The. Well, hello and welcome to this Marketing and Communications webcast brought to you by the Conference Board. In this episode, we'll talk about cultural brand strategy, or call it how brands and culture shape each other might or should shape each other. Why do we call about, you know, why do we talk about cultural brand strategy? Well, this is the Center for marketing and communications professionals who are keen to understand how brands grow. And so culture is a must have, believe it or not. Let me flip this slide here because brands and our social cultural environment certainly impact each other. There's no question about that. Think about brands, new, old, reborn that are said to move society and culture, like Bumble or Ben and Jerry's or more recently Barbie again, or the phenomenon of boycotting and burning or maybe celebrating, depending on which side of the cultural divide you are. Just ask Nike and Bud Light. So brands and culture definitely linked. The key questions really are if brands can deliberately acquire social cultural significance, how they can do that, how they can become cultural players and if they are, and if they have such power, is there a right or wrong way to use to leverage this cultural power? My name is JP Culvine. Some of you know me already. I'm principal at Uber Brands Consulting, Teach marketing at Columbia University, and I'm the principal here at the Conference Board. And here with me to discuss this and unpack this quite complex question are Anastasia Carclina, Gabriel and Marcus Collins. Two people who know a thing or two about this subject, I would say, have tackled it in depth through both academic research as well as their professional application, and who've published also relevant books in the area. We'll get to all of this in a second, but for now, hello Anastasia Markers, welcome to the show. Hello. Hello. Excellent sound check. So maybe let me briefly introduce the two of you. I'm sure you're going to give it more personal flavor in a second. Anastasia is a classically trained cultural analyst who applies her expertise to, I quote, develop culturally incisive and socially impactful strategies for forward thinking brands. I'm sure you want to be such a brand. She's currently a senior insides lead at Reddit, full of cultural insight. I'm sure has received her PhD in cultural studies at Yuke University. And if you need any further qualification, know that she's previously previously worked on such cultural giants like Nike or Hinge or Bacardi, eBay, Alta, you name it, to help gain the kind of insights into trends, culture, even semiotics and how it should impact their marketing strategies. Dr. Gabriel has also written a new book. I think I have it somewhere here. Yes, you fully, I will show it. It's called cultural intelligence for marketers building an inclusive marketing strategy and that's brand new. I think it came out this year and I just realized it's by Kogan Page, which is my publisher as well. So well done. Thanks Anastasio for being on the show again. Thank you for having me. We have our 2nd guest, Marcus Collins, I think by now a name among quite a few people who I quote again, is a marketer and cultural translator. He too has one foot in the world of practice and one in the world of academia. Until recently, he served as the Head of Strategy at at Agency Whedon and Kennedy. Many people will know them in their New York office, but he's also dedicated to teaching marketing, specifically at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. I should say thanks for your service. At this point. His work focuses also on how marketers can, and I quote again, ignite cultural innovation and leverage cultural influence... For good. A common theme here last year, Doctor Collins has published a book. It's entitled for the Culture, the Power Behind what We Buy, What We Do and what we want to be. And I don't have it because I borrowed it to one of my students. I can tell you it's quite a popular book among students. So thank you, Marcus for being here with us today. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here. And then last but not least, of course, last household item, I want to invite you, dear listeners, and I want to tell those people who want to earn continued education credits that they need to push that little button on the CEU request widget to get those credits. But really, really, everyone is invited to answer questions, give your own perspectives. We'll try and weave those into the conversations as we go. And with that, let's dive right into it, Anastasia. Marcus, it seems to me that while you both are really into the culture of marketing, you might shed somewhat different light on the subject. I would think. So that was the interest in pairing you up and maybe also end up in slightly different recommendations as what to do as a brand. Anastasia, let's start with you. Can you tell us a little bit where you come from? And what I mean with that is what what's your background and how does it relate to what you would call the main thesis of your book, Cultural Intelligence for Marketers? Certainly, JP Well, as you mentioned, I finished my training at Duke University in cultural studies, and so my academic background is really in a question of culture and meaning making. And specifically I trained in black cultural studies, feminist studies, and gender and sexuality studies. So a lot of where I come from, so to say, looks at the question of culture and cultural belonging through the lens of identity. And so that is very much the focus of the book and the kind of argument I am trying to make, which is that brands are vessels of meaning and culture. And that whether brands want it or not, brands are communicating ideas through marketing and advertising to consumers at scale and shaping culture. And we can look at the history of advertising and the ways that historically brand driven businesses has have told stories, narratives, oftentimes leaning into stereotypes, you know, and the kind of forms of representation that could be positive, could be negative, could be harmful, could be progressive, etcetera. And so the book makes the argument that if brands are vessels of meaning and are culturally involved, the brand needs to brands need to take the question of culture seriously, both in terms of social responsibility as well as in terms of commercial advantage. So at a high level, that is what the book argues and why I feel so passionate about it. I've spent many years studying questions of identity and representation. Wow. At a high level, but very, very dense. I