664: The Reason People Make Buying Decisions, with Marcus Collins

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:00]:
Whether you’re in a sales and marketing role or not, every leader needs to appreciate the psychology of why people buy. Often, we assume people buy because of what the product or service provides. But as we discuss in this episode, people often buy because of who they are. This is Coaching for Leaders episode 664. Production Credit: Produced by Innovate Learning, maximizing human potential.

Dave Stachowiak [00:00:27]:
Greetings to you from Orange County, California. This is Coaching for Leaders, and I’m your host, Dave Stachowiak. Leaders aren’t born, they’re made. And this weekly show helps you discover leadership wisdom through insightful conversations. Every leader needs to be thinking about the importance of getting on the radar screen of the people that the organization is trying to serve. Many of us are not necessarily in a sales or marketing role ourselves, but we do have a responsibility to think about how do we influence? And how do we meet people where they are, where they’re willing and excited about engaging with our organization. Maybe that means partnering. Maybe that means making a purchase. Maybe it means a contract, but being able to connect. And today, I’m so glad to have a conversation with someone who’s gonna help us to do this so well and think about this from a different perspective than sometimes we often do.

Dave Stachowiak [00:01:30]:
I’m so pleased to welcome Marcus Collins to the show. He’s an award winning marketer and cultural translator. He’s the recipient of advertising ages 40 under 40 award and Crain’s Business 40 under 40 award and a recent inductee into the American Advertising Federation’s Hall of Achievement. He has worked for several top advertising agencies, and his strategies and creative contributions have led to the success of Budweiser’s Made in America Music Festival, the launch of the Brooklyn Nets, and State Farm’s Cliff Paul campaign among many others. Prior to his advertising tenure, Marcus worked on the Itunes plus Nike sport music initiatives at Apple and ran digital strategy for Beyonce. He is a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan and faculty director for the school’s executive education program with Google. Marcus delivers keynote talks across the globe for companies at conferences such as the Cannes Lions International Festival for Creativity, South by Southwest, Social Media Week, Adcolor, Hyper Island, TEDx, and Talks at Google. He is the author of For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Want to Be.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:44]:
Marcus, what a pleasure to have you.

Marcus Collins [00:02:46]:
Thank you so much for having me, Dave. I’m super stoked to be here.

Dave Stachowiak [00:02:49]:
Oh, me too. I love this book. I love it because it connects so deeply on a human level of the things that often we think about. We think of marketing, e think of influence, we think of advertising, getting the word out into the world. And a lot of times we think of those things transactionally, but I love that You’re really looking at the human element that really comes down to the heart of why we do things and how we connect.

Dave Stachowiak [00:03:14]:
And you write this line in the book. “Culture is one of those words that is often used, but seldom understood.” I think we think a lot about culture from the standpoint of teams and organizations and countries, but we don’t often think about it in marketing and why people would wanna buy from our organizations, do we?

Marcus Collins [00:03:35]:
We don’t. Not as much. I mean, culture, it’s this amorphous, omnipresent thing that’s all around us that influences so much of what we do. We take for granted the sway that it has on how people consume, especially as business folks. We spend So much time thinking about the value propositions, the performance of the product, but not thinking about sort of the frames in which a product is used or why it’s consumed. And the better we understand those things, the more empowered we become, the more enabled we are as business leaders, as entrepreneurs, as politicians, activists, anyone with the best interest in getting people to move, the more enabled we are to get people to adopt behavior.

Dave Stachowiak [00:04:21]:
One of the quotes you highlight in the book is “We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.” And if if there’s 1 line in the book that captures your work, I think that that’s really it of, like, inviting us to think about that from a standpoint of our organizations and how we serve people or not through that lens. And one of the really interesting examples you cite is Patagonia and what they have done in order to show up in this way of meeting people where they are versus trying to shift that. I’m wondering if you could share a bit of, like, how they’ve approached the world that that’s worked so well of them being able to do that.

Marcus Collins [00:05:05]:
Well, Patagonia as a brand exists because they believe in minimizing our invasiveness on the planet. Right. Yvon Chouinard referred to it as as climbing clean. This is reducing the impact that we have on the planet so that the planet sticks around longer. Right? That makes a lot a lot a lot of sense. They just so happen to sell jackets and fleeces and outdoor wear and outdoor, accessories, that’s not why they do it. Right? In the words of Simon Sinek, why they do it is because they exist to help minimize power and baseness on the planet. And the way they communicate themselves through marketing communications through their words explicitly is a testament of that.

