Ep 38: Dr Marcus Collins on navigating culture, meaning and purpose

What makes a brand truly meaningful in people's lives? In this captivating conversation with Dr. Marcus Collins - professor, agency strategist, and cultural marketing expert - we explore how the most powerful brands transcend their product categories to become vessels of meaning in culture.

Marcus reveals why brands aren't something we construct but rather what others think of them. Through examples like Patagonia, Nike, and Beyoncé, he illustrates how brands that stand for something beyond their products create deeper connections with people. "They are not defined by what they do," Marcus explains, "They're defined by who they are and how they see the world."

The discussion takes a fascinating turn when Marcus unpacks the three levels of empathy in marketing, with cognitive empathy - treating others as they want to be treated rather than how we would want - representing the highest form. This perspective shift from "how do I tap into culture?" to "how do I contribute to culture?" transforms how brands can authentically connect with people.

Perhaps most provocatively, Marcus challenges the concept of brand purpose, suggesting that "conviction" provides a more powerful framework. While many brands jumped on social causes when convenient, those with true conviction stand for their principles regardless of consequences. "Speak up when you are convicted, when it really matters," he advises, noting how brands that make strategic decisions based on genuine beliefs rather than opportunism create more meaningful connections.

For marketers navigating today's complex landscape, Marcus offers a profound reminder that brands exist as characters in constantly evolving cultural stories. The key to success lies not in rigid control but in authentic participation in culture with humility and curiosity. Listen now to discover how putting humanity first in your marketing can create lasting impact.

About Dr Marcus Collins

Dr. Marcus Collins is an award-winning marketer and cultural translator with one foot in the world of practice—formerly serving as the Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy, New York—and one foot in the world of academia—as a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. 

Before joining Wieden+Kennedy, he served as the Chief Consumer Connections Officer at Doner Advertising and led Social Engagement at Steve Stoute’s advertising agency, Translation.

Over the course of his career, Marcus has developed a practice for creating culturally contagious ideas that inspire people to take action. Prior to his advertising tenure, Marcus began his career in music and tech with a startup he co-founded before working on iTunes + Nike sport music initiatives at Apple and running digital strategy for Beyoncé. 

His best-selling book, For The Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be, examines the influence of culture on consumption and unpacks how everyone, from marketers to activists, can leverage culture to get people to take action.

Marcus holds a doctorate in marketing from Temple University, where he studied cultural contagion and meaning making. He received an MBA with an emphasis on strategic brand marketing from the University of Michigan, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in Material Science Engineering. 

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Transcript

Introduction to Marcus Collins

David Wheldon 0:09

Hi everybody and welcome to another Better Marketing podcast, supported by Meta, to whom immense thanks for helping us put this together and indeed for their support this week in the Global Marketer Week and got the great pleasure of picking up with doctor, I believe, and professor Marcus Collins just after he's come off stage doing a breathtaking speech. Very interesting CV you've got I mean to reduce it down, you know brilliant background as an agency strategist doing some of the finest stuff with Wyden and Kennedy in New York, beyonce's digital marketing, but a professor of marketing, great academic qualifications and these days I'm going to go with famous for connecting culture to brands and people, which is really, really special. So it's so great to see you, so nice to have you in. Thank you for your time.

Dr. Marcus Collins 0:58

Good to see you again. Yeah, here we are again. I've been really fortunate. I think that the experiences I've had have allowed me to see the world in ways that I think I wouldn't have if I didn't have the bricolage of apertures and lenses, which just provides a unique way of seeing things. I don't know if it's better than anyone else, but it certainly is my way, and my hope is to empower not only marketers, but academics, people with a vested interest in getting people to move, to better understand us, who we are as a species and the forces that drive us to do what we do.

David Wheldon 1:36

But I think one of the things you were talking about was brands, aren't? We don't construct brands. We can do our best, but brands are what other people think of them. That's right. Can you give us a couple of examples of what you see and how that's working?

