What does culture have to do with marketing? Everything, as it turns out. What you buy and the products you use have more to do with your identity and the culture you identify with than how those products function.

If you want your product or service to find its people, then you need to understand your people—and their culture. This is the basic premise of the new book For The Culture by marketing keynote speaker and culture expert Marcus Collins.

In his book, Marcus explains what culture is, how to research it, ways to market to the people in it, and more. Here are a few ideas to get you started.

What Is a Culture

According to Marcus, culture can be broken down into how people see the world, their shared way of life, and their creation of shared expression. In this way, you can separate a culture like America, which believes in individualism and freedom, from that of Japan, which believes in community and duty. 

You can apply this cultural breakdown to any group or demographic if you look at what they do, how they act, and what they wear. For example, look at any movie about high school. The jocks (who play sports, wear Nike gear, and do outdoor activities) have a different culture than the theater people (who put on plays, dress in vintage clothes, and put on theme parties). 

How to Understand Your Target Culture

If you’re a marketer, you may want to appeal to a certain group but are not sure what they value because you aren’t part of the group. If that’s the case, there are a lot of great data collection tools and social media apps you can use to help you understand a culture.

Marcus suggests using Twitter Advance Search and Reddit subgroups to research cultures. With Twitter Advanced Search, you can search for specific topics, words, hashtags, or people and follow what they are saying. Hashtags are one of the best ways to search to target a particular culture. For example, if you wanted to learn about vegans, you could use the hashtag #vegan, or if you wanted to learn about cosplayers you could do #cosplay.

Likewise, you can use Reddit to “listen” in on members of a community engaging with each other and talking about what they love. Just look for subreddits that have titles and topics similar to the one you are looking to market to. For example, if you’re looking to market to milk lovers, you can find a group that shares a love of milk. Learn about how they drink milk, when they drink milk, who they drink milk with, etc.

Market Your Message

When you better understand the culture you want to reach, then you can market to them. According to Marcus, your basic marketing message breaks down like this “We believe [fill in the blank], so we created [fill in the blank: product or organization] to realize this belief.” 

For example, Nike believes that everyone is an athlete, so it created athletic products to help people be better athletes and to encapsulate the belief in the tagline “Just Do It.” Likewise, Apple believes in challenging the status quo, so they made products that empowered people to challenge the status quo and enabled them to “think different.”

If you would like to learn more about culture and marketing, contact BigSpeak Speakers Bureau to book Marcus Collins for your next event.

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