Dr. Marcus Collins
Appearances
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Marcus, when you started this journey, man, what was your because? It was because people didn't think I could. People doubted me, and maybe even I doubted myself.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I go, just take your money back. Like, I can't do this. Like, this is a mistake. I've made a mistake here. And here's where things got interesting for me is that I thought, okay, what am I trying to say? What's the argument I'm trying to say? I'm trying to say that culture is important. So many people have said this. People a million times smarter than me have written that.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
People know that intuitively. But what can I bring to the discourse that's unique? And I thought about it for a while, and it dawned on me sort of serendipitously that those early scholars of sociology, which is where most of my academic repertoire sort of sits, that those early scholars of sociology, they studied – culture by observing religion. And I go, Oh dude, I'm a church boy.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I am blessed and highly favored and so very grateful to be with you.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Like I could, that's a perspective I can have, you know? And as a marketer, I realized that we spend so much of our lexicon actually comes from the theology. We say, you know, we need people to evangelize the brand. We need people to convert over. It's like, Oh, this, this is all theological nomenclature that is of the the theory that culture was studied.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I happen to be a practitioner, so I could tell stories that I've actually done using this work. And it was like, for good measure, I'm a product of hip hop. I'm a hip hop fan. That is a culture to which I studied as a doctoral student and that I know as a fan. And it was really the intersection of all those cylindrical circles. That's the book I'm gonna write.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
A book that interrogates culture through a sociological lens, framed through what we know of religion, theology, through a practitioner's lens with a hip-hop slant to it. That's the book.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Man, I literally was like, I have nothing else to say. Like there's, there's nothing else. Like get squeezing thing out of me. I've written down everything I thought I knew about this topic. And it wasn't that my understanding was shallow. It's just, I did not have a voice. to say it. I was regurgitating what the literature says as opposed to having a point of view.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I think that that's been one of like the biggest learnings for me is that if we put things in the world, whether you write, you talk, you host a podcast, whatever the cultural production you create, it's not enough to just to create. You have to create with the point of view that you have on the world.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And it's that point of view that people go, oh, I see myself in it and realize that not everybody's going to like it either. And that's cool too. It ain't for everybody, you know? And the idea is that I write from a place that is vulnerable and that is honest and hopes that people see my humanity in it and they see their humanity as a result of it.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Okay. For those entrepreneurs who are starting early in their career, three to four years, I would say this. You think that you cannot do marketing fidelity that you want to because you don't have the means or the resources. And I would say that is the biggest lie that you could tell yourself. Because every brand that we look at out in the world
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
They were once exactly where you are, exactly where you are. And they built themselves to that. And the best ones built themselves to that by being disciplined, being disciplined about who they are as a brand, which requires a little vocabulary lesson, if you will. I hate the word lesson. Let's just say it requires some vocabulary, a Rosetta Stone. marketing is going to market.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
That's what marketing is. And I would argue that everybody, whether you have marketing in your title or not, you are a marketer because you are going to market. You're either bringing products to market, you're bringing yourself to market if you're looking for a job, you're bringing ideas to market if you write or create content, whatever the case may be, we're all going to market.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Marketing is going to market, right? And the market is people. We're going to people in an effort to get people to adopt behavior. So then what is a brand? Well, brand historically, for 4,000 years, brands were essentially just a mark of ownership. We would mark our cattle as a way of saying, this belongs to me. These are Collins cows. I mark them as such so that you know them.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
That's a blessing, man. Thank you so much. That makes two of us. Let's do it.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
You can distinguish them from anybody else's cows. But brands have evolved to be much more. brands today aren't just identifiers. They are signifiers. They represent something. They are vessels of meaning that conjure up thoughts and feelings in the hearts and minds of people relative to a company, an institution, an organization, a product or a person.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I would say that brands mean something, but the strongest brands mean more than what they create. So if you are a razor blade, if you sell razor blades, you go, my brand is the best selling razor blades. I go, great, good luck with that. But it's the brands that transcend the category, that transcend the product and value propositions.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Those brands mean more and therefore they are more meaningful. They are more full of meaning and people find themselves investing themselves in it. You could do that today right now. You don't need a million dollar budget to do this. You have to first identify what do I believe? Now, what do I create? But what do I believe? How do I see the world?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