Dr. Marcus Collins 1:50

Sure, so you think about the best brands. So brands

Brands as Vessels of Meaning

Dr. Marcus Collins 1:55

by nature, by definition, are vessels of meaning. They're identifiable signifiers that conjure up thoughts and feelings in the hearts and minds of people. An idea there is that what do brands mean depends on how people interpret them. You could be just a razor blade. You could be just a bottle of water right, that's what you mean. You mean water. You mean a computer, you mean sneakers. Or you can transcend those categories. Instead of just being water, you mean irreverence, because you want to kill plastics. That's a plastic being liquid death. You can just be a pair of sneakers, or you can be a provocateur of those who want to realize their best athletic self Nike, right.

Dr. Marcus Collins 2:37

These brands have greater meaning than the value proposition of the product or the category in which they reside the value proposition of the product or the category in which they reside. Beyonce is a great example of this. Beyonce makes great music, but she represents women's empowerment. She represents this idea of women realizing all their agency and pushing it forward. She so happens to sing songs and dance and act and direct and make content. So she's not defined by what she does. She's defined by who she is and how she sees the world. When brands get to that level, they are operating in a completely different stratosphere that not only drives consumption, but also contributes to culture.

Examples of Transcendent Brands

David Wheldon 3:17

And which brands would you kind of call out for doing that really well at the moment? And the next question, of course, is the other way around.

Dr. Marcus Collins 3:24

Let's start with the great ones you know, I think about a brand like patagonia. Yeah, you know, here's a brand that sells fleece jackets. You know, products for us to wear when we're outside, that's what they create. But they believe in minimizing our baseness on the planet, right, and even though their products are parodied with other product offerings, right. I do this example in my class. I have three different fleece jackets up. I cover up the logo and I say whose fleece belongs to what brand, and they 100 get it wrong every single time, every semester, every year. But since I really I reveal the logo, they go ah, yeah, of course. Of course it's what the brand means, how it resonates in their affects, what they feel, in their cognitions, what they think, and a brand like Patagonia is so perfect at doing that very thing, transcending their category.

Dr. Marcus Collins 4:15

I think about a product like Dove. This is an inconspicuous product. I don't know what soap or deodorant or shampoo or conditioner you use, but people buy Dove not because of what it is, but because of who they are and what this brand means to them. I think a brand like Elf Beauty, which I think is probably one of the most to me. If I were a brand marketer running a brand, leading a brand that would be my biggest crush, elf, because here's a brand that sells beauty products but they believe with democratized access. They stand in for this idea of democracy. As opposed to just being lip balm and face moisturizer, they transcend the category, even though they do that really, really well. They operate by the way they see the world and people who choose elf is not just because the products are great and they are but they choose them because of what the brand means.

David Wheldon 5:10

And how? I mean a strange question, before we talk about the bad ones. How do you measure that? How do brands get the metrics to show, you know, because in the end we've all got those nasty people called shareholders that we have to talk to and what kind of metrics set do

Measuring Cultural Impact

David Wheldon 5:27

you see people using? There are two metrics.

Dr. Marcus Collins 5:28

There are business metrics. That's typically defined by engagement, whether it's consumption, whether it's time spent, whether it's clicks these different metrics that we use to identify that behavior has been adopted, which makes sense because our job as marketers is to influence behavior. So of course those metrics are important. But then there are also cultural metrics that aren't defined by the quantitative but only by the qualitative, and we identify these metrics through discourse, which is how meaning is made. Meaning is made through conversations, through our talking, whether it's in person, through zeros and ones like social networking platforms or a combination of the two. So we use the discourse as a way for us to get an understanding of how meaning is being negotiated and constructed, and then we look to see how those things are impacting consumption.

