For the Culture

INTRODUCTION

I do this for my culture.

—Jay-Z

The 1960s were a decade of sweeping social change. From civil rights to gay rights, the Hispanic movement to the second wave of feminism, America experienced a decade of culture shock. These changes brought with them new ideas and new identities, which in turn led to new behaviors and new norms. Take, for instance, the rise of “hippies,” a countercultural collective that was born out of the “Beat generation” the decade prior. Like Beats, hippies rebelled against the conventions of the status quo. They adopted a bohemian outlook that challenged capitalism and traditional norms in favor of egalitarianism and free thought. The cultural characteristics of hippies were obvious, and those who subscribed to their beliefs adopted them in droves. They donned the look—long hair, tie-dyed clothes, bare feet—and adhered to the traditions of free love and (ironically) anticonformity. Over time, their way of life spread across the country and amassed legions of new community members.

In 1965, at least a thousand hippies lived on Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco, California. By 1966, that number had jumped to fifteen thousand. A hundred thousand people attended the 1967 Summer of Love festival in San Francisco, and five hundred thousand people attended the Woodstock music festival in 1969. Before long, millions of people had adopted the hippie cultural characteristics. Soon the counterculture had become the mainstream culture, but by the end of the decade, the allure of the hippie generation had faded—only to be reborn, just shy of forty years later, as twenty-first-century urban hipsters.

Like hippies, hipsters challenged the ideals of capitalism and bought in to the beliefs of egalitarianism. But instead of the tie-dye and bare feet of their predecessors, hipsters wore plaid shirts with suspenders, “ironic” facial hair, and dark-rimmed glasses. And their adult beverage of choice? Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, also known as PBR. There was nothing in particular about the liquid that endeared it to the hipster community. No proprietary brewing filtration system or special hops that gave it a unique taste. No, there was nothing intrinsic to the beer itself to which PBR’s magnetic pull on urban hipsters could be attributed. Nothing inside the can, that is, but everything outside of it. Everything about the brand.

As a brand, PBR represented autonomy and freedom of expression, both of which were core tenets of hipsters’ shared beliefs and ideology. While other beer brands with enormous marketing budgets spoke to the masses through splashy television ads, PBR strategically used its modest resources to speak to the fringe with off-kilter tactics such as sponsoring bike messenger rodeos and opening artist galleries in hipster havens like Portland, Oregon. PBR eschewed celebrity endorsements and refused to run commercials during the Super Bowl because these tactics seemed out of step with its countercultural beliefs. The brand’s intentional rejection of mainstream sensibilities felt more like a social protest than marketing communications, and this posture fit the rebelliousness of hipsters. PBR didn’t use its marketing resources to convince consumers that the brand was cool. Instead, it actively lived out its beliefs as an outsider brand that deviated from the norm of its more traditional competitors. This made PBR seem cool to hipsters who themselves were outsiders to mainstream America—much like the hippies and the Beats who preceded them. Furthermore, PBR didn’t “market” to hipsters. It was “chosen” by hipsters who shared a penchant for dissent with the brand. And these fellow dissenters consumed PBR as a symbol of protest.

PBR was more than a beer for the hipster community. It was a badge of identity, a receipt of hipsterdom—a lifestyle of dissent and autonomy—that transcended the functional utility of the product and elevated it to an artifact within the hipster culture. Subsequently, those who subscribed to this identity naturally drank PBR, and it spread to other like-minded communities as well—to the tune of roughly two hundred million liters over the course of five years. While category leaders such as Bud Light and Busch were declining, PBR was experiencing hockey-stick growth. Within a matter of four short years, the 150-something-year-old company had become a $1 billion business, thanks in large part to the hipster community and its cultural consumption.

We see this kind of relationship everywhere. Like skaters to Supreme, early hip-hop to the LA Raiders, and Republicans to Fox News, people gravitate to the entities that are representative of their identity and corresponding beliefs. We have seen this phenomenon play out in the acceptance and adoption of fashion (Yeezy sneakers), music (Cardi B), cars (Tesla), smoking (Marlboro), dieting (Atkins), and political affiliations (MAGA). They manifest in collectives like the Harley-Davidson Owners Group (affectionately known as H.O.G.s), Apple fanatics, Patagonia loyalists, hypebeasts, QAnon members, and Bernie Bros. The actions of the people in these groups extend far beyond a commitment to a shared consumption behavior or voting allegiance. Their identity is intentionally reflected in and projected through these brands, so strongly that the brand, product, or organization transcends its categorical label and becomes a part of their cultural practice.