But you're a Michigan man, right?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And then you use all the resources at your disposal to go preach the gospel. Now, you're not trying to get on the Super Bowl stage and preach your gospel. No, no. Go door to door. Knock door to door, person to person, winning over a consumer a day, converting one a day.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
arbitrarily speaking, that allows you to not only do hand-to-hand combat, but also learn about how people respond to your message. Nike doesn't have that luxury. Nike has to convert millions a day. If not, it's a failure. Right. That's the cross that they bear. That's the burden that they bear behind the success they have. The burden you bear is far lower.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
A consumer a day, a viewer a day, one engagement a day. And you do this not by preaching the gospel about how sharp your razor is or how fast your car goes, but rather about what you believe and how you see the world. And people who believe the world the way you do, see the world the way you do, go, that's my brand. Then they go tell other people
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
about you, not because they love you so much, but because they love their people. And that's a powerful place to be.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
So what we see is an evolution of media. And the media is important because the media has meaning embedded in it. And as media evolves, we have to evolve with it. We have to make sure that we're giving the right message in the right context. That's great.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I wish I had the answer to that, but I'll tell you a little bit about who I am. I'm a product of Detroit. Now, I always start that way because I feel like Detroit was very influential in how I made sense of the world, how I framed the world. Being a city that is predominantly Black, but living in a world that straddled the fence of both.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
But what I would tell those established brands is that here's the benefit, that while yes, things have changed 1000%, but you know what hasn't changed very much? Us, humanity. So we have to start by understanding humanity, the underlying physics of what it means to be human. Those things change very, very, very, very, very slowly.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And if we start with the understanding of who people are, not customers, not voters, not subscribers, because that's their actions. It's not who they are, but understanding who people are and engage them as such. We can then say, all right, where are the best places to do that based upon what that media means? It's like this. It's like, you know, I feel totally licensed telling Eddie Murphy jokes.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
at the bar with my friends, right? They get it. They're totally fine with it. But I would never tell those jokes in the church sanctuary ever, even with the exact same friends. Why? Because that environment, that situation does not lend itself culturally to be acceptable. And the same jokes resonate, but the environment makes it different.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
So the question becomes then, what resonates with these people? A, these people who I'm trying to engage, and then what are the best environments in which I can do that? And then that's when we look at the evolving media landscape to say, okay, where should I be to do that thing? Because every surface area is media. Yeah.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I would push on it just a little bit. I would say that marketing without public relations is shallow. Correct. And so to your point, like public relations is a discipline that's about nurturing the nourishing and grooming the relationship between an entity and the public.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
It's about how do we influence, shape, and create interventions that inform the public zeitgeist, the collective mindset of the people. And I would say that if you have really good PR, we have really good relationship with the public, but you don't go to market, you never get a chance to benefit from that goodwill.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
If we define marketing as going to market, that going to market is a necessity to realize the benefit that comes from PR. But if you go to market with a product, but you have no relationship with the public, the chances of your marketing winning is pretty slim. So the idea is that these things are – they work in concert.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
together right you know we call it earned media you call it you know uh paid media you know i i'd say the idea here is that they are you know they got it um you know you have uh whether you are left wing or white right wing it's all one bird you know and the idea here is that pr and marketing going to market they work in concert in an effort to help you soar marcus bro
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I mean, I was a swimmer growing up, which wasn't a ton of Black folks swimming. So I lived in two different worlds at the same time. And having a city like Detroit as the backdrop just always created unique frames for me. It's a big city, but never thought of like as a New York and L.A. or even a Chicago. It was a tough city, but never thought of as sort of as gritty as I don't know.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I get the spirit of what you're getting at. I told you the spirit is that you could have the best product. You can have a very reasonable price. You have all the right distribution, what we call place. And you can have the really great promotions. The marketing communications may be spot on.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
