you do.

[00:15:26] Dan Runcie: Makes sense. Makes sense. Yeah. I mean, I think that's applicable for a number of industries here, and we're getting into insights and just how you perceive people. And one of the things that we're talking about is who are the best market researchers. You have this piece in the book, and you've talked about this before, about why comedians are actually some of the best market researchers out there.

Could you talk a little bit more about that?

[00:15:49] Marcus Collins: Yeah. Comedians are phenomenal because they just observe people. They observe us humans as the social actors that we are, as we navigate the phenomenal world that we live in, and they look at people and go, that's odd. You see what she did? Oh, and he did it too. And they did it. And they did it. Okay. This is a thing, and as they observe people act, they apply theory to describe what they saw, right?

They use theory to describe the socially phenomenal world that we live in, and then they say, okay, this is why it's happening. This is the underlying physics of why these people act the way they do, and then they tell it with a slant. They find an interesting way to communicate it such a way that when they get on stage and go, every time we go to the mall, you notice that you do this, we all go, oh my goodness, that's so me.

I totally do that. Of course you do, because they have used what we know is to be the best description of human behavior. Theory and applied it to something empirical that happens. The phenomenon that we take on, the chances of us understanding people are far higher when those two things are together and the chances of us saying something that's meaningful to them is far greater when we tell it with a slant.

And that's what good marketers do, mark, especially advertisers do. But market research, no one does it better than comedians. Full stop.

[00:17:12] Dan Runcie: And this gets at something else. I know you've talked about comedians are able to get at that intimacy level. They're actually interacting with people. They're seeing things, and they're not mistaking that for information. And I think that's one of the challenges. I know you've talked about how we have so much data.

There's so many companies that can easily just turn on Facebook ads, turn on Google ads, so you could see the profiles, but that doesn't necessarily give you that deep engagement to be able to understand beyond, and I feel like that's becoming a bit more and more of a challenge.

[00:17:44] Marcus Collins: Exactly, that's the paradox. More information, very little intimacy and comedians are, have always been intimate and marketers used to be intimate, but as we get more. Information, more data. We go, oh, I don't need to go spend time with people. I don't need to go talk to people because I have their search history.

I have their click history, I have their downloads. I have what they watch and what they listen to that describes who they are. It describes what they do. To get to who they are, we have to get closer. We need greater proximity to understand the underlying physics that govern, why they listen to trap music and why they watch, Succession, and why they consume what they consume, why they're going back into the nineties for fashion inspiration.

Why is that happening? We can observe it and say, oh, cool, that's a thing. That's a trend spotting, but you don't know what's going on until you get close to people. And this is what we have to do as marketers. And I would even argue that maybe this is what we need to be doing as a society. Just get a little closer to people and it's easy to look at someone and go, oh, they're crazy.

Because they operate by a different meaning system than we do, than different cultural characteristics than we do. But if we understand that the way we see the world is subjective, not objective, we go, oh, well my truth isn't, their truth doesn't mean that they're wrong. It just means it's just a little different.

And the closer I get to understanding how these people make, meaning, how they navigate the world. The more connected I probably feel to them, but as a marketer, the more likely I am to interact with them, to engage them, to get them to adopt behavior, which is the core function of our gig.

[00:19:18] Dan Runcie: This reminds me of Tyler Perry and what he's done with Tyler Perry Studios too. Of course, we all know the backstory. He was doing his plays. His plays were able to gain great traction. He ended up moving that into movies and his TV shows and everything he's done since. But even through all that success, he still was doing the plays.

That was his opportunity to be in front of the actual audiences, see how they reacted. He would make jokes different in the north versus the south versus the Midwest, and that's his way of, although he may not be a traditional comedian, he's still wearing all the hats and he's still providing humor through his content.

So I think that's one of the things that doesn't get talked about as much, about why he's been able to build this billion dollar empire.

[00:20:05] Marcus Collins: That's right and the best set up comedians, they still go to the Laugh factory. They still go to the hole in the wall to try new bits to sign, try new material. Oh, they laughed at that one, not this one. Okay. That one got in. Okay, cool. They build their set by workshopping it iteratively, right?

But marketers, that we hold onto it. We concoct it in the walls of our offices and then we release it to the world, prayerfully, hopefully in Shallah that it's gonna connect with someone. And it's like, well, yeah, there's some randomness that we can't control. Sure, we can't predict everything, but we can certainly increase the likelihood of connecting by just getting closer.