made a few notes. Brands are vessels of meaning, about meaning making. We're a culture of belonging. Brands have meaning whether they like it or not. There's a lot to unpack, but before we get into that, let let's listen to Marcus. Can you tell us what's your main thesis and at least as far as brands and culture is concerned? And how does it relate to kind of your background? It's my background is squarely set in the world of practice. I've been a marketer slash advertiser for years before I even stumbled across the behavioral sciences and found myself in the world of academia. And what I realized is that as marketers, we often talk about culture all the time. It's a part of our lexicon to get our ideas out in the culture, what's happening in culture. But our understanding of culture by and large was very superficial. We understood sort of what it was intuitively, but we certainly didn't understand how it works. And without an understanding of its mechanisms, it rendered us pretty enabled or unable to to harness its power. So the the book really focuses on a core idea of what is culture, which, you know, scholars have struggled with for for for quite a while. And I don't plan, I don't, you know, set myself out to be 1 to excavate new territory. But it really just providing a Rosetta Stone that was both digestible by the general public as well as marketers, but also actionable. I'm a big Raymond Williams fan now. We talked about culture as systems of systems. I'm a huge Durkheim guy because my acumen repertoire sits squarely within the world of sociology. So I think about these conventions and expectations that are associated with these systems, the systems. And by and large, it's not enough for us to just know what culture is, but understanding its influence. I think that's really the, the, the, the biggest revelation that there is no external force more influencing human behavior than culture. And our job as marketers is to get people to adopt behavior. Therefore, culture should be the thing that we spend the most time thinking about excavating and contributing to my doctoral work, not unlike Anastasia. It's about understanding meaning making, like how how we make meaning of the world, which, you know, Raymond Williams will even say that culture is a meaning making system. We call it realized signifying system. And the notion there is that we make meaning through our cultural lenses. And it's through our cultural subscription that we mediate the things in which we we encounter like ads, brands and branded products. And we collectively decide if it's acceptable for people like us through a process we know is legitimation. My work sort of sits in the center of that and I take that thinking and apply it to how marketers devise strategies, put things in the world, but even more so, how organizations or any groups of people that come together, how we understand these dynamics that drive how we see the world and ultimately how we navigate through it. Excellent. Now, you already answered one of the questions I had next as good part academics that we all are, which was a definition of culture. I think maybe instinctively you both gave us one and you kind of seem to align on, you know, gives meaning. We're looking for meaning and how brands relate. Our brands can give meaning. There's one thing I noted though, which you said I'm a fan of Durkheim and sociology as part of that. And one thing I shock my students with regularly is I tell them most of the stuff you buy for yourself, you actually buy for others in the sense of you really do it because you wonder how it's going to project you in the eyes of the others. And I can hardly come up with any purchase we do, particularly of what we call lifestyle or lifestyling products. Just let that word really sink in, in its full definition. Any purchase of such products that is not done, at least subconsciously, with other people in mind now that seems to go completely against this idea of total individualism and freedom that is valued so highly here. How are you 2 thinking about that? Am I off track here? Is it really about hedonism and ourselves, or is there something to it that it's mostly about us as a tribe, a group? A society. I'll take a swing at it. And Shoran Assasi have great brilliance on this. You know, I think you're absolutely right. You know, we, we buy things not because of what they are, but because of who we are and the consumption of said things, especially the more conspicuous the consumption is, the more we use it as projections of identity, as identity projects. But those identity projects are only achievable when the meaning that is embedded in them, that we embedded in them is translated by the public, right? We project in an effort to signal intended meaning in hopes that people see it and go, Oh yeah, I get it. You know an example of this, years ago, Fruit of the Looms used to have licensing deals with recording artists, right? Like KISS, Metallica, etcetera. You see people wearing like TIS KISS T-shirts or or Rolling Stones or Aerosmith T-shirts. Often times those T-shirts were created by Fruit of Looms under their licensing deal with these artists. And at one point they went and looked at their book of business to get a sense of what was performing best. And they realized that the Ramones were out selling Kiss. They go, what The Ramones, this little, small little punk band. What's going on here? But certainly Kiss has more fans than the Ramones is considering the the salience of of Kiss and the zeitgeist. So he went out and asked people who were wearing Ramones T-shirts like, oh, wow, Like you wear Ramones. Like, you have to be big fans of the band, right? And people said I never even heard their music. He goes, whoa, what do you mean? Then why are you wearing the T-shirt? They said because the Ramones mean badass. And the idea is that even though I'm not a fan of the music, I don't listen to the music, which would be intrinsic reward. I wear the the shirt because of what the shirt means in the minds of people and how I want that meaning associated. To me. Consumption is a cultural act and we, we consume these things as a way to signal where we, where we sit in the world. I mean Natastasia's. Work. And identity is like, you know, dead, dead, dead. On with that. I I in fact, Durkheim, you mentioned famously, you know, showed how even something as personal as suicide is really driven by society, by others. In today's concept, when we context, when we talk about Wellness, when we even talk about things like psychotherapy, etcetera, it's amazing. Some talk about this