Marcus Collins [00:05:47]:
I write about this in the book. As you know, the campaign they did some years ago for Black Friday, they took out an ad in New York Times and told people, don’t buy this jacket. Here’s a new jacket that we have, but please, please, please don’t buy this jacket. Why? Because you probably have a functional jacket in your closet right now, and buying a new jacket would just be wasteful. In fact, Patagonia had introduced a service where they would repair your previously owned Patagonia coat for free, mind you, so that you don’t have to go buy a new jacket. Not only that, they would repair people’s jackets even if they weren’t Patagonia jackets. This is how committed they were to their conviction. And if you have to buy a new jacket, fine.

Marcus Collins [00:06:33]:
Buy this one, but please don’t buy it. And that articulation is really at the heart of who this company is. Yes. It’s a commercial entity, at least it was. Until recently, the Chouinard family sold or gave the company away to nonprofits that are in the same service as they are, mitigating our baseness on the planet, but ultimately, by communicating this point of view and living up to it, right, walking the talk becomes a powerful signifier of what this brand exists to do, and what it does that it invites people who see the rules similarly to say, that’s my kind of brand. And then not only they consume from Patagonia, they go preach the gospel on behalf of Patagonia, Not because of what Patagonia is, but because of who these people are. And this congruence, belief of ideology becomes a really powerful way to find people and to connect with them in ways that value propositions and functional benefits would never do.

Dave Stachowiak [00:07:41]:
You write about Patagonia saying “They didn’t go out to find an audience to sell to. Instead, they found a congregation who shared their beliefs, and those people took action.” And it’s really a fascinating example, and the word that I’d love to dig in on there is that word congregation. I think often we think about congregation in the religious context, but there’s a broader meaning and a connection behind that word, isn’t there?

Marcus Collins [00:08:08]:
Deed. So congregations are typically associated with religious context. But the interesting part about a religious congregation is that there are groups of people who believe. They have a shared belief, but these groups of people are made up of Sort of tribes, families. Right? You got the Collins family. You got the Davis family, the Smith family, or or whatever the case may be. Right? And those people who are there from religious perspective because they see the world similarly, they not only operate in a religious context, but the congregation, they also, do education, but they’re not a school. Right.

Marcus Collins [00:08:42]:
They do, real estate. Right? They they buy buildings. They buy, a property, but they’re not a real estate company. Right. They’re not a they’re not a performing arts theater, yet they do theatrical reenactments. Right? So we see here is that This idea of congregation being a religious context only is actually myopic. It’s a small way to see this. We widen and broaden the aperture of what we mean by congregations mean people who see the world similarly and therefore act in concert.

Marcus Collins [00:09:13]:
And when it comes to humanity, I don’t think there’s anything more powerful than beliefs that we hold and our innate want and desire to belong. So beliefs and belonging become this gravitational pull that bring us into collectives of people who see the world similarly. And as a result, as Emile Durkheim, one of the founding fathers of sociology, puts it, that we act in concert in an effort to promote social solidarity among ourselves, he refers to it as collective effervescence. And with this sort of truth about humanity, It becomes a really compelling vehicle for anyone with an interest in getting people to move, to connect with people in meaningful ways. Instead of looking for people who like sneakers, look for people who see the world the way you do. If you believe that every human body is an athlete, you should identify people who see the world the way you do, and out of that, you get Nike. Right? And what does Nike tell the world? Just do it.

Marcus Collins [00:10:14]:
And this is This is the gospel of Nike articulated in such a way that people can take it. Not only can share it, socialize it, But also rework it into their own cultural practices, and that’s unbelievably powerful. I mean, like, if you put a Patagonia fleece next to a Northplace fleece or a Columbia fleece, you cannot tell the difference. But as soon as you put that logo there, as soon as you put that brand mark there, It means something different. And because of that meaning, they therefore see the world differently.

Dave Stachowiak [00:10:51]:
As you were saying that I was thinking about congregation and the word that is coming up for me in a way that I think a lot of organizations and leaders think about this relationship between them and the people they serve is there’s an element of ownership, but not in a good way. Like, these are our customers. This is our target audience that we own this relationship. And the shift that I’m hearing you inviting us to make is not thinking about it like that at all. Right? This is the congregation that already exists. These are the people who already have their beliefs and their values. And the beautiful phrase you said from the from that person, the moment, for I can’t remember what you said, but it was, that shared belief system, and inviting us to think about we’re coming along and we’re and we’re serving the people who are already part of that congregation versus going out and trying to, like, own that relationship.