Dr. Marcus Collins 6:19

Now, it's never one-to-one, because almost nothing is. I mean, I'm a scientist in scholarship and attribution is really really hard, like we go through great lengths to try to get one-to-one attribution but it's challenging. So we try to create experiments but we end up, you know, filing down the elbows of reality. So it's never a hundred percent. It's just the closest expression of what is and what we know. The theory is that things that are more culturally relevant. People are more inclined to consume, which is why I love being in scholarship, being in academia, because I'm just building my repertoire of theory and that theory helps me describe the world so I can navigate in the world better.

David Wheldon 7:03

And, as always, some of the best learning comes through failure. Oh yes, so which brands are failing and getting this wrong?

Dr. Marcus Collins 7:11

Adidas had a problem with Kanye West. Yeah, used to benefit from what Kanye meant to the popular zeitgeist for a long while, until the meaning associated with him began to deteriorate and, as a result, it now was transferred over to the Yeezy Adidas brand. All it is is meaning. This is all just a transference of meaning and our job as brand marketers, our job as brand stewards, is to guide desired meaning and make strategic decisions such that we signal the meaning that we want to mean in the hearts and minds of people, in hopes that there's congruence. And the way we get there is by better understanding how people make meaning.

David Wheldon 7:51

Fantastic. In my experience, all the brands I've worked on I now have like a lifelong membership of their soap opera.

Dr. Marcus Collins 7:59

So I watch what.

David Wheldon 7:59

Coca-Cola do, and so on. And for you, you know what Nike has been through. Yeah, must have been interesting, because you were part of the architecture of building it out to be brilliant. Yeah, so how has that felt?

Dr. Marcus Collins 8:11

as you've watched it, you know I've had, I laid one brick on the edifice. That is Nike's greatness and it's to your point. It's like seeing a Fran falter. Because you know what's in the heart of this brand, it's like you're with a Fran. I know what the intentions are, I know what this brand is, who it wants to be and what it can be, but it's not realizing its potential.

Dr. Marcus Collins 8:35

I mean, there is the procurement challenges. Ie, they decided to remove some of their retail partners to squeeze more surplus through direct to consumer, which was problematic post COVID. But also for a long while, nike stopped telling stories about athleticism. Here's a brand that means athletes. Right, it believes every human body is an athlete big, small, short, tall. We're all, all athletes and the only thing keeping us from our best athletic self is us. So he tells the world to just do it. Yeah, and in that moment where it was focused on performance not performance on the court or the field, or, or, or, or, outside or the track it was focused on stock performance, on sales, on optimization, on efficiency it lost all the humanity of what the brand is about, supposed to be about athletes. So it's starting to get there, starting to course correct itself there, but seeing it falter it's like seeing your favorite artist drop a bad album.

David Wheldon 9:37

You go what are you doing exactly? You're better than this, but I mean, what's? What's fascinating is some of these great brands starbucks would be another one. They are beautifully built they own a. And then they do something that goes wrong. But when they get back to the essence of what made them work, they're good at it.

Dr. Marcus Collins 9:53

So I'm working on a new project now, I'm working on a new book now, and it's all about the culture of work, and what I'm realizing is that in a capitalistic framework, there is an insatiable desire for scale, efficiency and productivity and by its very nature, it removes humanity. By its very nature, the more we get, we have to squeeze and pull from something else, and that squeezing and pulling almost always runs counter to humanity. So Starbucks, they were doing really well, they're doing really well. So Starbucks, you know they were doing really well, they're doing really well. They define, redefine coffee consumption across the globe. They say how do we get more, how do we grow more, how do we optimize more?

Dr. Marcus Collins 10:42

And by doing so, they had to step away from its beliefs, stay away from its convictions in the world, what it is about being the third place. And, as a result, they were able to optimize, but they wrote it the meaning they had in the hearts and minds of people. They eroded the humanity of the brand. It's starting to return there and it's exactly what we always do. I use music artists as an example, because music artists do this as well. The first album is just all heart. It's just yeah it's just all, all heart, you know.