concept of conscious or conspicuous commitment, meaning that on dating sites now it seems to be an advantage, a requirement that you say I am in therapy. It's supposed to be very private. It's supposed to be. But now it has become a label that qualifies you to become part of a tribe or not. Anastasia, you they have to be culturally fluent, I think is the word you use in your book. And of course, the title is cultural intelligence. Some listeners might say, wow, I mean, this is so complex, I need to worry about shipping my stuff for the next quarter. What do you mean by the marketer having to be culturally fluent? And can you give us at least the beginning of how do you do that? Yeah, well, to Doctor Collins point around the importance of understanding culture right, as marketers, we struggle to even define what culture is right. You will, you will ask a bunch of marketers to define culture, which is so paradoxical because culture is so important to the world of brands. And we get multiple different answers. And so I kind of want to answer this question by adding something to what was just said about, you know, how we understand culture, right? And, and, and what does it mean to be fluent in the language of culture, right. And, and I think for me in the way that I think about it is everything that Doctor Collins said and, you know, thinking about the kind of ideological forces that are structuring culture, right? So what we're really talking about is that people derive meaning and people express meaning not simply because they decided that something means something, but because they are bombarded as consumers by mass media, entertainment, advertising, pop culture that are community, communicating certain values and certain narratives about what is desirable, what is beautiful, what is attractive, what is aspirational and so on. And so for that reason, you know, bringing my training, I think a lot about cultural ideology, right? Like what ideologies are driving consumer behavior. And so that, you know, when, when, when thinking about culture through the lens of ideology, it becomes, I think, easier to make sense of the current moment. For instance, if we think about dominant ideology and, you know, counter hegemonic ideologies, right? So the tension that exists between old ideas and new ideas. And so why does that matter for brands and cultural fluency? Well, we talk so much about culture wars and how to go to the marketplace, how not to cause backlash, etc. And so to be culturally fluent, brands need to understand the kind of environment that they are entering, the kind of competing narratives and ideas that exist, the kind of responses that marketing campaigns can strike. And we see a bunch of failures in in our profession of where that sort of foresight was not part of the consideration. And so all it is to say that, you know, cultural fluency for me begins in understanding how culture works, like going back to the basics and really expanding what I call our form of reference. Because in the world of business, in the world of marketing, we can be so isolated from other types of knowledge that exists outside of the world of commerce. And there's simple reality that ordinary people don't think about brands the way that marketers think about brands. So I think that that's kind of consideration is super important. Now you also said, you know they should use brands should use this cultural fluency to decode the culture and then create competitive advantage. Can you give us a practical example of a brand that you see has consistently created competitive advantage by being culturally fluent? That's an interesting question. What I want to say in terms of specific examples. So I work within commercial semiotics and so Prior to joining Reddit, I was working with innovation agencies that utilize semiotics to really decode the category and really take the notion that brands are part of a meaning making system seriously. So what does that actually mean for those who might not be familiar, Semiotics is a study of symbols and signs, right? So we can use utilize semiotics in commerce to look at the category and to see what kind of messages, what kind of visual cues, what kind of verbal cues are being communicated to consumers to say represent ideas or Wellness, right? And how a brand can look at what is being done in the category and identify a white space of opportunity of what no other brand is doing or where if you are doing in alignment, of course with analysis of you know, future where culture is headed, what is happening and the kind of grounding it in the cultural context. And in terms of you know, brands 11 project I was working on for Nike comes in as an example, you know, where I see that being very interested in the future and kind of preparing for it. So in my consulting practice, I work on things like future of sport, future of scent, future of beauty, right? These are brands that are preparing for the future today by decoding the cultural landscape and seeing what what are some of the emergent codes that are happening. So Nike is one of the good examples, I think of what they're doing perhaps behind the scenes in terms of their practices. So that's one example. And then another example I like to mention is REI, which is the outdoor retail retail brand that is really thinking forward around the future of retail, around gender. For example, they're one of the few brands to produce gender neutral clothing line that is also accessible and has been produced in consultation with Black and LGBTQ advisory groups, so to say, right. So they're really looking towards the future and doing what barely any other brand is doing in their category, like, you know, questioning the gender of outdoor gear and equipment. You know, I, I, I love examples like that of those that are leaning into the future actively. I think that's so perfectly stated. Just a quick reminder, Marcus, I, I wanted to get straight to to you anyway on a practical example, I'm sure you're burning to throw one out. I just wanted to quickly remind listeners that submit your questions, your examples of brands which do it right or wrong etcetera. Don't shy, don't be shy. We'll try to weave it in. And with that, Marcus over to you. How I mean, I'm particularly interested and I'm, I'm sure our listeners are in this idea of creating competitive advantage with that understanding. I think sensitivity to culture, that's understandable. You don't want to make the full pause, but how do you get one step further in actually harnessing your understanding to create advantage I. Mean