I found For the Culture by Marcus Collins to be a fascinating read that starts by introducing concepts from social psychology, backed by a solid foundation of research, to start the reader off on an academic understanding of the topic at hand before launching into his explanation of "tribes", which he defined as, "real. They’re made up of real people, and people use them to communicate who they are and demarcate how they fit in the world." Collins then goes on to explain that in order to sell a product or service, you must understand the tribe if you want to succeed at marketing to them because you need to tailor the message to that tribe so that they can derive their own meaning from it. Overall, this book was a great study of sociology, psychology, and marketing, and how these are combined to condition the buyer to be an endless consumer. Scary, but insightful.

For The Culture by Marcus Collins it’s not a long book but is it very interesting one from Patagonia‘s moral stance on consuming more stuff than we need to AGIs wanting to turn black Friday into go outside Friday mini companies have taken a chance at a financial hit to stand up for what they believe in in this book talks about how that transfers to the social zeitgeist he not only talked about the things that worked socially but the things that didn’t work like Kendall Jenner‘s Pepsi commercial and Kim Kardashians corn rolls I found this book very interesting and it didn’t take me long to finish and wish there was more by the end hi to him a child of the 80s so totally got the whole thing with Eddie Murphy and the stand-up comedy from the 80s. Even though I don’t agree about cultural appropriation because if we divided everyone’s inventions and held them to that race we would spend more time looking up if we’re allowed to use ,wear or acknowledge something then we would actually interaction with the thing we want to use and as far as calling cornrows Bo Derrick‘s braids the only reason her hair was like that was because in the 70s and 80s when you went on a tropical vacation natives would be there wanting to braid your hair for five or $10 it’s not like both Derek went into a beauty salon and said give me cornrows a lot of vacationers in that era healthy hair like that I don’t know why people find it so convenient to forget that I guess because it doesn’t fit their narrative. Either way it doesn’t take away from the greatness of this book it is so interesting and a study in pop culture it’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed. as I said it isn’t a long book but has a lot to say and all interesting. I received this book from NetGalley and a publisher but I am leaving this review voluntarily please forgive any mistakes as I am blind and dictate my review.

First, let’s start with the good, because For the Culture is filled with it. Marcus Collins is the head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, and no wonder, the guy is dazzling. He’s also a professor of marketing at the University of Michigan, and it shows—his book is packed with information clearly and engagingly explained, and laid out almost like a course.

Collins starts by introducing concepts from social psychology, providing us with a solid foundation for what comes next. There are simply too many insights for me to do For the Culture justice, but this excerpt should give you a pretty good idea of what the book is about:

“… tribes are real. They’re made up of real people, and people use them to communicate who they are and demarcate how they fit in the world. Segments, on the other hand, are not real. They are a construct that marketers create where people are placed into homogeneous-like groups based on a loose proxy that helps us identify who they are and predict what they are likely to do. Segments are clean and neat. But real people are complex and messy.

Unfortunately, this delineation is often lost on marketers, who rely on demographics to describe people based on their age, race, gender, household income, geography, and education. Demographics provide discrete boxes to put people into and help us make the world neat. But here’s the thing: demographics, while factual, don’t accurately describe who people are.

Demographics never get close enough to capture the nuances that make me who I truly am. However, my tribes do, which makes tribes a better means of segmenting the market than demographics. Plus, people self-identify by their tribes and adhere to the cultural characteristics of the tribes, and of the congregation more broadly. Therefore, our behaviors are much more likely to be predictive of the behaviors of people like us than the fictional boxes that marketers construct. Through this lens, segmentation and targeting become very clear. We divide the market into two segments: those who believe and those who do not. We then target the believers, who are more inclined to move, and move on past the nonbelievers.”

Collins then explains you can’t tell tribes how to feel about your product or service, you have to essentially join the tribe to see how they think, and then tailor your message so they can then make their own meaning from it. He shares some brilliant examples of work he did for Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, McDonald’s, and other brands. I don’t call them brilliant lightly, either—they’re pretty much masterpieces of brand marketing.

Which leads me to the bad: Collins ends his book with an entreaty to use this knowledge for good. He writes, “It’s through stories that we preach the gospel to the congregation—the collection of people who see the world the way we do. For this reason alone, we bear a great responsibility when we use storytelling as a vessel to preach the gospel… Now that you have the skills, you have an implicit responsibility to use them ethically, realizing that the ramifications of our stories can have a long-lasting material effect on people.” Sounds great, right? But if we go back to the examples I mentioned above, you can’t help but notice a serious gap between what Collins does and what he asks us to do.

In the Barclay’s Center example, he describes that there was great opposition to the stadium being built in Brooklyn because of the potential environmental impact of the area and the displacement of long-standing businesses and homeowners due to the gentrification it would bring to the neighborhood. Collins’s solution? A campaign appealing to Brooklyn pride through which locals start identifying with their new team (the Brooklyn Nets, a middling New Jersey basketball team relocating to go with the stadium). Support for the new stadium surged. Did this help the businesses and homeowners from being displaced? Did it in any way lessen the environmental impact? Of course not, but Barclays got what it wanted.

And then there’s McDonald’s. Plagued by the fallout from Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, lawsuits from obese customers, and the utter failure of their attempts at a healthier menu, the burger chain was in trouble. Collins came to the rescue with a heartwarming and very relatable campaign in which celebrities shared their usual orders at McDonald’s, helping consumers see themselves as part of a tribe that includes their idols. Obesity be damned, McDonald’s was back in business.

We don’t read marketing books for lessons in morality, and this is why—many marketers are blind, or at least very near-sighted, when it comes to the effects of our work on people, instead we take pride in doing a good job for our clients.

TL;DR A brilliant book on how to leverage subcultures to embrace and evangelize your brand, marred only by a feeble plea for ethics that the author himself doesn’t live up to.