Dr. Marcus Collins 11:11

Then the second album got a little success. That was pretty good. So it's a little better, right, you got, you know, better producers, better recording, better budgets, a little bit more optimized, and by the third, fourth or fifth album you go who are these guys? This isn't the band that I used to love, and when, in an effort to optimize, they begin to lose that, what do do they do? Go back to basics, go back to where it all started, and that's sort of where it needs the wake-up call for us as a marketing community Get back to what it all started.

Dr. Marcus Collins 11:44

Why do we do this? We do this to influence people. That's what the job is. But why did we get into this business? No one said I want to make more machines. No one said I want to make more machines. No one said, ooh, I just want to count data, and data is great, but there was some connection to humanity and what these brands mean to people. That got us excited about seeing an ad or seeing the brand or seeing a partnership. It's that thing, and I fear that in our haste to optimize, to be more productive, to be more efficient, that we start to lose the humanity because we prioritize the machine.

David Wheldon 12:22

Well, I love that and I particularly like. In your talk today you were talking about the three different kinds of empathy.

Dr. Marcus Collins 12:29

Oh yeah.

David Wheldon 12:29

This is the way of bringing to life how you actually create, actually create proper that's right connection, can you? Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Dr. Marcus Collins 12:36

yeah, so um michael ventura, who specializes in empathy. He defines empathy as self-aware perspective taking, and I love that because it means you are intentionally taking on the perspective of someone else who intentionally adopt their lenses, taking off your lenses and seeing the world through their eyes.

The Three Levels of Empathy

Dr. Marcus Collins 12:55

And there are three forms of of empathy. There is semantic empathy, which is sort of mirrored feelings. It's automatic, right Again, unless you're a sociopath, you do this. So if you slam your door in this.

Dr. Marcus Collins 13:06

Yeah, yeah, exactly, that's right so if you slam your hand in the door, I'm going to respond like in a very visceral way, because I'm going to see that and experience it like I slammed my hand and go ooh, are you okay? Are you sure? Goodness gracious, it looked like that hurt. That's an automatic response and a more attentional response is something like affective empathy and that's the golden rule Do unto others what you want done unto you. So if I'm having a bad day or if my friend's having a bad day, I'm going to engage them like I would want them to engage me. If we do that, we say I'm a good friend. But then there's one empathy higher still and that's cognitive empathy and that's do unto others as they want done unto them. And the only way that is achieved is by understanding what they want. It's actually denying yourself. It's saying I would want this, but that's not how they operate. So I'm going to deny myself and prioritize them.

Dr. Marcus Collins 14:00

And this is where marketing is sort of at its best. When we go, what are they dealing with? Yeah, we go. I mean that's stupid to me. It's not a big deal to me, but it's a big deal to them. So how can I serve? And you know, as someone who studies culture, I think that it has a very close parallel to how we engage with culture, that we often say things like how do I tap into culture? I'm going to tap into it, but that's exploitative. It's like you know, putting a tap in a tree is sucking out all of its resources. Instead, we should think about how do I contribute to culture, what can I bring to culture in effort to catalyze some reciprocity between me and the people? This is what empathy does. We go. This isn't about me, this is about you. How can I contribute, how can I help? When we do that, people go oh man, thank you so much. Then we go tell other people and they go tell other people, and that's how we get optimization, that's how we get efficiency, that's how we get scale.

David Wheldon 14:58

So you're so generous with your knowledge and time and last time you were with us, a year ago, you're in Toronto and I think you ended up by talking about brands don't need to be normal and you engage with this audience. Have you seen since you did that? Have you thought, wow, those people were listening they're doing something.

Dr. Marcus Collins 15:20

You know. I would say that I see examples of brands who have identified that and have doubled down on it. You know, I referenced McDonald's when we were in Toronto because they have done a really good job of saying we're not for everybody. And the interesting part about this is that McDonald's is a massive corporation, they operate at scale, but yet they say listen, we're not even targeting people who buy our burgers. We're targeting fans, people who see the world the way we do, people who are our people, and we engage them accordingly. Now, if you sure, come get some fries, but we're not talking to you, we're talking to fans, and I think that level of discernment allows them to be very, very focused on what they do, hyper focused on what they do. But we know this in marketing, marketing 101, you can't target everybody. So why do we try? Why do?

