Dr. Marcus Collins
speaker
97 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Dr. Marcus Collins’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
about you, not because they love you so much, but because they love their people. And that's a powerful place to be.
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.
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.
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