If you look at photos taken before the twentieth century, there is a 99.99 percent chance that no one in the picture will be smiling (the academic in me must allow for at least a 0.01 percent margin of error because… science). Why is that? Deductive reasoning might propose that this phenomenon is due to the limitations of technology at the time. When I first pondered this question, my mind immediately went to portraits that were painted of royalty, dignitaries, and notable families. It took a great deal of time for painters to portray their subjects. One sitting alone, of the many sittings necessary before a painter could render a completed portrait, could take hours. Sustaining a smile for these long durations would be terribly taxing on the facial muscles of a posing subject. Therefore, the subjects for these paintings would don a solemn facial expression, which resulted in pictures with no smiles.

While that may have been the case for paintings, photographic portraits required far less effort from their subjects, which undermines this hypothesis about why people didn’t smile when their pictures were taken. In fact, what is believed to be the first photograph of a person was taken by accident in 1938 when Louis Daguerre, a photography enthusiast, snapped a picture of what appeared to be an empty street in Paris, France. Unbeknownst to him, according to reports, his photo also captured a nondescript man getting his shoes shined, which goes to show that it didn’t take much to have your picture taken—and debunked the “facial muscle taxation” argument I had begun to ponder. Interestingly, a year later, the first self-portrait was taken by Robert Cornelius, an amateur chemist who set up a camera, removed the lens cap, and ran into frame while the shutter snapped. It is said that he sat in front of the camera for about a minute before he produced what would be considered the first “selfie.” Again, it didn’t take much effort to be photographed. So what was going on here? Why were people so averse to smiling in photos?

There is a case to be made for dental hygiene, a practice that wasn’t established until 1913 by Dr. Alfred Fones in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Before then, the negligence of dental care did not boost people’s confidence to show their (less than) pearly whites in a photo. However, according to Today’s RDH, a digital media publisher for registered dental hygienists, it wasn’t until the 1950s and 1960s that access to advanced oral care became more widely available to Americans, thanks in part to the Civil Rights Act. Yet, as evidenced in a study by a team of researchers from the University of California, Berkeley and Brown University, the transition from stoic faces to smiling faces in photos had begun decades before this moment in time. Their research examined thirty-eight thousand high school yearbook photos taken from 1905 to 2013 and measured the lip curvature in those photos due to the zygomatic muscles in our faces that are engaged when we smile. According to their findings, photographed smiles were on the rise around the 1920s, some twenty years after the first smiling photo of a US president—Theodore Roosevelt—was taken and almost a century after the first-ever photo of a US president—John Quincy Adams, who of course was not smiling—was taken.

What I came to learn about this mystery is that it had almost nothing to do with the technology of cameras and little to do with the advancement of dentistry but everything to do with culture. In those days, practitioners of the fine arts considered smiling to be a practice saved for peasants, dimwits, drunks, or children. Essentially, to smile in a photo meant that you were of a lower class; therefore, people wouldn’t smile in photographs as a strategy to project their desired social status. This shared belief fortified what would become a ubiquitous cultural norm in society at that time, much to the dismay of Eastman Kodak, the New York–based company that dominated the amateur film market. Since photos were seen as a serious endeavor, used for artistic expression and archival documentation, people weren’t taking a ton of photos. In response to this challenge, Kodak invested its resources and energy to reposition photo-taking as a way to capture joyous moments.

Fittingly, the people represented in Kodak’s advertising material were all happy—and, of course, smiling. It wasn’t long before we went from saying “prune” before the camera snapped, to mitigate the possibilities of a grin crossing our faces, to saying “cheese” in hopes of maximizing our smiles. This conclusion is further substantiated by the high school yearbook study’s findings.