Marcus Collins [00:11:51]:
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, think of what think of what segmentation is. Right? Because what what what this is is a practice of segmentation targeting positioning. Right? This is table stakes for anyone bringing ideas market, and business folks know this very well. The segment, this is this is taking a heterogeneous market where everyone is different and putting them into homogeneous like clusters where they’re more alike than they are different. And the act of segmentation, this is a construction. It doesn’t exist.

Marcus Collins [00:12:19]:
Right? We say we’re looking for traditionalists. That’s a construction. Like, we are creating that label, fixing that label, and certain characteristics that we think is demonstrative of that label, and we put people in it. And we say we’re gonna go after these segments and position ourselves as such based on what we know of these segments. So, essentially I mean and not to be crass, but we are building a castle on sand. We’re building a castle on a construction of what is not real, what we have created, these groups of people. Instead, the idea then is to segment people, or gather people, or identify people based on the way that they self identify because that is real. A way do people see the world already.

Marcus Collins [00:13:07]:
Instead of making up labels for them, call them who they are.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:11]:
Yeah.

Marcus Collins [00:13:12]:
And this is the powerful part about about culture in this way is that culture is anchored in identity. Right? So the artifacts I don, the behaviors that are normative, the language that I use, then ultimately, the production, this the shared work that I use to express my cultural subscription. This is film, literature, art, movies, dance, and brands and branded products. They’re all reflections of my identity. So when we talk about segmentation, like, we have to get that right. And what better way to get that right than to segment people based on who they are, how they self identify, and how they see the world, and use that as the foundation by which we build targeting, and ultimately positioning and executions.

Dave Stachowiak [00:13:56]:
You mentioned a brand a bit ago that is so good at this, Nike. Right? Just So good at understanding their audience, what they stand for, the why behind it. And one of the examples you cite in the book, I’m sure many folks in the States, I remember, is Colin Kaepernick and his protest in NFL games, and that all happened. And then Nike made a decision as a brand to meet their audience where they are, didn’t they?

Marcus Collins [00:14:21]:
They sure did. Look. Nike, as a believer in in in athletes, Nike will always stand with athletes. Always. Always. They’ll always stand with athletes. And when you’re looking at Colin Kaepernick, that situation, Nike say, well, we’re staying with Cap. We’re gonna stand with him because this is what we do.

Marcus Collins [00:14:39]:
It wasn’t even a great debate because Nike was living up to the beliefs that they hold as an organization, as a brand, and therefore, he did it. And as a result, people who didn’t see the growth the way Nike does, they burnt their Nikes. Of course, they would. Because this is antithetical to their identity and their subsequent shared beliefs. So, of course, they would do that. Might as well burn them, but to divorce themself from the brand, and that divorcing themselves from the brand was a way by which people were signaling their identity. On the other hand, people who saw the world the way Nike did said, yes. Absolutely.

Marcus Collins [00:15:17]:
And they’re gonna go buy 2 pair of Nikes as a way of signaling their identity. Now we have seen Nike step away from athletes when athletes were not Being our ideal versions of athletes, i.e., Lance Armstrong, for instance. Mhmm. Nike stepped away from Lance Armstrong because His actions were not aligned with what it means to be an athlete. And Nike was just living up to its belief systems. Those things are byproducts of what these brands believe. And as stewards of the brand, their leaders decide to act in concert in an effort to ensure that the brand is living up to its beliefs and signaling that to people who see the role similarly.

Dave Stachowiak [00:16:00]:
You write “People who share the same worldview are more inclined to act in concert with other members, not because they love the brand or politician, but because the brand or politician is an extension of themselves.” I think that’s such a critical point because a lot of leaders and organizations make the mistake that people are in love with their brands. But it’s not really about the brand. It’s about how people view themselves, and the brand is just an extension of that. Right?