And the challenge is that there are perverse incentives that make getting closer a challenge. In that it takes time. It takes effort to build relationships, to talk to people, to see the world through their lenses. Where I've had, I got one quarter to turn my business around, man, whatever's the most efficient.

And that's what we rely on. And we wonder why we don't have strong relationships with our consumers because we look at consumers as machines, eat messages and crap cash, as opposed to real life human beings who navigate the world through their cultural lenses.

[00:21:18] Dan Runcie: Do you think this got worse since the pandemic?

[00:21:21] Marcus Collins: I would say in some ways, yes, in some ways, no. I think that there was a level of elasticity that when the pandemic hit, people were emailing everyone in their database saying, We care about. You we're thinking about you and then someone made that film where it took all the ads from all the marketers and they were saying all the same things.

And you go, this is nonsense. And marketers went, oh, they're right. So let's like be a little bit more human. And people got human like, like the murder of George Floyd. People were like, oh, there's a world that exists beyond my own. there are lenses that are translating the world that aren't my own.

Let me go see the world through other people's eyes. And for a moment, therefore, a brief moment we were getting in like some humanity in the world. But then once we got back to some normality, some normalcy, we snapped back into place. All right, cool. Let's use the data. Tells us, let's use it, this news to that.

I thought that the pandemic was an interesting time because people just became a bit more empathetic, right? We saw companies treat their employees a little bit differently. They're like, hey, gives people some grace. People need time. People need space. like people's needs. And then once we went back to quote unquote normal, assuming we're back to some kinda normality, get back to work, get back in the office, gonna razor sharper.

My battery lasts longer, my car goes faster. You aren't human, kind of a sad situation. and you would think that kind of inogen shock to the system will wake us up a little bit more. But unfortunately I think that there's some return to status quo a bit.

[00:22:53] Dan Runcie: Part of the challenge seemed like there was so much growth that so many software and tech companies had during the pandemic, given the nature of the services they offered, and because the pandemic and lockdowns limited, then from the in-person interactions, it could be very easy to think, okay, well we don't need to spend the money on those focus groups.

We don't need to spend the money on having our leadership team be out in the field to interact with people. Look at what we're able to do in the current ecosystem and we saw that there was just so much growth, especially from March, 2020 up until November, 2021. Things were booming, but then. World started to open back up and I feel like we're starting to see it more.

We're seeing more flexibility with what certain companies are doing in terms of their policies, whether they are letting people work from home. But I'm also seeing people wanting more in-person events, more engagement. There is an appetite for this, which I think should hopefully translate to an appetite to getting in-person time and more inpe intimacy with the people you're actually trying to serve.

[00:23:57] Marcus Collins: Well, what I think is awesome. Is that the technologies help facilitate ways to get closer, even if you can't in person, right? So, you know, we typically use ethnographic research for, when we're trying to study culture, right? Go into people's cultural contexts, observe them, interact with them, don't be, you know, sort of a tourist, be a part of the community.

But then there's netnographic research, which is the same thing in ethnography, just in online spaces. In fact, all of my academic work. All my academic research is typically done on Reddit like I'm observing these communities in their cultural contexts, practice their cultural subscription, and the beautiful part about Reddit, truly.

Now, I'm about to just nerd out for a moment here cause we could do that. Dan, is that Reddit has moderators that actually clinging the data for you. The moderators, they remove content that's not within the cultural conventions of the community, and then they'll get rid of people who post things that are outside of the norms of the community.

They are cleaning the data for us to observe this community operate and abide by its cultural characteristics for a researcher goodnight. It doesn't get any better than that. And we get to observe these people make meaning through their discourse in an unobtrusive way. And not only that, we get over the hurdle that people have about qualitative research, that the sample size is so small that we can see this in massive, massive, massive, occasions in my dissertation work, I had over 12 million lines of text. I'm watching people engage. And like I'm going through it and looking at how they make meaning, the language they use, the memes that they use, all these different texts that they use in an effort to communicate, to help make meaning, negotiate, construct meaning.

That's superman powerful. And if nothing else, this creates great opportunity for us, right? You could do interviews via Zoom. We did some ethnographic work, with folks in China when mainland China wasn't letting anyone in or out, so we couldn't even go be in the field. So we used Zoom. That was helpful, right?

The technology is meant to extend our human behaviors, right? It means to extend where we have human limitations. And if we don't take advantage of that, what are we doing really?

