For the Culture
The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be
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4.4 • 5 Ratings
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
USA Today Bestseller
The architect of some of the most famous ad campaigns of the last decade marshals his expertise and “elegantly friendly writing style” (The Wall Street Journal) to reveal how our perspective is influenced by culture
In For the Culture, Marcus Collins argues that true cultural engagement is the most powerful vehicle for influencing behavior. If you want to get people to move, you must first understand the underlying cultural forces that make them tick.
Collins uses stories from his own work as an award-winning marketer—from spearheading digital strategy for Beyoncé, to working on Apple and Nike collaborations, to the successful launch of the Brooklyn Nets NBA team—to break down the ways in which culture influences behavior and how readers can do the same. With a deep perspective built on a century’s worth of data, For the Culture gives readers the tools they need to inspire collective change by leveraging the cheat codes used by some of the biggest brands in the world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"Anyone with an idea, product, or cause can leverage the influence of culture to inspire... people to act in concert," contends Collins, a marketing professor at the University of Michigan, in his perceptive debut. He explains culture as a "meaning-making system" in which a person signals their ideology or community membership through symbols, and examines why it holds such sway and how marketers can use it to influence consumers. The author suggests that companies transform their brand into a symbol by pairing an ideological stance with their products, as exemplified by Patagonia's calls for prospective customers to repair their current jackets rather than buy new ones, counterintuitively boosting sales from buyers drawn to the company's promotion of ethical consumption. He encourages companies to advertise themselves to groups, based on characteristics, that are likely to share their main conviction (a brand built around the belief that "life is an adventure" might target adrenaline junkies) and to keep up on changes in the group's culture by scrolling Twitter hashtags and Reddit pages. Collins has an unusually sophisticated outlook on what drives consumer behavior, as well as a knack for delivering his smart ideas in accessible prose. This is a superior program on how the business world can use the interplay between culture, consumption, and identity to their advantage.