Marcus Collins [00:16:32]:
That’s right. That’s right. I mean, you know, brands at their core, they’re identifiable signifiers that conjure up thoughts and feelings and the hearts and minds of people relative to a company, institution, organization, or entity brands represent something. They’re representation. So at their core, brands are reflections of who we are, based on how we see them. So we see a brand, a brand is not inherently a thing. We give it meaning, and the hope as a steward of a brand, as a manager of a brand, of a leader of a brand, is that what we signal to the world is what people see, and there is meaning congruence.

Marcus Collins [00:17:10]:
When that happens, we find ourselves in really good connections with folks.

Dave Stachowiak [00:17:14]:
We had Raja Raja Manar on the show a while back who’s the CMO at MasterCard. And I can’t remember if we talked about in the episode or if I just read this in the book, but he made this really critical point that when you look at marriage and divorce rates, at least here in the states, that about half of long term relationships end at some point. And he made this point that in the relationship that most people espouse as the most important relationship of their lives, their life partners, their spouses. Half of those relationships ultimately end. And he said, you know, it’s it’s interesting. Like, a lot of times we think as people who are ambassadors of organizations and brands that, that people are gonna be more loyal to us than they would be to the most important relationship that they have. Like, it’s not really about brand loyalty. It’s about do you connect and identify well with who people are?

Dave Stachowiak [00:18:10]:
It gets right back to this congregation message you’re sharing. It’s meeting people where they are versus I’m trying to get people to be loyal to my brand for eternity.

Marcus Collins [00:18:20]:
That’s right. I I think brand loyalty What is loyalty? Loyalty is the repeated consumption from a person or group of people, and sometimes we mistake repeated consumption as sort of blanketed love and blanketed loyalty. And one of my colleagues here at Ross will refer to loyalty in 3 ways. Said there’s he would say that there’s because hand loyalty is what we do habitually. There is head loyalty. This is when we look at the the value propositions of a thing, And it’s part loyalty. That’s what what we feel, what we just kind of do. And, of course, hand loyalty can be disrupted so long as there is, some disruption in the in the space.

Marcus Collins [00:19:01]:
So imagine I go to, to CVS to get toothpaste, and my normal toothpaste isn’t there. Do I go to another CVS to go find my toothpaste? No. I’m right there, so I go, what else is there? That’s what I’m gonna buy. In that moment, my loyalty in the toothpaste I typically buy is now disrupted. Now in the case of head loyalty, this is based on the value proposition. I buy the best performing product. Now if your razor isn’t as sharp as the other person’s razor, I’m more inclined to buy the sharper razor because I’m gonna make a rational decision on which one performs best, and that’s the one I’m gonna buy. And so long as yours is the sharpest, I’ll buy yours till someone else’s is sharper than yours.

Marcus Collins [00:19:42]:
Heart loyalty on the other hand, heart loyalty, this is just like anything else that we that we love, this goes way beyond any rationality. We do it because of me makes us Feel its connection to us, and that kind of loyalty is long lasting. And how do we get to that kind of loyalty? We get set kind of loyalty because we resonate the part of the brain that is emotionally charged, and and we resonate that By preaching a gospel that is aligned to how people see the world, and it resonates inside them in a meaningful way that we’re no longer just shampoo in a bottle. Right? But this shampoo, this particular brand of shampoo signifies women’s empowerment or increasing women’s self esteem. You go, I believe in that. So I buy that product because it is an expression of my belief, And it resonates with me far greater than it just having the better smell to it or better moisturizer or more body in the shampoo, whatever that means. And so the notion here is that these things are all being translated through an emotional sense. And therefore, we have to see people as the emotional animals that we are, not the rational beings, but the emotional animals that we are. And what guides the way that we see the world and ultimately emotionally respond to it? It’s our meaning making system.

Marcus Collins [00:21:08]:
It’s the the cultural lenses that we use to make sense of this messy world in which we inhabit.

Dave Stachowiak [00:21:15]:
You’ve been a part of so many successful campaigns, and I’m sure you’ve also seen so many campaigns, people come to you looking for support that haven’t been as effective. And I’m curious, like, when you think about the organizations like the Nikes, Patagonia, Beyonce you’ve worked with who’ve, like, really done this so well of meeting people where they are showing up for their congregations. What do you hear that’s different in the conversations about what the marketing campaigns look like, what the advertising campaigns look like. When leaders are trying to figure that out, that sets them apart from the organizations that just don’t do that as well.