Anastasia just expressed it so, so eloquently. You know, the idea is that like these brands are like they're, they're, they're, they're signifiers, they're vessels of meaning. And that meaning is being signaled by the brand, but interpreted by the population, interpreted by the people that we're trying to move. So cultural intelligence sets in because your ability to understand how people make meaning gives you opportunity to find meaning congruence that I signal both implicitly and explicitly through our marketing communications, through our product design, through all the dormant and, and, and aesthetics in hopes that other people see it the way that we do. When you have a close proximity to how people make meaning, it creates an advantage for you to to increase the likelihood of congruent. Example, liquid death. Here's a brand that's in a category that I would arguably say is the epitome of parity, like water is 2 hydrogen and oxygen. Now, though, some people say, well, we got greater pH balance and we have greater electrolytes. I go, please come on. Like we've seen empirically that people can't tell the difference between tap water and bottled water, let alone bottled water and other bottled water. So category completely parody from a product functionality perspective. Liquid Deck holds this ideological view that they want to murder plastics. They have this ideological view that the advertising that the industry typically praises as the best advertising is typically communicating or trying to sell things that aren't good for you. Liquid death feels like let's murder plastics. Well, also murdering your death. No, murdering your, your, your, your, your thirst. And the way in which they do that, the way which they do that from an iconography perspective, from a semiotic perspective, is they're going to adopt A silhouette that is as rebellious as their ideology. Instead of doing bottles, which are plastic and therefore lead to, to, to more waste, they're going to use cans. Tall boys that when you're at the gym and you open a tall boy, someone's like you're drinking beer at the gym. Like, no, it's water. It's just as rebellious from an ethos perspective as the brand. All the iconography, all the aesthetics, all the semiotics of the brand creates a space in which the brand's able to not only it only disses themselves from the category, but make them distinctive in the marketplace such that people will see the world similarly go. That's my kind of brand. Now let's look at this is an interesting example. Liquid Death. If I play devil's advocate, I could also say that most of the folks who buy this at rock concerts and show it off and play around with it are not necessarily environmental activists, but buy it because it's very cool. It seems countercultural. It seems in your face rebellious. It's getting high without getting drunk, which apparently was actually one of the inspirations, etcetera. So can we at least or can we say here that it's multifaceted, It's not just this environmental aspect of murdering plastic that is the driver compared, let's say to maybe Patagonia, which is much more single mindedly environmentally focused. Sure. I would say that what what Liquid Death has done is position themselves to activate network effects and I would argue Patagonia has similarly. And by that I mean liquid deaths beliefs are its beliefs and they are very much wed to it. They are very much committed to it and convicted by it. But what they've done has been able to find a way to make itself distinctive, but also be able to appeal to people who don't necessarily just believe. But the people who are on board first were the believers, people who saw the world similarly. And then they started to evangelize on behalf of the brand and people who were like, well, I'm not like, you know, a go greener sort of sustainability guy. But like, the cans are kind of cool, so I rocked them. Not unlike an associate's point with Nike. Well. Let me. Let me go for some. More, you could almost argue, sorry to jump in, but you could almost argue it plays a little bit of a trick. Because the people who might find Liquid Death very cool might not be your stereotypical environmentally concerned activists, aren't they? So take Nike for for instance. Nike is targeting athletes because they believe that every human body is an athlete. Big, small, short, tall. We're all athletes. I wear Nikes and I know it may surprise you, JP, but I'm no athlete. That's the that is the network effect of of Nike carving out its ideological space in the world. Patagonia believes in climbing clean, and their target are people who see the world similarly. I'm all about the planet, but like, I'm not like a part of that community yet. I own a Patagonia because of what it means in the minds of people. It's Pataguchi. It's luxury because of its meaning. Even though I'm not a part of the core target, I still get to benefit from the reverberation of the network effects. Which which upsets Yvonne Chouvinar endlessly. I hear that when you know people in their SU VS and you know investment bankers drive around in Pataguchi. I want to quickly acknowledge some questions here and ask you maybe let's do a rapid fire take on these to address them. Someone has asked what about the REI example and the fact that they are a cooperative? Does that have cultural significance? How might it help them? Interesting questions because a similar question would come up in the context of let's say Vanguard Investment being a mutual or Amica being a mutual insurance and that seems to resonate with certain people. Any perspective on that? Anastasia REI as a cooperative? Well, at the very least, I think that having talked to folks there and certainly not here to speak for them, but from my perception and my interpretation, you know, the idea of the collective, of the kind of a commitment to social impact is really at the core of what they do, how they think about their brand, how they think about what it means to build community, right? And to me that's a powerful thing to witness because it seems like such a different way of approaching brand management through the lens of social responsibility and inclusivity and so on. Then some of the examples we see that seem more performative and more kind of, you know, the concerned with signaling some kind of some kind of meaning, you know, for the sake of it, right, like purpose for the purposes sake. And so REII think in that, in that sense is distinct because you know their model and the way that they think about running their business in the way that they partner with