David Wheldon 16:11

we even try, Because Byron sharp tells everybody they should. And let's say I think so well, so well played.

Dr. Marcus Collins 16:20

So I think, like, in all fairness, my bias, that I come from the school of Douglas Holt, like I come from a consumer culture theory school of thinking. That's my framework, which I operate. But I really appreciate what Byron Sharp does. Byron Sharp is right Distinctive brand assets are ways by which we allow for cognitive availability, mental availability Unbelievably important. But I tell you, I can see a pack of Marlboros every single day of my life. I can see it everywhere and your assets are very distinctive. But there is no way in hell you're ever gonna see me smoking a cigarette Because it is dispositionally antithetical to who I am. Which means that no matter how distinct for brand assets are, they are mediated, moderated by our cultural subscription. So, instead of being like total Byron Sharp or total Doug Holt, who I love dearly, it's the connection of the two, it's understanding sort of how we operate and then how we respond to catalysts.

David Wheldon 17:26

Since I first saw you speak, which really impacted me by way, and I've stolen some of your thinking, as, as we all do. You know, good writers borrow, great writers steal, so so I I steal with pride, but I always credit you when I do thanks. I mean, I think the um.

David Wheldon 17:43

You know, the thing that's most interesting about marketing is nobody's got the answer oh yeah and you have to bring in learning from wherever

Brand Conviction vs Brand Purpose

David Wheldon 17:50

you can, but I do think the um you know, we've lived through an era of brand purpose. We've lived through an era of people thinking that brands could attach themselves to social issues and be activists, and, for reasons we don't need to go into now, that's not the world we live in. I mean, how are you seeing this brand and activism in the political space? What's your view?

Dr. Marcus Collins 18:13

well, I think that what we've seen brands do is follow this idea of having a purpose, and purpose is a shortcut for social activism. The truth of the matter is that they weren't really convinced. They weren't convicted by it. It was convenient like remember, you know, years ago, so many brands across the globe were putting black boxes on their Instagram saying that we stand for black people in the wake of George Floyd's public execution. We're all about making investments to DEI, all about that. Two years later, we started to see that erode a little bit. Now almost all of them have pulled back because it wasn't real. It was convenient for them.

Dr. Marcus Collins 18:54

So what I've always told brands is that listen, speak up when you are convicted, when it really matters and I like the word conviction over purpose, because conviction it implies action that I stand for this, even if I'm the only one, even if no one else believes it, even if it means losing customers. I stand for this, even if I'm the only one, even if no one else believes it, even if it means losing customers. I stand for this. Yeah, that kind of conviction. People will see the world similarly. Go. I like that, yeah, and people disagree. Go like I don't like that, but I respect it exactly and we know this when we think about humanity, people who sort of believe in a thing and stand by it, and we see brands be. You know that. They see what is available to them, they take advantage of it. We see this in politics now, whether it be some of our elected representatives in the states who are doing things that are convenient for them, even though it's antithetical to everything they say that they believed in and stood for for years, and most recently a brand like Steak and Shake.

Dr. Marcus Collins 19:51

This was a brand, fast, casual restaurant, called it fast food. Really. That wasn't doing terribly well and they said what are we going to do? Like, how are we going to zig, to the zag? How do we find our own voice in this? And they found themselves saying, well, let's jump on the Maga train. And now they're like look, we're not going to use seed oil for our fries, we're using beef oil. And now we're lying, we're RFK. And now that's the train that we're on. And there hits their wagon to that train and that's what the meetings will be associated to them.

