Cultural Intelligence and Responsibility of Marketers

Описание: In this episode, Dr. Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel, cultural theorist, writer, social critic, and strategist and the author of Cultural Intelligence for Marketers, joins AMA’s Bennie F. Johnson to talk about cultural intelligence and the responsibility of marketers.

Transcript
Bennie F. Johnson
Hello, and thank you for joining us for this episode of AMA’s Marketing And. I’m your host, AMA CEO, Bennie F. Johnson. In our episodes, we explore life through a marketing lens, delving into conversations with individuals that flourish at an intersection of the unexpected and marketing. Through our conversations, we’ll introduce you to visionaries whose stories you might not yet have heard of, but are exactly the ones you need to know.

Through our thought provoking conversations, we’ll unravel the challenges, triumphs, and pivotal moments that have been shaped by marketing. Today, our guest is a cultural theorist, writer, social critic, and strategist who focuses on inclusivity in marketing, media, and tech. Our guest today is none other than Dr. Anastasia Gabriel. She currently serves as the Insight Lead at Reddit and earned her doctorate in cultural studies from Duke University. She’s worked with and consulted some of the world’s leading brands, including Nike, Samsung, Disney, Ulta Beauty, and Amex, to name a few. Her agency work has spanned Widener Kennedy and Macan. Among others, she is an author of the forthcoming Cultural Intelligence for Marketing, a lifelong and committed activist. Dr. Gabrielle helps brands ignite cultural innovation and leverage the power of media for good. Her insights have been featured not only with us at the American Marketing Association, but with Advertising Week, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, and most fun and importantly, Teen Vogue. So today we are delighted to welcome Dr. Gabrielle to our podcast today. Thank you for joining us.

Anastasia Kārkliņa Gabriel
Thank you for having me, Bennie. It’s a joy and a privilege to be here today.

Bennie
It’s so much fun to have a conversation today that’s looking at our culture, which we’ve seen in a way. I think we’re all more aware and more present in the changes and twists that are happening and in the culture in which we live in. Talk to me a little bit about what first captured your attention in terms of this body of research and looking at you know, cultural studies and marketing. What first brought you to this?

Anastasia
My origin story in the field of marketing starts at the desk of my home office in Durham, North Carolina when I was finishing my doctorate. I was a fifth year PhD student studying culture, really passionate about popular culture, media, advertising, what was really happening in the world of mass media and entertainment.

Bennie
Yes. Okay.

Anastasia
Fully funded fellowship to begin my dissertation research and realizing, oh gosh, I do not want to do this for the rest of my life. Just sitting at a desk and studying culture in retrospect, so in hindsight. And I started looking for ways to be more immersed in culture and to bring my knowledge to areas of work that really have to do with culture as it’s happening. And so I stumbled into marketing and advertising around 2019. And in 2020, as you might remember, so many brands started paying attention to culture, to issues of identity, to questions of belonging and empowerment. And in that moment, it was just such a revelation for me where I felt very strongly that the disciplines of cultural studies of critical race and gender studies, which is what I specialize in, have so much to offer to brands and businesses that are trying to be more culturally relevant, but also be more inclusive. And so that’s really how the book and the body of work that I’m engaged in now came to be through this realization that there’s so much unexplored knowledge outside of business that I wholeheartedly believe.

The full transcript is available at https://www.ama.org/marketing-and-pod...