But if you are not engaging with the public or if the frame in which the public translates you as a brand, as a person, as an entity, as an organization, as an institution, if those things aren't congruent, then all that going to market is for naught.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I think that the idea is that if we think about our going to market less about how do we sell things, cram things on people's throats, but instead, how do we service people? I think when we think of it that way, we go, oh, well, I'm in the relationship business then. That my marketing is in service. I'm going to market in service of people.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And therefore, the relationship I have with the public becomes tantamount to my ability to serve them. When those two things feel like they're of the same spirit, they're of the same ilk, and there is no bifurcation between the two. And now when you're there, now you're in lofty places.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Okay.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Of all time?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
No particular order. Tribe Called Quest, Redman, Jay-Z, Andre 3000. And I might get flack for this, but I'd be lying if I didn't say it. Kanye West. Old Kanye. Not just new Kanye. Old Kanye. Hip hop Kanye. Exactly. Exactly.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Yeah, he's in the path.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
That's my five. That's my five.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Oof. Oof. Scenario by Tribe Called Quest. Tribe.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
They probably hate that I say this, but Me, Myself, and I by De La Soul, because they hate that song themselves, but Me, Myself, and I just kind of talks to me. And, oh man, a part of me, I guess I would say, I guess I would say Flashing Lights, Kanye West. Okay.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And an honorable mention, honestly, would probably be I Wonder by Kanye West.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Yeah.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I don't want to. I don't want to be disparaging of another city, but I was always sort of in the middle. And because of that, there's always a chip on the city's shoulder. And I feel like everybody from the city sort of bears that. And I think that that sort of disposition followed me not only as an adolescent coming of age, but as a college student coming out of college, starting a company.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Start with what do you believe? Who are you? How do you see the world? And then find the people who see the world the way you do. These are your collective of the willing, people who believe also, and then preach the gospel to them. And what will happen is they'll go, finally, someone said it. man, I've been feeling this way forever. I thought I was the only one.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And they'll take your messaging, your branding, all your things that you put out in the world, and they will use them to express their own identity as their own identity project. And it will propagate into the population. They'll tell other people about you, not because they love you so much, but because they love their friends. And it'll come with a level of credence that you can never buy.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
That's the reverberating network effects of culture.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Almost every salutation. Everyone's just like, what up, doe? What up, fam? What up, doe? This is what we do. This is what we do.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Never. So when someone said, what up, doe? I was like, are you from the D?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Just like if you're from Philly, someone says, Dad John, you go, oh, you're a Philly guy. Or if someone's like, what up, son? You're from New York. We're just these lexicons. They're so telling of who we are. It's really powerful.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I was looking at your merch being really impressed, by the way.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Now we've got a Letterman's jacket. That's right. I'm grateful for that. And it's been informed by the marketplace. You know, like when we put things in the world, we're in discourse with the market and they are saying things back to us and we can decide to remain in discourse or just sort of fade away.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And what I realized is when I was out in the world talking about the book, people get the ideas intellectually, but they need just one sort of push to get them to apply it. I was like, oh, let's use the playing cards. Like, let's do that. Like that way, the questions I would ask them, they can ask themselves, right? And it can use that way to workshop those ideas internally.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
It's like, oh, that's what we got to do. And I thought about, you know, it was like freezing cold here in Michigan. And I was like, man, remember back in the day, I used to love my letterman jacket. I used to wear it in high school. I was like, actually, my favorite jackets have always been lettermans. Like when I played Sigma, my letterman jacket, I wore it all the time.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I was like, I don't have a letterman jacket. It's like, we need a letterman jacket for For the Culture. We got to do this.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I mean, that's very, very kind of you.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