organizations, you know, beyond their retail stores, right? I mentioned advisory groups and so on is really seen in the way that the brand is managed and in the way that they approach innovation, right? They are a almost like a community brand that is bringing outside consultants, advisors, etcetera into the process of brand management, their communication campaigns, their innovation objectives, etcetera. So in that sense, I do think it makes them unique and I think that's an inspiring example to me and I always love to shout them out for that reason. And, and beyond the internal, because there's some questions around community, both internal as organization, as a community of employees and their culture, as well as externally creating community, relating community to community. You talk about that REI does many things at that level, right? They decide to close their stores to make people go outside, which is kind of their mantra and their mission. And then they send their people almost as ambassadors into the community outside to learn how to do kayak in the Long Island Sound, if you're a New Yorker, etcetera, etcetera. So are the strongest brands the ones that are able to create community around themselves? I'd say the strongest brands are the brands that are able to facilitate community around a shared ideology, a shared belief. And their ability to facilitate community is to help them connect with other people who are like themselves, who remove points of friction that keeps them from realizing things that they're both believe in and that create cultural production through its works. That is is products, market communications, etcetera, that speak on behalf of the people that are expressions of the identity project that people want to undergo. A question I guess to both of you, but particularly Anastasia from reading her book is it's not always easy. Maybe if you realize in particular that the community that has shaped around your brand or a substantial number of them might not be in the boat with you on some of the more general views emerging in society or your own organizational views. Let me be very specific. It's it's easy to paint the example of an Apple that was about creativity and individuality fighting an IBM slash, Microsoft that was all about corporate and how that created different communities that are in two different things. There's not much, there is conflict and positive tension in there, but it's a nice story. It's a different story for Bud Light. I feel for example, very recent where a group of people would say they did just the right thing. They acknowledge the LGBTQA plus community, you know, celebrated pride and this area. And at the same time, there is marketers who say, well, they were completely blind, who actually their community is people who feel quite upset about these ideas and then obviously ended up not only literally shooting them on video, but abandoning them with significant share drops that that continue. How should a brand act here did where they culturally fluent? Did they try to do the right thing? Was it wrong that they then turned around and said, oh, I insulted my key audiences? Or should they On the contrary, have stuck with them and just potentially lose these people, but do the right thing. How? How should you act as a marketer in that situation? Well. A few things. First of all, as somebody who thinks about inclusive marketing a lot, I just refuse to even insinuate or entertain the idea that what Bud Light did is somehow an example of, you know, what purpose driven or inclusive or intersectional marketing is. Because I think what happens, it's almost like a case of confirmation bias in the marketing community, right? It's it's, you know, there was a brand who did something in an extremely non strategic manner, did something without thinking, sent out, you know, their product to this influencer, right, was not prepared. In the book, I talk a lot about utilizing reception theory to prepare for the kind of messaging, for the kind of reaction that you're messaging as a brand can cause. And so it's one instance of brand that was not smart about how they engaged with an influencer. In this case, a transgender woman was not prepared for the response. And so as a marketing community, I worry that we take this example and we use it to say, well, does does inclusive marketing really work? Is really social purpose work? It's a bad example. And, and, and, and I, I just refuse kind of to continue entertaining Bud Light and what they did as a way to say, well, this is hard. And is it, is this a reason for brands not to do it? There are plenty of other other examples of brands who do it well. And so I want to shift our attention to those brands that do it well and they do it intelligently. And So what I think, you know, there's also research that exists that for folks who argue that in fact, you know, the sales were going down, the vertical was already struggling, right. And so there is a division in fact in, in, in folks who how much folks attribute that particular moment to the demise of Bud Light. So I think, I think we need to really question of where we pay our attention and why we are so as a profession, as a community, so committed to using this example to say, well, this doesn't work. Yeah, it doesn't work because they did something without thinking much, without preparing for it. The response was lesson ideal. You know, they didn't stand by it. They were kind of seem uncertain. And so, yes, it's an example to learn from. It's a lesson that marketers should take of what not to do. Fair enough. You you you say we should not use it as an example. Marcus, sometimes as an agency you don't have the choice or you actually want to jump on people hurting if Bud Light comes to you, what would be your advice on how to re become a valued part of our culture? I mean, clearly Bud Light is an icon, still was an icon, maybe with a more positive Halo a couple of years ago. Do you have some practical advice as to how to approach this? Yeah, the first question is what do you believe? You know, Bud Light was a client of mine 12 years ago, 20/12/13 and 14. And ironically, I did marriage equality work for Bud Light. Like the client legit say at the LGBTQ plus community matters a ton to us. So we support them. And I was like, wow, OK, look at y'all. I didn't expect that. Not from a brand, but particularly a brand as sort of macho masculine as as as Bud Light. So when the Dylan Mulvaney partnership happened, when I saw it, I was like, yeah, but like, we do this. They've been doing this for at least a decade. But