Dr. Marcus Collins 20:25

So someone who says, oh, I'm not a MAGA person, no way I'm buying Steak and Shake. Yeah, where people go, I am a MAot person. No way I'm buying steak and shake where people will go. I am a matter of person. Steak and shake is now my, my, my go-to place. These are decisions that we make. These are strategic decisions that we make. How it fares for us in the long run. We don't know which is why we should do these things. Not because they're opportunistic, but because we believe in that. I'm convicted, so like, even if it means 10 years from now I'm going to lose business, I still don't want to believe 10 toes down.

David Wheldon 20:57

I mean, I, I'm a big fan, as you know. Brand is business, brand is everything, oh yeah. But I also I I don't know whether it was me or fantastic guy called David Erickson who came up with this.

The Brand as a Character in an Evolving Story

David Wheldon 21:15

I will always say that, because it could have been him or me but we came up with this notion when we were at Vodafone that a brand is a character in a constantly evolving story. Amen, so you can define who you are, but it's not up to you what people think of you. That's right. And life changes, it moves on. You just got to find a way to tap into that. That's right. You think that's?

Dr. Marcus Collins 21:27

right, oh yeah. Cooley refers to it as the looking glass theory. He says I'm not who I think I am. I'm not who you think I am. I am who you think that I think I am.

David Wheldon 21:39

Okay, I think I got that, so it's like I'm not me, I am who.

Dr. Marcus Collins 21:46

I think that you think that I am, and because of what I signal, and just with this idea of you know, brandon's a character that I am, yeah, yeah, and because of what I signal, and just with this idea of you know, uh, brand as a character. Uh, urban Guffman, you know, he postulate the, the metaphor, uh, that social living is like being in a theater, right From William Shakespeare all the world's stage. We're merely actors on set stage. We decide what character we want to be and then we adopt the costumery that's aligned with that character. We adopt the behaviors and mannerisms of that character, we adopt the script of that character and, as Guffman would say, that if we aren't careful, before long, what was once a mask will soon become our face, and this is how we are. So once we sort of go down a road, we go. Well, this is my identity. Then I have to behave in this way, because people like me do something like this.

David Wheldon 22:36

Yeah, I mean I'm a big fan of the Oscar Wilde quote be yourself, because everybody else is taken. That's right, that's right.

Dr. Marcus Collins 22:44

And you know it's a scary thing to be oneself. Yeah it is Because the first thing is well, who am I? Yeah, yeah, that's a pretty intensive inventory to undergo and then to say I have the courage to be myself, even though, by its very nature, it's different than everybody else. Yeah, because as humans, we have a proclivity to to congregate, to collect, to gather, to copy, like this is what we do. We're wired to do it. So we have to sort of undo our wiring to be ourselves and that's it.

David Wheldon 23:18

that's a challenging thing can we touch a little

Teaching the Next Generation

David Wheldon 23:20

bit on? You know, through the academic side, yeah, because you have the great joy of dealing with the next generation. You know through the academic side, yeah, because you have the great joy of dealing with the next generation. You know, what are you seeing? I mean, how do you think they see our world, the world of marketing? How do you think they see the future?

Dr. Marcus Collins 23:33

yeah, I think that they are much more savvy about the different modalities of marketing than I certainly was when I was going through an mba program and certainly as I was as a consumer before I got into marketing as a discipline. They realized that almost every surface area is media to communicate to us, both implicitly and explicitly. So I marvel at their savviness when it comes to that. But because they're so savvy when it comes to this, they're sort of yada yada yada to the basics. They're sort of yada yada yada to the building blocks as to why it is the way it is. And I'm of the belief that you know. You can't know how until you know why. You gotta know why to know how. So what I try to teach my students is to see the world through a theoretical lens, see a world through a lens that is not only constructed by what we know of humanity but also moderated by the experiences we have as humans, as social beings. You know, there's a guy named DC Darrell Cobbin who was the VP of Sprite. He did all the Obey your Thirst work for Sprite decades ago. He's just a brilliant, brilliant marketer. You put it this way. I think it's so brilliant.