People’s beliefs about photos had changed, and consequently, their behaviors changed in a systematic and predictable fashion. Through its marketing efforts, Kodak was able to turn the tide of consumption, not because of any specific product advancement alone but rather because of its understanding of culture. Oddly enough, though Kodak went on to become a multibillion-dollar business decades later, the company faced ruin in the late 2000s because it had missed another cultural shift: digital media as a means of connecting people through photos as relationship currency. The company’s leadership misread the cultural cues, and what was once a category-defining business was ultimately forced to file for bankruptcy by 2012.

This is the power of culture. It’s contagious, and it influences people to move in predictable ways. Whether we are aware of it or not, this influence is happening all around us all the time. And those who understand the dynamics of culture are more likely to have influence, while those who do not are almost always influenced by those who do. It doesn’t matter if your product is better or your cause is more noble. The ones who lead culture—who contribute to the cultural characteristics of a community—tend to be more successful than those who follow trends.

For years, Bose was considered the trusted category leader in the consumer audio electronics space. But when Beats by Dre came to market in 2011, it rapidly overtook Bose’s standing. Was Beats a better product? Sonically speaking, it empirically was not. But Beats was more than just a device for listening to music. It was a symbol that signaled to the world who you were and, perhaps, even who you were not. People walked around with Beats headphones around their neck as an accessory, a cultural artifact, that just happened to play music. As the cultural scholar Douglas Holt put it, “Culture side-steps conventional value propositions, functional or category benefits, and mind-share marketing.” It moves beyond a brand having the sharpest razor, the fastest car, or the longest-lasting battery. Culture supersedes all these product differentiators because it does not revolve around what the product is. Culture focuses on who we are.

All of this begs a series of questions. What is culture exactly? Why does it have such a powerful effect on people? And finally, how might a marketer, manager, leader, or entrepreneur leverage the power of culture to influence collective behavior and inspire people to move? Well, my friends, that’s exactly what this book aims to address. So let’s get started.

Culture is one of those words that is often used but seldom understood. We think we know what it is, but we almost never do. This is not surprising considering both the intangible nature of culture and our relatively loose use of it in our everyday conversations. The irony is that culture is our everyday life. It’s “how we do things around here,” and its omnipresence in our lives makes it very difficult to comprehend and, subsequently, hard to define. It’s like explaining water to a fish—we live in it, we navigate through it, and it encompasses everything around us. My frequent collaborator and thought partner John Branch, a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, refers to culture as the program for everyday living. Like the programming code that makes up an operating system, providing a navigable user experience and running applications, culture is the programming code that informs where we go, what we do, and how we do it for just about every facet of our everyday lives.

Take, for instance, what you ate for breakfast this morning. If you live in the United States, it is likely that your breakfast consisted of some combination of eggs, bread, cereal, milk, and/or coffee—that is, of course, assuming you did not skip breakfast altogether, which is quite common here. In China, however, breakfast typically consists of dumplings, noodles, or maybe a rice-based dish or drink. Meanwhile, in Saudi Arabia, breakfast might comprise dates, bread, cheese, yogurt, and coffee. Each of these societies has its own program for everyday living, a code for what is considered normal. We know this intuitively when we visit other countries. We ask about the food, the dress, the music, the customs, and all the other codes that make up people’s everyday life—the characteristics that make up their culture.

The metaphor for culture as a programming code lends itself nicely to a Durkheimian view of culture. Émile Durkheim, widely considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the 1800s, referred to culture as a system of symbols, beliefs, and values used by groups of people to establish norms and roles. Durkheim underscored the complexity of culture, as a “system” that defines a group of people, while also providing some elemental codes that collectively make up the system—shared beliefs (values and principles, a way of thinking), rituals (traditions, social norms), artifacts (symbols, clothes, decorations, tools), and, of course, language (dialect, lexicon, songs, poetry). Durkheim called these elemental codes “social facts,” a manner of thinking, feeling, and acting that is constructed by society at large. In this way, social facts are the collective representation of social behavior for a distinct group of people.