[00:26:15] Dan Runcie: I love that you mentioned Reddit there because it is a great lens into all of these subreddit. Each of them is a community that provides a reflection on what that broader community may be thinking, what they if, how they evaluate things and how they interact with each other. How do you, from an audience segmentation perspective, how do you look at the conversations that may happen within those communities and.

Get an idea of how that may extend to a broader community, knowing that Reddit itself does attract, maybe a more analytical or a deeper type of thought that may be slightly different in terms of the broader subreddit community represents.

[00:26:53] Marcus Collins: Sure. So, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. So when we're going out in the field to Stu to study, see, I wanna study cost players. I'm gonna go to Comic-Con where the hardcore cost players are, because these are the people that are abiding by the cultural characteristics of what it means to be a cost player, right?

I'm gonna implant myself where they are and engage with them because oftentimes these are people that are like a part that are leading the construction of an a negotiation of meaning among the community. So Reddit, to your point, these are people who are hardcore into it. And maybe there's some bias in the fact that they're more inclined to be there than others, but they're representative of the community.

And what we do in all research truly, is that we look at a sample of the market and then we try to generalize the learnings, right? So we, we look at, social phenomenon and try to find generalizability of it. So my research, particularly my dissertation, I looked at how brands of branded products spread within a cultural context.

And I chose hip hop because hip hop's tentacles are. I mean, I'm talking to the guy who wrote the book on this, and you know this very well, how widespread hip hop's impact is in like, almost every industry. You could think of jewelry, high fashion, high tech, auto, sneakers, beauty, pharmaceuticals, everything, hip hiphop touches almost every single thing.

So I studied, how brands and branded products spread in hiphop culture. Specifically, this community looked at the mechanisms by which they make meaning and they evaluate and legitimate products as they spread, throughout, throughout the community. And then generalized that broadly on how communities make meaning.

Now, there'll be nuances that'll be different for rock climbers versus pickle ballers versus runners. But at its core, these are the processes by which things spread. So we try to get at some generalizability, especially when we have a wide swath of data to analyze.

[00:28:56] Dan Runcie: Makes sense, and I know we've talked about that dissertation before. it's powerful. I mean, and that's so much of what attracted me to this work as well. We see how hip hop is so pervasive in every corner that it touches. And that's only going to continue even if they may not call it hip hop in the future.

We still know where the origins come from, I say that because of just some trends I'm seeing in terms of how certain songs have been categorized and they've been talking about hip hop's decline. But we know what's there when we hear general music themes. This is the origination place. This is where it is, and this culture is now about to celebrate its 50th year in a few months, so it's just great.

[00:29:34] Marcus Collins: I mean, which is why Trapital is so important, man. Like it's, you need, cultural producers to preach the gospel and to quantify its impact on commerce in the economy, which is you're doing the good work.

[00:29:46] Dan Runcie: Thank you. Appreciate that. So before we close things out, let's talk a bit more about for the culture itself. You've been doing so much work in this space, you already had a great platform. What was the value add for you with this book, putting it out there, what does it do for you moving forward and how is that process?

[00:30:04] Marcus Collins: The hope for me personally, is to scale my impact like I believe that reasonable, my ideology, my belief, my conviction is that we're put in this world to serve God, and serve each other. That's what I believe, and the way I serve is by helping people realize the best version themselves operate the highest fidelity.

So the book is a way to scale my impact. As opposed to if you can't be in a Michigan classroom and you can't be a client at Widen Kennedy, or you can't be on my team at Widen Kennedy, here's a way to get some of, some of the thought leadership, right? But the other part, it's to helpfully raise, the industry that if we are using different language, A better Rosetta Stone talk about culture that will be better practitioners of culture and bear some responsibility to what we do. So we're not conquesting people's culture to sell more widgets, but we're actually contributing to it, realizing, that when we're using other people's cultural markers, we run the risk of what we know is appropriation.

If we do that without understanding the meaning that it's associated to those things. And once we understand that, we go, oh, okay. We're not just gonna pimp their thing out, we're gonna contribute to the community that actually has made this thing a thing. And the hope is that, the residuals from that, the reverberation from that, will make a little dent in the world and would've I would've done my part.

if that happens.

[00:31:30] Dan Runcie: Makes sense. Love it. Well, for people that are listening along and wanna get a copy of further culture themselves, where can they get it and where can they follow you?

[00:31:38] Marcus Collins: the book for the cultures available where all books are sold, particularly Amazon. you could find me at @marctothec, m a r c t o t h e c at all the social places, and marctothec.com/.

[00:31:50] Dan Runcie: Love it. Dr. Marcus Collins. Thank you.

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