How 50 years of hip-hop contributed to 50 years of the marketing game.

Today, hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary. But hip-hop's influence goes beyond just exporting music. Its fashion, speech, demeanor, and body language are adopted all over the world, transcending ethnic, linguistic, and geographic boundaries.

As such, hip-hop's contributions to the music industry have been further complemented by its repercussions across the clothing, fashion, sports, automotive, QSR, beauty, CPG, and technology industries. It's a multibillion-dollar force that has an undeniable impact on consumption. For marketers, that influence is something they crave. However, hip-hop has been woefully understudied in the marketing literature and underrepresented in Fortune 500 boardrooms.

What started as a house party at 1520 Sedgewick Avenue in a South Bronx housing project has become a worldwide phenomenon. Hip-hop music, rap, is the most consumed music genre in the United States, and according to Spotify, nearly a quarter of all global streams on the platform come from hip-hop. Not bad for such a modest beginning, to say the least.

So in honor of hip-hop's golden birthday, let's take a look back at some of the lessons marketers can learn from the hip-hop pioneers over the decades. Pioneers who helped transform sound into culture. This culture has had more influence on commerce than anyone, including its founder, DJ Kool Herc, imagined.

marketing measurement

“If I can’t move my legs, I won’t eat.” – Andre 3000 “Elevator (Me and You)”

At its core, marketing is the act of going to market to encourage people to buy, vote, adopt policies, recycle, download, watch, promote, and more. Or, in some cases, marketing communications may be used to persuade people to stop moving. That means stopping the use of plastic straws to reduce waste.

Everything we do as marketers is about getting people to take action, and if people don't take action, we (and our shareholders) can't make ends meet.

Through this frame, the meaning of measuring marketing activities becomes clear. If marketing's job is to influence behavior, then we need to measure behavioral adoption, not consideration or brand love, as an indicator of success.

After all, consideration is cognition, not action, and we all know the Inception-like level of complexity required to measure thinking. Unless you have an fMRI machine at your disposal, it is very difficult to quantitatively assess what people are thinking. Measuring behavior simplifies the process by highlighting why we enter the market in the first place, the purpose so to speak: what moves people.

market segmentation

“Some MCs keep talking, trying to show how black people walk. But today, like all my brothers eating chicken and watermelon, speaking broken English, and selling drugs, ” – KRS-One “My Philosophy”

Wendell R. Smith wrote a groundbreaking article in the Journal of Marketing in 1956 that introduced the world to the idea of ​​segmentation. Since then, it has become a mainstay of everything from MBA classes to blue-chip brands. Segmentation is the work marketers do to shape heterogeneous markets, where everyone is unique, into homogeneous clusters that are more similar based on specific contexts and criteria.

However, marketers very often segment based on demographics such as age, race, gender, household income, education, and geography. These are the means we use to describe people. Not because it's accurate, but because it's simple and easy to observe. My age is my age and my gender is my gender (whether fluid or binary), but these nicknames don't accurately represent who I am.

It's no wonder so many marketing efforts consistently miss the mark. We characterize people by demographic metaphors rather than who they actually are.

cultural consumption

“I’m doing this for my culture.” – Jay-Z “Izzo (HOVA)”

term culture finds a home in a wide range of literatures, but tends to accumulate as a system of practices in which groups of people and their corresponding roles and norms are established and managed. We see it expressed in our ethnicity, our nationality, our religion, and the points of passion in which we invest ourselves.

Whether you're interested in skating, gaming, collecting manga, or performing cosplay, each of these collectives has a system of traits that are standardized within the community and expected of people who self-identify as such. . Therefore, people who consider themselves members of a community adhere to these norms in order to promote social solidarity among the community and to stay in step with the members of the community.

Consumption is, by its very nature, a cultural act. These characteristics also influence how we consume. What we buy, where we go, what we eat, how we vacation, all of this is influenced by what is normal for the culture with which we self-identify.

And the truth is, just like Jay-Z, we all do it for the sake of culture, the unique culture that we belong to. The better we understand the practices that make up a culture that people subscribe to, the more likely we are to promote the adoption of behaviors among them.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. For 50 years, hip-hop has provided cheat codes to business leaders through the musical mythology and self-expression of its practitioners.

While we keep our heads moving to the beat, these urban academics are at the mercy of their uncanny ability to understand consumer behavior and reshape the old into the inevitable new. , was offering masterclasses on how to bring a product to market. This should be a must-read for modern marketers considering how successful hip-hop is at motivating people to move. After all, it is a core function of marketing.

Every time I turn the pages of a half-century of hip-hop, I am reminded of modern-day penniless-to-riches anthems.juicy” In The Notorious BIG, he reflects on the advancement of hip-hop during his unfortunately short-lived life. On the track, he rhymes, “Remember Rappin' Duke, 'Duh-Ha, Duh-Ha?'” I never would have thought that hip-hop would develop this far. ” That was about 30 years ago.

Back then, hip-hop wasn't old enough to legally buy beer. But thinking about hip-hop's propagation since losing B.I.G. sometimes makes me think the next 50 years might be even more amazing. Marketers, take note.