We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Marcus Collins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Marcus below.

Marcus , looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Over the course of your career, have you seen or experienced your industry completely flip-flop or change course on something?

For years, McDonald’s seemed to embody everything that was wrong with the American diet. The brand had become a symbol of food choices that were driving escalating rates of obesity and hypertension.

The company spent more than a decade trying to fight this perception among American consumers by targeting them with messaging about its updated menu, which offered healthier alternatives more in line with contemporary diet trends — but to no avail. Year over year, McDonald’s sales declined, and its brand perception continued to spiral downward.

Finally, the company decided to go on the offensive. Instead of combating the opposition’s hate and attempting to win over those in the middle, McDonald’s decided to focus on its fans — the people who self-identify as McDonald’s devotees despite the vitriol directed at the brand. The company’s tactics included launching its Famous Orders campaign, which celebrated the favored menu items of superstar fans (like hip-hop mogul Travis Scott and K-pop megastars BTS); creating adult-targeted Happy Meals; and promoting fans’ own menu hacks. In doing so, it tapped into what these devotees love about McDonald’s and not only activated their collective consumption but also inspired them to spread the word on behalf of the brand. The result of this strategy was a 10.4% increase in global revenue for McDonald’s from 2018 to 2021 and the return of dormant customers: more than a quarter of those who came in to buy the Travis Scott meal, for example, hadn’t visited the chain in over a year. Seemingly overnight, McDonald’s went from being a cautionary tale to the darling of brand marketing and a case study for advertising effectiveness.

Marcus , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I study culture and its influence on human behavior—consumption, organizations, and social institutions like politics and society writ large. Therefore, I spend my time helping companies see the world through other people’s meaning-making systems, i.e. cultural perspective, to achieve connection. But it wasn’t always that way.

I went to school for materials science engineering as an undergraduate, and the only humanities course I took was Sociology 101 during my freshman year. I was a latecomer to this world of human behavior and the social sciences. In fact, I was practically a decade into my career before I was even introduced to this world—or, more accurately, thrust into it. As a newly hired executive at a cutting-edge advertising agency called Translation, cofounded by Steve Stoute and Jay-Z, I was tasked with building and leading the company’s social media marketing practice. However, my understanding of “social” was primarily technology-centric. I had a deep knowledge of the social networking platforms that dominated at that time, like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Four- square. But I didn’t understand people, which was problematic because “social” is people.

I didn’t know much about culture at that time because I didn’t know much about people, despite my past experiences working on social media campaigns at Apple, running digital strategy for Beyoncé, and leading a handful of accounts at a pure-play social media agency. To rectify this lack of knowledge, I began to investigate the social sci- ences, reading everything I could get my hands on in order to learn more about people—and, subsequently, to learn more about culture.

I started with Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and it rang a bell inside me that I couldn’t unring. I found its exploration to be nothing short of fascinating. I read the book twice. In my second pass, I highlighted the research and researchers that I thought were most interesting and started studying their work, too. Ariely led me to Loewenstein, and Loewenstein led me to Kahneman. I detoured to McLuhan and then turned to Berger, who led me to Watts and Thaler, and soon after, I moved on to Asch and Milgram. My curiosity was insatiable, and as a result, I read broadly and deeply. It wasn’t long before my self-directed research began to manifest in my own work, and I started to get really good at my job.

With a new perspective on “social,” I found myself challenging the long-standing conventions of traditional advertising and began applying my newly acquired repertoire of academic theories to brand marketing. If a client expressed interest in creating an influencer program, I relied on network theory, whose dynamics inform the diffusion of influence, to guide my approach. If another client inquired about getting people to adopt a new behavior, I recounted the importance of creating defaults in the environmental design to act as a nudge. The more I applied theories from the social sciences to my marketing practice, the better the outcomes were. This was evidenced in my work that helped conceive and launch the Cliff Paul campaign for State Farm, where I leveraged Loewenstein’s “gap in knowledge” theory. Likewise, when I helped move the New Jersey Nets to New York to become the Brooklyn Nets, I borrowed from Bernays’s propaganda theory. Since I started this exploration over twelve years ago, I have embraced the world of academia to better understand people and the governing operating system that influences our collective behavior—culture. And, boy, did I ever embrace academia. Not only did I begin teaching at schools like NYU, Boston University, Harvard, and now the University of Michigan, but I also went on to study cultural contagion and earned my doctorate in marketing at Temple University.

The marriage of academia and practice has been the biggest cheat code in my career because it unlocked an unequivocal truth: if you want to get people to move, there is no vehicle more powerful or more influential than culture—full stop. Why? If a product, idea, behavior, or institution is adopted into a community’s cultural practice, not only will people take action, but they will also share it with people who are like themselves. And those people will tell other people, and ideally, that product, idea, behavior, or institution will be adopted into their cultural practice. This isn’t just about marketing or technology, category, or business model. This is all about people and the governing operating system that informs what we do and with whom we do it. I have seen this in my work with tech firms (like Google), telecom companies (like Sprint), automakers (like Ford), quick-service restaurants (QSRs) (like McDonald’s), consumer package goods producers (like Kellogg’s Eggo), retailers (like Champs Sports), health care providers (like Kaiser Permanente), clothing outfitters (like GORE-TEX), artists (like Beyoncé), educators (like Harvard), and nonprofits (like Big Brothers Big Sisters). This unlocking is category agnostic, and it does not depend on the business model of the company or organization. Whether it be B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), it makes no difference because it’s all P2P (person to person). And no lever influences people more consistently than culture.

It took me what felt like a lifetime to come to this realization. It wasn’t just knowing about the culture that made such an impact on me; it was understanding the nuances of culture—with the level of concreteness necessary to actually impact it—that made the difference. Today, I operate as one part practitioner and one part academic. I worked in advertising, most recently as the chief strategy officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the biggest independent advertising agency on the planet, where I helped “blue-chip” brands put ideas into the world that leverage the influence of culture to get people to take action. I am also a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where I help some of the brightest minds in the world leverage what we know about culture to use business for a better world. This duality has uniquely shaped my perspective and, ultimately, my practice as a marketer. But that’s not nearly enough. The research I’ve done over the years with regard to the mechanisms that shape collective behavior goes far beyond “marketing” as a discipline. Rather, it reaches further into the ambitions of getting people to move writ large—whether you have “marketing” in your title or not. Whether you have a traditional product, a nonprofit organization, or political aspirations, my work aims to get people to move. I committed this thinking in my best-selling book, For The Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, what we do, and Who We Want to Be.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Through thought leadership and prolific content creation. First, I had to define my POV on the world. Once I established this, I began to articulate it on stages, in prose, and in video content. The book is my most definitive work to date, laying out my worldview and giving readers/practitioners direction on how to operationalize. Between this articulation and a suite of case studies to underscore the thinking in action, the result has generated credence for me in the market and given me opportunities to share my thinking broadly.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Absolutely. Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational changed my life. It rang a bell I couldn’t unring and helped me to see humanity in a more vivid way. This was one of the biggest inflection points in my career. The better we understand people, the more likely we are to get them to move.

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