Dr. Marcus Collins 24:51

I tell my students this too. He says. You know, for centuries the way that we have equated knowledge and intellect was by having answers. If you can rattle off answers fast, you go. Wow, you are really smart. Your ability to get to have answers in your mind about questions was a way by which we signaled intellect. But today, answers are abundant, they're abound, they're one stroke away, whether it's a Google search or even more profound, or AI prompt, answers are everywhere. The new intelligence is questions. Ask the right questions, whether they're prompts that give us AI outputs or they're curiosities about the world. So what I'm teaching my students is to be curious, because things aren't the way they are. They are the way that we are, and if we understand the world is subjective in that nature, then we walk around with less certainty and more curiosity. We walk around with less answers and more questions, and we do that. We find ourselves suited for tomorrow while we are active today.

David Wheldon 25:56

Yeah no, I. I tell people, the older I get, the more.

Dr. Marcus Collins 26:00

My favorite answer to a question is I don't know exactly my greatest learning, getting a doctorate degree is that I know a lot about a very, very small thing. But there's so much I don't know, so I stay in a I stay in a posture of humility. Yeah, I don't know. Even there are times when I'm working with clients who are asking me a question. They go well, you know everything about culture. I don't know everything, but I study culture. And so what about this? And I say, look, I don't have an opinion, but the theory does, and the theory tells us this. And if that be the case, then I suppose we should be thinking this, then maybe that Then we start to scaffold on top of something more solid.

David Wheldon 26:52

That's why having a good theoretical foundation, a good theoretical

The Gift of Mentorship and Legacy

David Wheldon 26:54

repertoire, benefits us when we're navigating uncertainty. And do you have a kind of an alumni set? So you've been at this for a while? Have you watched people go out of your training into marketing and be successful? Do you keep in touch? Oh yes, oh yes, I bet you do.

Dr. Marcus Collins 27:02

You know, I see a lot of people I worked with who were juniors when I were in the business or were students of mine. So I've been teaching for about 12 years. I see them working and I go, hey, look at you. And to me that's the biggest gift, a hundred percent. As a marketer, I got to put ideas in the world and that was amazing. I mean, like I think some of the case studies I love the most, I look at it with such great pride, like I did that, wow. But as a scholar, as an academic, I put people in the world, yeah, yeah, and that is just a million times more powerful.

Dr. Marcus Collins 27:39

I go you see that person. I taught them everything they know.

Dr. Marcus Collins 27:41

I don't talk about everything they know I can take credit for that and to me that's what pushes my work today. And when I wrote my book for the culture initially I thought about this is my work, my scholarship that I'm sharing with the world. It felt very much mine, like my possession. But it took some reframing for me to understand. Really I'm just the conduit for the thinking and my objective is about scaling the thinking because I believe that only the learnings that come from my work not only help us be better marketers, but I am naive enough to believe that help us be better humans. And if I can make that kind of contribution then, good lord, my job has been well done here.

David Wheldon 28:27

That is so not naive, I mean, I think for all of us you know, as people that do marketing, it always will be, and we must put humanity first. Yeah, totally, and uh, humanity will win in the end. I love that point because I probably take most pride in watching the success of people I've worked with along the way. Yeah, and if and if I've helped them get there, great. And actually, when you take your ego out of it, that's a really empowering moment because you just see what happens when you have the right ideas and you have the right humanity. There's no greater gift, no, but you give us one of the greatest gifts, which is your time. So thank you so much for your time. Here again, I'm going to get greedy and say please come back next year?

David Wheldon 29:06

Yes, totally We'll talk about who's done it right who's doing it wrong and what's learning, but it's such a pleasure to spend time with you and thank you so much.

Dr. Marcus Collins 29:14

Thanks, mark, thanks for having me.

David Wheldon 29:16

Thanks. Thank you so much. Well, these conversations are being supported and enabled by Meta, to whom great thanks.