a music company, much to the chagrin of my parents, to going back to school to get an MBA, to having the audacity to say, I think I can work at Apple, you know, to on the surface and see like I had the credentials to be there, then to then go run digital strategy for Beyonce, then to then go into advertising and then to then be a professor, then to then write a book, like all these things.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
I'm going to have a couple of deck of cards for you. I'm super, super grateful, truly. This has been a pleasure.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Yeah, fam. Why are we playing games? Absolutely. But this time I want to interview you.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Done. Consider it done.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Across all the social channels. I go by at Mark to the C, M-A-R-C-T-O-T-H-E-C or marktothec.com. Or you just Google Dr. Marcus Collins. I think the SEO has been kind to me. So I might show up.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Grateful for you, man. Looking forward to next time.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
It just felt like, you know, no one thought that I could do those things, which made me feel like, oh, well, let me show you what's up.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
You know, we tend to mistake the obvious because it's there. It's right in front of us.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
It was because people didn't think I could. And I think maybe a part of it, maybe I didn't know if I could. I've always hoped for and wanted the most of myself. I wouldn't say more of myself. I'd say the most of myself. I mean, if you asked me when I was in high school, I was going to be the fifth member of Boyz II Men. And I thought that that was possible. I thought it was legit possible. And my
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
parents, particularly my mother, was like, yo, you better go to school to be an engineer, fam. This music delusion you have in your mind, that's not happening for you. You're going to do this thing because it was logical. And I guess a part of me felt like, well, why should I abide by what is logical?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I think that my because is that because people doubted me, and maybe even I doubted myself, I wanted to... It wasn't about showing them that I could do it, but it was about proving to myself that I could do it, I suppose.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I mean, I thank you for that. And I think that, you know, it's the obvious that gets us every time. A gentleman named Duncan Watts wrote a book that essentially said the obvious typically isn't obvious until someone points it out to you. Once someone points out, you go, oh, man, totally. Absolutely. I think that we tend to mistake the obvious because it's there. It's right in front of us.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And I would love for you to elaborate that culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
The obvious thing about us is that we know how influential people are. We know. how influential culture is, but yet we spend a fraction of our time thinking about how do we better understand people so that we can understand how they influence each other? How do we better understand culture so we might be able to engage in such a way to get people to move?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And for me, I was working in an industry advertising where all we talked about was culture, get our ideas out in the culture, what's happening in culture. We had to move at the speed of culture. And I was saying this like multiple times a day. And what I realized that I didn't know very much about culture at all. I knew it sort of intuitively and I knew it conceptually and intellectually, but
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
But I didn't understand the underlying physics, the mechanisms that make culture work. And the more I came to understand it, the wider the aperture of how I saw the world became. It became so illuminated. In many ways, it was humbling because I realized I didn't know much about anything, which only, if anything, just sort of catalyzed curiosity in me.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And writing the book, to me, was sort of a love letter of sorts. to this exploration of culture. And it's not a period at the end of it all. It's sort of an ellipsis. It's like dot, dot, dot for people to continue to build on top of it. Because I feel like I built on top of those who came before me.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Amen. Amen. So I think about culture through a sociological lens. When the founding father of sociology, Emile Durkheim, talks about culture as a system of conventions and expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. And in the book, I try to detail what those systems are.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
It's identity, who we are, a shared way of seeing the world, and then a shared way of navigating the world, like a shared way of life, and then the way we express ourselves, a shared way of expression called cultural production. And the alchemy of those systems make up our culture.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And, you know, I try to prosecute this idea that our consumption behaviors and our behavioral adoption that happens in the marketplace out in the world is culturally mediated or culturally governed because of the way we culturally mediate. We mediate the world through our cultural lenses. And to your point, organizational culture... is the same system of conventions and expectations.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