Tanasashi's point, soon as they got some pushback, they flinched. They said, hey, we're for everybody. We're everybody's beer. We're, you know, we don't have a dog in the fight. So the LGBTQ plus community goes, excuse me, I thought y'all were supporting us. What the heck? And the boycotters was like, well, we still hate you. And now the people in the middle was like, well, we don't want no smoke at all, so we're just going to buy Modelo instead. And the drop in sales. The idea there is that Bud Light had feigned support. They had feigned conviction, they had feigned belief. And the idea, what we find is that they don't stand on business with regards to any ideology other than you. You sell beer. And as a result, they have reduced themselves to the category You are a light beer manufacturer. That's it. That's what you want to signify. That's the vessel of meaning you want to be. But if you ever want to elevate beyond that, then your beliefs and ideologies have to extend beyond the category, beyond what you make. What are the orthodoxies that you are challenging based on the way you see the world? And by its very nature, you're going to turn people off. And this is, this has to be said, JP. I know I'm going long, so I'll stop here. This has to be said. One of the truisms we know of marketing is this. You can't target everybody. We know this. You can't do it. It's not efficient, nor is it realistic for resource perspective. You can't target on everybody. And though we know this as marketers, the minute, the minute that we have to make a decision that may turn off some people, we go, whoa, we don't want to turn off anybody. Though. What did we just say? That you can't target everybody. And even if we go, whoa, wait a minute by two, by supporting one 'cause you may turn off your consumers, well, just because people consume, don't mutate your people. Very good. I'm glad Peter Spear here is asking a question. It was on my lips, but I prefer it to come from the audience, which is I'm quoting him. Aren't we conflating brand purpose and social mission? OK. Are both of these necessary for competitive advantage? I would somewhat. Let me repeat it in a different way. Which is does a mission or the higher meaning or the meaning that fills the vessel to use your expressions always have to be about social justice or and or sustainability related items? Or can the mission just be about making people dream? Feel for Amber Young creativity, having supernatural powers. I always say that to my students. One of them being online apparently hear about Red Bull. Isn't there a diversity of meaning? Do we always have to touch on the cultural, the social cultural element? Of course there's diversity of meaning. I I don't think Anastasia's work, nor my own, would say that you must stand for social issues. No, no, what I'd say, I don't want to put words in her mouth is that you got to stand for something. You got to believe in something more than your razor sharp or your battery lasts longer, your car goes faster, or your shampoo will put more body in your hair. Like you got to stand for something. What do you believe? So the idea here is, isn't advocating to have some righteous 'cause it's about believing in something beyond the category of what you do. If, if, if you want to have greater meaning in the hearts and minds of people. Now, if you want to just be a sharp eraser, have at it. Good luck, buddy. The minute someone has a sharp eraser than yours, you're toast. But we, we lean into the, the emotional and the cognitive because we know the power of activating people at that level, that people not only consume in concert, but they do it religiously because of their identity congruence. So if we want to play in that space, then you have to be responsible in that space. So I don't think we're conflating like social responsibility and, and, and brand purpose. Brands have always had purposes. The purpose of a brand is to signal meaning. The question we're asking ourselves is what do you want to mean? All right, OK. That makes a lot of sense to me. However, Anastasia, you say inclusive about inclusive marketing, you say that I quote intersectionality is a critical lens, is a pivotal step towards unearthing meaningful insides that moves people. Does that mean four brands that decide to adopt inclusive marketing as their thing, as their meaning not for let's say my motor oil that chooses to talk about performance and maybe Speedway wins, etcetera? Or is that something that every brand should consider? Every brand should consider being intersectional in their marketing processes and that's what I guess is my worry as a community, we are in this stuck from my perspective in this binary thinking, right? It's either purpose or profit. It's either multicultural or mainstream, and the moment we ourselves start hearing words, identity, gender diversity, we somehow think that it only has to do with purpose driven marketing. You won't find me arguing for purpose for purposes sake. You won't find me arguing that every brand should be purpose driven or have, you know, a social cause attached to it. What I talk about when I talk about intersectionality is asking yourself what consumers have you as a brand historically left behind. It has nothing to do with social causes or social justice. As such, it could in some indices where it makes sense. Example case in point, the beauty industry. For the longest time in our profession, dark skinned black women could not find the product they needed to use on their face given their natural features and their skin tone. I could walk into CVS or Sephora and find five different, I mean, I still have to go and, like, ask the Sephora employee to help me find the tone that matches me. Like, there is a variety of product options for me. Historically, Black women have not had the same kind of consideration given to them in consumer research. And that has nothing to do with purpose or social justice or running a marketing campaign. It simply asks ourselves what are our biases as researchers, as marketers, as creatives? Who are we leaving behind because of our own ideological socialization? You know, for example, like me, I'm a white woman marketer. It is expected that I would make decisions, design, research, process out of my own lived experience. Intersectionality asks us how are brands doing market research? How are brands producing products? They're still products where a dark skinned person can go into the bathroom and put their hand under a soap dispenser and will not recognize it because they have dark skin. And OK, I keep going