Though these social facts are external to the individual, they put pressure on each of us to behave in a particular—and predictable—manner. For instance, in the United States, if someone extends their hand upon greeting you, it is customary to mimic the gesture and interlock hands for a few brief seconds. Why? Because shaking hands is a social fact here, much like bowing is in Japan or air kisses on cheeks are in France. To do otherwise in this scenario, within these respective societies, would be considered at best socially odd and at worst an offense. Therefore, members of a given society adhere to these norms so they don’t experience the social consequences that follow if they don’t. It’s a societal instinct to maintain orderly living, and adherence to these social facts is a large part of how that is achieved.

A WHOLE NEW WORLD

All this talk about social facts, Durkheim, and behavioral adoption may be new to many of you reading this. At least, it was for me. I studied materials science engineering as an undergraduate student, and the only humanities course I took was Sociology 101 during my freshman year. I was a latecomer to this world of human behavior and the social sciences. In fact, I was almost a decade into my career before I was even introduced to this world—or, more accurately, thrust into it. As a newly hired executive at a cutting-edge advertising agency called Translation, cofounded by Steve Stoute and Jay-Z, I was tasked with building and leading the company’s social media marketing practice. However, my understanding of “social” was primarily technology centric. I had a deep knowledge of the social networking platforms that dominated at that time, like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Foursquare. But I didn’t understand people, which was problematic because “social” is people.

Think about it for a moment. What do “social work,” “social action,” and “social welfare” have in common? They each pertain to people. “Social work” is the practice of enhancing the lives of people, “social action” is a commitment to the empowerment and advancement of people, and “social welfare” is concerned with assisting people. “Social” is all about people, and culture is the governing operating system of people. I didn’t know much about culture at that time because I didn’t know much about people, despite my past experiences working on social media campaigns at Apple, running digital strategy for Beyoncé, and leading a handful of accounts at a pure-play social media agency. To rectify this lack of knowledge, I began to investigate the social sciences, reading everything I could get my hands on in order to learn more about people—and, subsequently, to learn more about culture.

I started with Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, and it rang a bell inside me that I couldn’t unring. I found its exploration to be nothing short of fascinating. I read the book twice. In my second pass, I highlighted the research and researchers that I thought were most interesting and started studying their work, too. Ariely led me to Loewenstein, and Loewenstein led me to Kahneman. I detoured to McLuhan and then turned to Berger, who led me to Watts and Thaler, and soon after, I moved on to Asch and Milgram. My curiosity was insatiable and, as a result, I read broadly and deeply. It wasn’t long before my self-directed research began to manifest in my own work, and I started to get really good at my job.

With a new perspective on “social,” I found myself challenging the long-standing conventions of traditional advertising and began applying my newly acquired repertoire of academic theories to brand marketing. If a client expressed interest in creating an influencer program, I relied on network theory, whose dynamics inform the diffusion of influence, to guide my approach. If another client inquired about getting people to adopt a new behavior, I recounted the importance of creating defaults in the environmental design to act as a nudge. The more I applied theories from the social sciences to my marketing practice, the better the outcomes were. This was evidenced in my work that helped conceive and launch the Cliff Paul campaign for State Farm, where I leveraged Loewenstein’s “gap in knowledge” theory. Likewise, when I helped move the New Jersey Nets to New York to become the Brooklyn Nets, I borrowed from Bernays’s propaganda theory. Since I started this exploration over twelve years ago, I have embraced the world of academia to better understand people and the governing operating system that influences our collective behavior—culture. And, boy, did I ever embrace academia. Not only did I begin teaching at schools like NYU, Boston University, Harvard, and now the University of Michigan, but I also went on to study cultural contagion and earned my doctorate in marketing at Temple University.

The marriage of academia and practice has been the biggest cheat code in my career because it unlocked an unequivocal truth: if you want to get people to move, there is no vehicle more powerful or more influential than culture—full stop. Why? Because if a product, idea, behavior, or institution is adopted into a community’s cultural practice, not only will people take action, but they will also share it with people who are like themselves. And those people will tell other people, and eventually, that product, idea, behavior, or institution will be adopted into their cultural practice. This isn’t just about marketing or technology, category, or business model. This is all about people and the governing operating system that informs what we do and with whom we do it. I have seen this in my work with tech firms (like Google), telecom companies (like Sprint), automakers (like Ford), quick-service restaurants (QSRs) (like McDonald’s), consumer package goods producers (like Kellogg’s Eggo), retailers (like Champs Sports), health care providers (like Kaiser Permanente), clothing outfitters (like GORE-TEX), artists (like Beyoncé), educators (like Harvard), and nonprofits (like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America). This truth is category agnostic, and it does not depend on the business model of the company or organization. Whether it be B2B (business to business) or B2C (business to consumer), it makes no difference because it’s all P2P (person to person). And no force influences people more consistently than culture.