They're the same collection of cognitions and kinetics that govern how we act here. And the leadership may go, we have a great culture here. We do X, Y, and Z. And it's like, well, is that really what's true? Because while you're trying to get people to buy into sort of the policies you create, They are negotiating, constructing what people like them do. And we know this intuitively.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Like you start a new job. Hey, Mick, how do I do this thing over here? You go, well, you're supposed to do this, but this is how everybody does it. That's your culture. What everybody does. That's the culture. The leaders of the organization make rules. But it's the people who make culture.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And real leadership is, you know, we talk about it here at Ross, that leadership is the ability to influence without authority. And leadership is about influencing without authority. And what's the most influential force in human behavior? Culture.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
So those who are able to contribute to, engage in, move the culture forward, those are the people who are most likely to influence people, to move people forward.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Well, we are social animals by nature, as Aristotle would say. We are built to be in community, are a social being. So if you believe evolution, evolution anthropologists will argue that the reason why we were able to evolve and to sustain as a species because we socialize, we cooperated. That is deep in our brainstem. And therefore, for us, trust and safety matter.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
is predicated based on our belonging, based on being a part of something, being with people, which is why we always try to find people like us. We're homophilic. We're self-loving. We find people like us. We feel safe in those numbers. So therefore, being a part of a thing becomes the ultimate currency in life because that means survival.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
The job of the brain is to make predictions about the future so that we increase our chances of surviving. And survival is... inextricably linked to being connected, then connectivity means survival. There's no currency greater than that. And we're just constantly just trying to find us. We're trying to bump into people like us.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
We're just in everything we do from the way we present ourselves, the clothes we wear, the products that we buy, how we style our hair, if you have it, of course, you know, all the, you know, you know, you know, we're about it.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
all these things and we'll actually navigate towards people who seem to be like us i mean i tell my students this all the time that when you were younger you went to sleepaway camp and you find someone who's from your hometown you go oh you're from detroit from detroit too oh my goodness oh my god best friends right we would do this when we travel abroad you could be in a foreign place you hear nothing but foreign accents accents until you hear an american accent you go where are you from someone goes i'm from chicago like i'm from detroit midwest what up
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
You immediately feel connected to that person. This is your brain saying your chances of survival are better by being with this person. And therefore we connect with them as social beings. There is nothing more important than to be connected. And we go to great, great lengths to do that very thing.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
You know, honestly, I did not think that at all. I had no intention of writing a book in any temporal sense, nothing like in the near term at all. I got an email from a literary agent who saw a talk that I gave somewhere online. And he emailed me and said, hey, I think you have a book in you. And I was like, what?
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And when the email came through, I honestly thought it was one of those like ghostwriting spam emails or like, hey, just dictate and we'll write the book for you. And no shade to them, but I just never would do that. And I was like, I just kind of ignored it. And then he emailed me again and said, hey, like, I'd love just 15 minutes of your time. I just think you have something interesting to say.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And he caught me right at the right time because we had just had our second daughter, Ivy, and I'm walking her in a stroller and I got a good half hour of time to walk her. So like, I'll take the call. So I was going to call. We talk and And, you know, I'm basically just grilling him about the industry because I didn't know very much about publishing at all. And we agreed to just write a proposal.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
No strings attached. We just write a proposal. And honestly, when I hung up the phone, I just compartmentalized it somewhere in the back of my mind so that I would do later in life. COVID happens and a close friend of mine passes very, very early, very early. A gentleman by the name of Marlo Stoudemire. Died March 24th, 2020.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And immediately it reminded me of a book I'd read years ago called Die Empty. And that book said that the most expensive real estate on the planet is the graveyard because that's where ideas are buried that weren't. brought to fruition. Books weren't written. Movies weren't made. Albums weren't recorded. Companies weren't started because everyone was waiting for the right time.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
Well, you don't have time. Time, you're on borrowed time. And in the middle of the pandemic, my mortality just felt so tangible. And I was like, I'm going to write this proposal. So I wrote the proposal. My agent liked it. I liked it. He said, let's pitch it. I'm like, great. What's the worst that can happen? Did they say no? And they said yes. And I was like, OK, cool. Great. Awesome.
Mick Unplugged
Dr Marcus Collins | Marketing that Matters: Dr Collins on Relationship Building and Authenticity
And we end up getting a deal to write this book. And then I go, oh, man, I don't write a book now. And the truth that matters, and being totally honest, this is like totally true. I wrote like 5,000 words and I go, I got nothing else to say. That's it. I got nothing else to say. And I think I was on, I was on the hook, contractually on the hook to write 85,000 words.