on because I feel very passionate about this topic. We can go. I can go into a mall right now and if I'm a plus size person, I cannot find if dress that fits me like we we are living in a diverse world where people embody multiplicity of identities and we're just stuck in this idea of social justice causes brand activism when we can't even do fulfill our basic responsibility produce products that our customers can use. Let's go back to the basics. Into functionality is all about asking what our consumers need. Who's being left behind. Preach. Let let, let me, let me Mark Marcus, let me challenge both of you. That's my job here. Because I just heard from Marcus earlier that brand should not stand for, you know, be for everyone, stand for everything. It's not affordable. It cannot be done. At the same time. I hear you like we need to be inclusive. When you are a fashion brand, you need to think of people. Big, small, dark, light, handicapped, able bodied, rich, poor. On the other hand, isn't it such that brands that are strong have meaning and represent a form of ideal and utopia and get some of their energy by helping people differentiate the kind of US versus them, me versus the others, etcetera? So a Harley-Davidson or a Liquid Death or a Patagonia. If I were Patagonia, aren't I as keen to show I am for preserving the environment... and you might not be. And when I am Lululemon, I am taking care of my body. I'm a Yogi. Look at me, how slender, etcetera. If I know I'm open this up to everyone and say no, I'm Lululemon, I'm for anybody. I'm for fit people and for people who are not. I'm for people who never leave the house. I'm also for gamers on isn't it diluting the differentiation? How do we deal with that now? Marcus, over to you. So I think what we're talking about here is the difference between ideology and skews, you know, ideologically, Patagonia is about preserving the environment, climbing clean, reducing our, our, our impact on society on on the globe. Like that's what they believe. But they have assortments of different colors and different sizes for, to meet the diversity of people in the community who feel that same belief, who believe that. But if you are a beauty brand who feels like, you know, everyone should be beautiful, but you don't have products for everyone, that's a problem that's not living up to your ideology. And the idea is that because of what I believe as an organization, I therefore adopt A set of behaviors, conventions. And I think the, the the critique and Anastasia's work is saying, great, if you believe that, live up to it, live up to all the heterogeneity that comes with the representation that ideology. And I want to put words in her mouth, but I mean, that's her work is so important because I think it requires moving beyond the binary of, well, I can't be everything, everybody. It's like, well, no, no, no, that requires a little bit more intellectual rigor. You can't ideologically be everything to everybody or ideologically, not everyone's going to believe what you believe. So service those who do. And if you say you believe in a thing, then you got to go full tilt. And considering that the world is always changing, culture is always evolving, the way that manifests will change, by its very nature changes. So, so to your point, to your point, a Patagonia refusing to sell their corporate gear now to investment bankers is positive, good, meaningful, mission driven discrimination in that particular case for this brand. Well, let's not, let's not, let's not, let's keep it like the the language clear in that set of call it mission driven. I think it is ideologically on brand that the the investment bankers they were working with, their book of business was out of sync with the ideologies of Patagonia. And therefore Patagonia was like, we're not going to do this because it is not aligned with what we how we see the world. Anastasia, what were we going to say? Right? Well, I was just going to, I was just going to chime in with a very quick thought is that, you know, if your identity depends on perpetuating oppression of marginalized people, then we have a creativity problem in this business and in this profession. Because you know, if, if, if all that you do as a brand and what you stand for is excluding other people that you know, that I mean, I find that notion appalling. And at that point, that's where we, you know, that's where we require honesty, honesty about what brands do and what brands stand for and what are the ethics of making profit. Because they're just, you know, it isn't any profession. They're just some line that can be, has to be drawn. And, you know, whether business is a purpose driven or not, business in my opinion, does have a responsibility to abide by some ethics, you know, And so for a brand to say we won't serve a particular segment, I'm not done talking, excuse me, for a particular segment, then that kind of opens up a question of, well, what does that brand stand for? And as a consumer, you know, I don't want to buy somebody someone's product just because they consider me to be the dominant consumer and they don't care about my husband who's a black man. Like that makes no sense. Right, right. I, I think we can all violently agree on that. I think that that's the easy one to answer. It might get a little bit more tricky when it comes to more the ideology where there's no right or wrong. There's just some people on one side of the ideology and others on the other. Let's move on because we've gotten a couple of questions that all have to do with how short attention spans are of the audiences, but also of the company. So Kate, let's go says, you know, teens famously have short attention span. So how is that going to impact liquid death? Is it going to be for sure out in a few months from now? There's John Gleason who says we were quarter to quarter. How do you become culturally significant while delivering quarter on quarter results and or delivering on ever shifting expectations and fads within consumer? I think that the North Star always remains the same, but the manner in which it manifests is of the time is contemporary. You know, go back to Nike, for instance. Nike, since the 80s has said we believe every human body is an athlete, big, small, short, all y'all athletes, they've used the language, just do it. But the way in which it manifests had always been sort of reflect a reflection of the times. In the 80s and 90s, it was about paying honor and homage to the best athletes there are. And as athleticism became more democratized, they then started to celebrate the