Marcus Collins

Why organisations work with Marcus Collins

• He translates cultural anthropology into commercial decisions, turning ideas that usually live in academic departments into practical inputs for brand, product, and growth strategy.
• His book For the Culture provides a single thesis with named mechanisms for how meaning, identity, and belonging move markets. Buyers get an argument they can hand to a team, not a set of trend observations.
• He has run the work he teaches. Apple’s iTunes and Nike sport music, Beyonce’s digital strategy, Wieden+Kennedy New York, and named campaigns for Google, Brooklyn Nets, and State Farm sit behind every claim.
• Thinkers50 named him to the 2023 Radar with the Distinguished Achievement Award for the idea most likely to shape the future of business management. That puts him among a small group of new voices the global management community has formally endorsed.
• He sits inside the platform side of culture as Professor in Residence at TikTok, which means his read on how brand meaning forms and spreads is current, not retrospective.

Biography highlights

• Clinical Professor of Marketing, Ross School of Business, University of Michigan
• Professor in Residence, TikTok
• Former Chief Strategy Officer, Wieden+Kennedy New York
• Author, For the Culture (PublicAffairs, 2023); Thinkers50 2023 Best New Management Booklist
• Thinkers50 Radar Distinguished Achievement Award, 2023
• American Advertising Federation Advertising Hall of Achievement; Ad Age and Crain’s 40 Under 40
• Columnist, Adweek and Forbes

Biography

Culture, not demographics, decides what consumers buy and what they refuse. Marcus Collins built a career inside that observation. He ran digital strategy for Beyonce, worked on iTunes and Nike sport music at Apple, and went on to serve as Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy New York, the agency behind Nike’s most enduring brand work.

His doctorate at Temple University was in cultural contagion and meaning-making, the academic foundation that now sits behind his book For the Culture. Published in 2023, it landed on the Thinkers50 Best New Management Booklist and won him the Radar Distinguished Achievement Award the same year, naming his thinking as the idea most likely to shape the future of business management.

He teaches marketing at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, holds a Professor in Residence role at TikTok, and writes columns for Adweek and Forbes. His commercial fingerprints are on Google’s Real Tone, the relaunch of the Brooklyn Nets, the Made In America festival, and State Farm’s Cliff Paul campaign.

For senior commercial audiences, his value is specific. He gives marketing, growth, and brand teams a working theory of why some ideas move through a culture and most do not, and he ties that theory to operating choices about positioning, audience, and product.

Key speaking topics

• Cultural contagion and consumer behaviour
• Brand strategy and meaning-making
• Marketing in a fragmented media environment
• The role of identity in consumption
• Building brands that earn cultural relevance
• Storytelling and business communication
• Customer experience and brand

Ideal for

• CMOs and brand leaders rebuilding marketing strategy for a post-demographic environment
• Growth and commercial leadership teams trying to understand why their category narrative has stopped working
• Creative agencies and in-house brand teams looking for an applied framework on cultural relevance
• Consumer-facing businesses, retail, media, sport, technology, where brand meaning is a competitive variable

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of culture that explains why messages succeed or fail, beyond demographic targeting
• A clear view of how meaning, identity, and belonging move audiences toward or away from a brand
• Named mechanisms from For the Culture that brand and marketing teams can apply to live campaigns
• Examples drawn from Apple, Nike, Beyonce, Brooklyn Nets, Google, and State Farm, showing how cultural strategy operates inside real commercial work
• A sharper sense of why most brand and growth strategies underperform in fragmented markets, and what changes when culture becomes the unit of analysis