It took me what felt like a lifetime to come to this realization. It wasn’t just knowing about culture that made such an impact on me, it was understanding the nuances of culture—with the level of concreteness necessary to actually impact it—that made the difference. Today, I operate as one part practitioner and one part academic. I work in advertising as the head of strategy at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the biggest independent advertising agency (and arguably the most celebrated creative agency) on the planet, where I help “blue-chip” brands put ideas into the world that leverage the influence of culture to get people to take action. I am also a marketing professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, where I help some of the brightest minds in the world leverage what we know about culture to use business to better society. This duality has uniquely shaped my perspective and, ultimately, my practice as a marketer. But that’s not nearly enough. The research I’ve done over the years with regard to the mechanisms that shape collective behavior goes far beyond “marketing” as a discipline. Rather, it reaches further into the ambitions of getting people to move writ large—whether you have “marketing” in your title or not. Whether you have a traditional product, a nonprofit organization, or political aspirations, my work aims to get people to move.

CULTURE AND MARKETING

What is marketing, after all? The traditional definition, according to the American Marketing Association, is “an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.” Huh? This is in my area of expertise, and even I struggle a bit to parse this definition. Could it (in my best Chandler Bing impression) be any more opaque? In the search for a better definition, I found frustrating abstractions everywhere—even from Philip Kotler, the man who basically wrote the book on marketing. (I don’t mean that as an idiom, by the way. If you have ever taken a marketing course in college, it is highly likely that your assigned textbook was written by Philip Kotler. He’s “the” marketing guy.) He called it “the science and art of exploring, creating, and delivering value to satisfy the needs of a target market at a profit. Marketing identifies unfulfilled needs and desires. It defines, measures and quantifies the size of the identified market and the profit potential. It pinpoints which segments the company is capable of best serving and it designs and promotes the appropriate products and services.” What in the world is going on here? Can someone—anyone!—define marketing as if they were explaining it to a five-year-old? Turns out someone could and did—nearly six hundred years ago.

The Oxford English Dictionary from 1455 features one of the earliest instances of the word “marketing,” which it defines as “to bring to market.” Finally(!), some simplicity. If marketing is “to bring to market,” then it begs the question: What is the market?

At a glance, most people might think of the market as the place where people exchange goods and services. You might imagine a farmers market or even a Turkish bazaar where people buy garments, fruit, crafts, and the like. However, economists think of the market as an abstract idea rather than a physical location. For economists, “the market” represents the decisions and behaviors of product producers, intermediaries, consumers, institutions, and stakeholders. This is more than a geography. Business folks, on the other hand, refer to “the market” as the dynamism between people, institutions, and organizations.

In both cases, we see that “the market” is more than the area in which commercial dealings are conducted. The market represents a set of players who interact in pursuit of exchange. It consists of groups of people who work in companies and make decisions on behalf of their stakeholders, people who represent organizations and institutions, and people who seek to identify solutions that satisfy a particular need—be it functional, emotional, or social. Consider this intellectual exercise: If there were no people in that farmers market you conjured in your mind a few lines ago—no one selling fruits or crafts and no one there to buy them—would it still be a market? Of course not. It would merely be a geographic site, an open space of nothingness, until, of course, people showed up to buy and sell.

Suffice it to say, people make up the market; we are the market. When you hear talk of market demand or market behavior, it means people’s demand and people’s behavior. “Market response” is code for “people’s response.” The market is the people, and the marketplace is where people go to exchange. And as Professor Branch would say, marketing is the act of going to market—going to the people.

But this begs an even bigger question: What is the core purpose of going to market?