athlete and all of us, highlighting the individual who was a little overweight who's like, just trying. Like, yes, he's just doing it. She's just doing it. So the manner in which it expresses itself is contemporary, but the ideology never, never, never wanes. And it gets back to this idea of understanding how people make meaning such that we signal meaning, the attendant meaning, in such a way that is congruent with the way people make meaning of the time. And that process or that frame by which meaning is negotiated and constructed is a reflection of the conventions expectations of the time. So we're not tracing trends, we're not trying to be of the moment as it were. We're just trying to be within the meaning frames of the people. All right, OK. Let me honest as you ask you a question we have here around data and research and kind of weave 2-3 questions together here, which is we observe a lot that it seems most of customers are using brands for what I would call virtue signaling or you know we talked about conspicuous consumption or commitment earlier and they would say one thing on a questionnaire or when you do statistics, you know statistics etcetera. On the other hand, when you really go into it, you know, you might find out things like, OK, these people who all say Gen. Z is echo. The most echo conscious generation is also the heaviest user for example of ultra fast fashions and actually consumes more plastic and recycles less plastic than the boomer generation. What a surprise. How do you approach research and in particular qualitative versus quantitative, to get at the root of what moves a generation or potential clients of your brand? I think it has to really attend to the complexity of the human experience. You know, we hear that a lot as a kind of pushback against, you know, socially responsible purpose of marketing, rarely by fast fashion. I evangelize inclusive marketing. I buy fast fashion because different kind of clothing is more expensive, you know, and I as a consumer am making decisions based on various forces that are influencing my behavior, inflation, You know, we actually, if we look at the latest research, when you ask consumers to categorize what matters, most of them value is still at the top. Because as a regular human being, yes, I would like to live out my ideas, but I also have bills to pay, right? And so for that reason, to me, it seems that it's important to understand the complexity of human experience in an uncertain world. You know, in the same way that brands are navigating, you know, uncertain, precarious times, so are consumers, right? And so it is just unrealistic, in my opinion, to expect some kind of, you know, pure insights about what consumers want. It's complex. And that's for that reason from the perspective of data and research to answer that question, before we started recording, Marcus was talking about the work that we did at White and Kennedy with different kinds of methodologies, right, ethnography, ethnographic field work, anthropological field work, et cetera. So we need a robust toolbox to understand what moves, what moves consumers and what value they're looking for. And last question, I know I keep going on last answer, I'd rather is that if we look at the recent research, I think it's Stern School of Business talks about sustainability claims. Sustainability claims perform the best when they are aligned with product claims and the benefit. So it is just unrealistic to expect all people to be social justice warriors. You know, product still matters, benefit that you receive from a product still matters. We have to start thinking of those together rather than expect some kind of purity and these absolute stances. That's just an unrealistic in my opinion. All right, excellent. Time flies when you're having fun, but we have the classic marketing 30 seconds each. Remember all TV ads. A question I wanted to ask you is think about your next edition of your books in a couple of years from now, in a few months from now. I don't know what your horizon is there, but what is one thing that you think you will change, you will amend based on the experience or the feedback or the insights you've gained since? What is one thing you think has evolved in your thinking after going even deeper? Post your book. Anyone who wants to go 1st 30 seconds. Wow, that's powerful. I'll go for. I'll go for it. Go for. It. Well, you think, yeah, yeah, very easy. I think just based on what I said, the problem of binary thinking in our current moment in in, in the industry, it's what I wish I had more frame my book around as a response to the current debates around purpose versus profit, multicultural versus mainstream, to speak up or to stay silent, activist brand versus bystander. You know, there is a, I think, a lack of imagination and innovation around the various possibilities that brands have when it comes to being more cultural intelligent, being more inclusive. And so I focus a lot on representative media, being inclusive, representing, you know, to my earlier points, your customer. And so that is a situation I would love to make. Excellent, Marcus. Now you have 20 seconds only. Yeah, it sounds good. I think as I look deeper to the work, what I realize is that the anemic part is that external culture is important, but internal culture is vital. And what I'm working on my next project is about looking at the internal culture, the internal customer just as much as the external customer. They both need to be In Sync if we are in fully leverage the power of culture. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you so much, both of you. I think you set us up for a Part 2 of this whole discussion because we've barely touch the surface here, but we need to move on. Everyone, I hope you got those credits. I just realized there was a slide there as well, a little late for that. And I want to just point out to you two more events coming up. One is a webcast and this time it's on elections and what our market is doing, allowed elections. I can imagine this to become a heated discussion as well, but very productive, very productive. And of course, AI God, this is the first webcast where we didn't mention AI God bless you. OK, the next transformation on N7 and eight, if you haven't had it here, you'll got to get, you know, full on in person experience in Brooklyn, NY. Yes, I said in person. Isn't that refreshing? And with that, I want to say thank you again, Marcus Anastasia, for these great insights and the discussion. And thanks for all who were listening. Goodbye and good luck. Ciao. _1732358728402