Marcus Collins [00:21:53]:
I think it’s multiple fold. The first thing is that those leaders don’t see People as consumers. They don’t they don’t see them as these machines we eat messages and grab cash. They see them as real life human beings whose lives are as rich as any other human being would be. So start to see them as humans. The second is that because they see them as human, they realize that they are governed by a cultural subscription, right, to which they subscribe their identity. And therefore, if we see them as human beings who are cultural animals, we have to then understand the culture so they have a very close proximity to these culture of people. They understand sort of the conventions and expectations that demarcate who they are and govern, what’s acceptable behavior for people like them.

Marcus Collins [00:22:45]:
And then once they see them as human beings and understand their cultural subscriptions, I think that the better brands, they identify the points of friction these people have, the points of friction they have, the things that are Keeping them from doing the things that matter to them most, whether it’s a functional thing, a social thing, the way they look, how they engage their people, an emotional thing, how they feel. They get to these these these these, what Clay Christa calls these jobs to be done, and they find the nuances of them. Not any generality, but, like, very, very, very specific nuances that make them tick, and then communicate them. They preach their gospel in such a way that they pay mind to them, and those people feel seen. They go, you. Get me. You get it. And then they take the brand and its communications and its products and all the things, and they use it as a way to present their own identity to the world, where they’re sharing the brand not because of what the brand is, but because of who they are.

Marcus Collins [00:23:52]:
And the best brands realize that it’s not about them, the brand. It’s about the people, and they serve the people. But the only way you could serve the people with the concreteness, with the specificity necessary to do this in a meaningful way is you need radical, radical, radical intimacy.

Dave Stachowiak [00:24:11]:
You write, you’d be better off trying to find the people who already believe what you believe and facilitating the network that connects them. That lines up with what you just said of, like, the the critical nature of how do you serve that congregation well. And I’m sure there is someone listening who is nodding their head saying, wow. This sounds really good. My organization, we’re not there for whatever reason. Right? We’re just not there. We’re looking at our customers as consumers, as transactions. For someone who’s in an organization that’s got that mindset and looking at it just kinda from the transactional nature, what’s a question or a starting point or first step that that person might ask, say, or do, maybe even think that starts just to nudge a little bit in this direction.

Marcus Collins [00:25:02]:
I would say this. You first have to start with yourself. You know, what’s that that Lorna Hill line? How you gonna win if you ain’t right within? You gotta start with, who am I and how do I see the world? What what do I believe as an organization, As an institution, as an entity, as a politician, as a leader, whatever the frame may be, how do I see the world? Then you say, okay. Who sees the world the way I do? Not defined by demography, not even defined by demograph no, psychographics. Like not even like their interests. No. No. What do they believe? Who are these people who see the world the way I do? Then you say, okay.

Marcus Collins [00:25:40]:
Awesome. I know who those people are. What governs how they navigate the world? Start breaking down their cultural characteristics. And this is really, I think, Dave, like, the important part of the book is that the book takes an abstract idea like culture and identifies the mechanisms that make up culture so that we can operationalize it. So we don’t have to say, what is their culture? We go, okay. Who are these people? Give them an identity that they self identify by. What do they believe? Like, what are their their ideologies, the stories to tell themselves, how they see the world? What are the social facts that is the artifacts, behaviors, and language? Then what’s the cultural production that expresses their view of the world. It helps socialize it among the people.

Marcus Collins [00:26:26]:
And when we start to identify our people Through that lens, we now can identify places where we can interact with them. We go, oh, we can engage them in their artifacts. We can engage them in their behaviors, we can engage them through production. We can engage them through language. Right? We can engage them in meaningful ways. And then when we do that, we go, okay. Let’s preach the gospel. In such a way, those people will go, oh my goodness.

Marcus Collins [00:26:52]:
Finally, someone said it. Good grief. Finally, someone said it, And they’ll use the brand as a way to communicate this who they are to the world and socialize it within their organizations. Right? And this isn’t just brands. Again, these are leaders. These are institutions, organizations. The same thing that works for a politician. It’s the same thing that works for a brand.

Marcus Collins [00:26:51]:
Why? Because it’s not about the context or the entity that you are. This is about understanding us, people, humans. The underlying physics of human behavior, why we do what we do, and how we see the world. And our understanding of this creates an opportunity for us to engage them in such a way that activates a network effect or reverberation among them that allows the idea, the products, the behaviors to to propagate in in inside of their groups of people.

