Review: For the Culture by Marcus Collins

I’m excited to be able to do a quick review and reaction to Marcus Collins’s book: On the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.

I was blessed to be able to learn about this book straight from the source when Marcus spoke at Tolhouse in Toledo. It was a terrific presentation for a terrific book. It passes my test for what makes a book great—it changes the way you think and stays with you after you are done. As in, I am seeing cultures everywhere I look.

Marcus is the real deal. Among other things, he is the former Head of Strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York, and currently is the Clinical Marketing Professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan.

This book is also the real deal. An accessible meld of scholarship and case studies, I came away from it with a new awareness of what was always right in front of us.

The word “culture” is tossed around a lot, especially in corporate settings. Like a lot of words tossed around like that, it usually ends up meaning what the boss says it means and not what it might actually mean.

Marcus gives us this definition:

“Culture is a realized meaning-making system. More accurately, it is a system of systems…which, collectively, influences everything we do because of who we are and how we see the world.”

I emphasized those last two clauses. I would argue that all communication, from The Odyssey to your stakeholder newsletter, is designed to reflect our identity and our way of viewing the world. (Actually, The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman tells a similar story, only with the opposite twist: what if people have their identity taken from them?)

I won’t summarize the book further, if for no other reason than it’s already in the book. You’ll especially enjoy the Brooklyn Nets and McDonald’s case studies.

I have a couple of posts that are relevant:

• One is based on the Japanese philosophy of “Go and See It” which found high-level Japanese executives wandering around car shows in the U.S. and providing grocery store samples of soy sauce to skeptical American shoppers.

• The other is about Toledo JeepFest, where the culture of the Jeeper is celebrated every year.

Two additional thoughts about how culture applies to public relations

1. Don’t Skip Ahead to the “Preaching the Gospel” chapter

   I know. We want to preach. We are communicators. Slow your roll. There’s a reason why your college composition teacher talked about audience awareness and every comm plan you’ve done identifies the audiences first.

   So, you need to read the “Find Your Congregation” chapter. Sorry.

   A couple of things I’d add:

   • It’s heavy on consumer examples, which is natural. (Patagonia, for example). Your local client has congregations, but at least some of them are assigned— such as companies that have “fenceline neighbors” as a congregation. You didn’t choose them or attract them with your preaching, but you want them to accept you in their congregation all the same.

   • Most of the time, we tailor each comms plan to each audience but do it individually for each communication. A For the Culture approach would be to have annual communication goals for each stakeholder group (aka congregation) and use each individual communication to move toward those goals, as in Resilient5, my modern communication program.
     
     
     

2. OK, now you can read the preaching chapter

For my money, this is the best chapter of the book. As it notes, an effective brand creates a relationship that is more than a transaction. People are moved by ideas and by people who share their values and aspirations. The way you do that is “start with the soul and end with the sale.” From “Just Do it” to “Think Different” to “Open Happiness,” Collins cites examples of brands that put a purpose behind the product. Widen+Kennedy says: “Start realizing that what you are doing is not advertising; it’s evangelizing the faith.” An example from my Resilience Blog is HBO’s “It’s Not TV, It’s HBO.”

Again, people might think this doesn’t apply to the plant down the street or the local dentist practice. But to the congregation of fenceline neighbors, you can preach the gospel of “being a good neighbor.” To your community and employees, it might be “being a great employer.”

This is an energizing challenge for us. It tests our skills with every piece of communication, as opposed to only the “important ones.” We are called to think big and to seek to find meaning and truth in what we do.

It’s a lot better than $0.99.

“Do you know what brilliance in advertising is? 99 cents. Somebody thought of that.”

— Roger Sterling