Dave Stachowiak [00:27:44]:
It’s not about you. It’s not about the company. It’s about, like, It’s about how to serve. Right? And as you were saying that, I was thinking about, I may be remembering this wrong, but I I seem to remember reading in the book that when you were supporting Beyonce that you all or the internal team had decided to, like, set up some sort of ability to connect or a network, and then fans had decided to do something else, and there was sort of a decision of, like, what was gonna happen there. Am I remembering that correctly?

Marcus Collins [00:28:11]:
You are indeed. Fortunately, I had a chance to work with Beyonce, writing digital strategy for her at a time where the world of music was shifting from CDs into a digital space and moving from traditional fan clubs to online fan clubs. And a part of my job as the head of digital strategy for her was to erect and build her online fan club. And in my mind, this is gonna be easy. I got Facebook. I got, Twitter at the time. All these tools at my disposal, this is gonna work out really well. Yeah.

Marcus Collins [00:28:46]:
And we created this thing that the team called the entourage, which is a terrible name, but I forgot to name that for at the time, to to our credit, to the to the team’s credit, the show, the entourage, was big and and whatever. Anyway.

Marcus Collins [00:29:01]:
So we launched this thing, and, it was not successful and nowhere to the stature of who Beyonce is. And the team was concerned for sure. So start to look out into the social web, and realize there are a group of people across the social web that call themselves the Beyhive. And they weren’t just fans of Beyonce, but they saw the world the way Beyonce does. That is they shared the same beliefs. So what does Beyonce believe? Beyonce believes in women’s empowerment, a certain brand of feminism.

Marcus Collins [00:29:33]:
She so happens to make songs, but as a brand, as a signifier that conjure up thoughts and feelings in the minds and hearts of people, Beyonce stands in for, she represents women’s empowerment. And these people saw the world similarly. They had their own artifacts, their own behaviors, their own language. So we said, let’s cut bait on this thing that we’re creating, the entourage. Let’s partner with the Beyhive to be the official fan club of Beyonce, and that’s what you see today. The Beyhive is the official fan club of Beyonce, and the idea is not about how do you tell fans about what Beyonce is doing instead is how do you engage the Beyhive, so not only are they informed, but they go preach the gospel on their behalf on behalf of Beyonce, not because of Who Beyonce is, but because of who they are and who Beyonce is to them.

Dave Stachowiak [00:30:24]:
The thing I love about that story is you tried something. It didn’t work, at least not to this the level you wanted it to. And you, the organization, looked out and said, how do we show up for the congregation that’s already there? Where are they already engaging? And it gets back to that point we talked about a bit ago. It’s not about the brand. It’s not about the loyalty to the brand. It’s about how people see themselves in engaging there. And smartly, you and the organization, like, engage there and look, you know, how sustainable that’s been and what a success it’s been. Incredible.

Marcus Collins [00:31:00]:
That’s right. I mean and I think that these are subtle shifts in execution, but they’re big shifts in perspective.

Dave Stachowiak [00:31:07]:
Yeah.

Marcus Collins [00:31:08]:
And and this is this kinda goes back to the the start of our conversation. Things aren’t the way they are. They are the way that we are. And if we want the world to manifest differently, then we have to see the world differently. And this is, I think, this is what I teach in my classrooms. I always tell my students that the very best thing I can give you is perspective. When I’m on stage, this is all I talk about, perspective. When I write, it’s about perspective.

Marcus Collins [00:31:30]:
Everything I do is focused on perspective because I realize that This is the most important part of daily living. It’s the way that we see the world because it ultimately informs how we show up in the world, and culture is a byproduct of this, and the culture is the governing operating system, the system of convention expectations that demarcate who we are and govern what people like us do. And because of that, we move the way we move, but we do what we do. And if we want to do things differently, if we want different outcomes, then we have to see things differently so that we behave differently, And as a result, we get different outcomes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:32:10]:
Well, speaking of seeing things differently and perspective, the the book has been out for a bit. You have been doing tons of speaking, of course, around the world and sending these messages, teaching in classrooms. As you’ve gotten this message out, as the books come out, as people have engaged with it, I’m curious. What, if anything, have you changed your mind on?

Marcus Collins [00:32:32]:
That’s a tough one. The I think that for a long time, I thought that the world was objective, that there’s just truth, and the truth is the truth. And what I realized from writing this book and from learning more about the world and experiencing the world, especially in relationship to to this book is that the world is not objective. It’s subjective. Again, things are the way they are. They are the way that we are. That’s why for some, a cow is leather. For others, it’s deity, and for some, it’s dinner.

Marcus Collins [00:33:04]:
For some, a rug is decor. For others, it’s, it’s a souvenir. For some, it’s a place of worship. Which one is it? It’s all those things. Because it’s all of those things, And it’s all those things are true to people. That means that our truth isn’t the only truth that exists. And for us to really understand people, it starts with understanding how they see the world and then trying to find the familiar and the strange In such a way that we connect beyond sort of the boxes that we put people in based on demography, truthfully. But more so, We find the opportunities to find congruence because of the shared humanity that we have.

Dave Stachowiak [00:33:46]:
Marcus Collins is the author of For the Culture: The Power Behind What We Buy, What We Do, and Who We Wanna Be. Marcus, thank you so much for your work.

Marcus Collins [00:33:55]:
Thanks for having me. I’m super grateful for it.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:03]:
If this conversation was helpful, a few related episodes I reccomend one of them is episode 223, start with why. Simon Sinek was my guest. On that episode, we talked about the importance of the big picture first, the why, and, of course, the title as well of his best selling book, Start With Why. Simon invites, of course, to look at the big picture. What’s the why behind what the organization is doing? You hear echoes of that in this conversation as well when we’re thinking about things through the marketing lens, but it all comes back to the organization’s larger why. Episode 223 for that. I’d also invite you to listen in on episode 381, serve others through marketing. Seth Godin has been on the podcast a few times in the past.

Dave Stachowiak [00:34:48]:
The first time was that episode 381 where we talked about marketing as a service. How do you utilize the marketing talent inside of your organization and the strategy, Not just to help the organization succeed, yes, but the bigger picture, which is how do you actually serve people well through marketing? Seth has been a leader on this for decades. His wisdom in episode 381, a great compliment to this conversation.And then I’d also recommend episode 521, the way to earn attention. Raja Rajamannar was my guest on that episode, the chief marketing officer at Mastercard, and his perspective on customer loyalty and how they think about it in the credit card business and more broadly how we should be thinking about it in our work as leaders in connecting customers to what matters most to them. And, whether that customer is truly a customer or Maybe it’s someone your organization serving or maybe it’s a client or whether it’s a congregation in the religious context, the importance of earning attention critical in all of those organizations. Episode 521 for that. All of those episodes, of course, you can find on the coachingforleaders.com website.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:02]:
And if you set up your Free membership, you’ll be able to easily search by topic. We, of course, have this episode filed under marketing. Many conversations we’ve had over the years on both sales and marketing, and, of course, just about every aspect of leadership and organizations you can find within the episode library. All of it’s searchable by topic. Just set up your free membership at coachingforleaders.com. One of the other free benefits inside the membership is the ability to pull my notes. I am preparing notes for every conversation I have here on the podcast. I share those notes.

Dave Stachowiak [00:36:37]:
Sometimes there’s things in there we don’t get to during the conversation or we have to edit out for time, but they’re there in our notes. Also, I’m usually pulling several key passages from the books of guests on the episodes, and those are included in the notes as well. If you go into the free membership, just look for book and interview notes. You’ll be able to track down all of those from all our past conversations. Just one of the many benefits of free membership. And if you’d like a bit more, I’d invite you to learn about Coaching for Leaders Plus. One of the benefits of Coaching for Leaders Plus is each month, we are sending out a recording of the monthly expert chat that I host with our Academy and pro members. Each month, we sit down live with a guest expert who’s been on the podcast before and record a conversation with our members asking the guests questions directly.

Dave Stachowiak [00:37:28]:
Most recently, we had Tom Henschel with us, my pal, talking about how to navigate organizational politics. All of those recordings from the last 3 years are databased inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus. In addition, as a Coaching for Leaders Plus member, you get the new recordings of those every single month sent to you by email, one of the many benefits inside of Coaching for Leaders Plus to find out more, go over to coachingforleaders.plus for more details. Coaching for leaders is edited by Andrew Kroeger. Production support is provided by Sierra Priest. Next Monday, I’m glad to have Todd Rogers on the show. He is going to be telling us how to get people reading what you’re sending, an important conversation on how we write and getting that message across. Join me for that with Todd next Monday, and I hope you have a great week.

Dave Stachowiak [00:38:19]:
Take care.