Hip-hop turns 50 years old today. But hip-hop’s impact extends beyond its musical exports. Its fashion, vernacular, attitudes, and body language have been adopted the world over—spanning ethnic, linguistic and geographic boundaries.
As such, hip-hop’s contribution to the music industry has been complemented by its reverberation throughout the clothing, fashion, sport, automotive, QSR, beauty, CPG and technology industries as well. It’s a multi-billion-dollar force with an undeniable influence on consumption. The kind of influence that marketers would die for. Yet, 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 Ave in the housing projects of the South Bronx has become a global phenomenon. Hip-hop music, rap, is the most consumed music genre in the United States and, according to Spotify, nearly a quarter of all worldwide streams on the platform come from hip-hop. Not bad for such modest beginnings, to say the least.
So, as we commemorate hip-hop’s golden birthday, let’s look back at a few of the lessons that marketers can learn from hip-hop’s pioneers across the decades. The pioneers who have help turn a sound into a culture—a culture with more influence on commerce than anyone, including its founding father, DJ Kool Herc, could have ever imagined.
Marketing Measurement
“If it don’t move your feet, then I don’t eat.” – Andre 3000 “Elevators (Me and You)”
At its core, marketing is the act of going to market to get people to move: to buy, vote, adopt a policy, recycle, download, watch or evangelize. Or in some cases, we even use marketing communication to get people not to move — i.e., stop using plastic straws to reduce waste.
Everything we do as marketers is in service of getting people to take action, and if people don’t move their feet, then we (and our shareholders) don’t eat.
Through this frame, the implication for measuring marketing activity becomes evident. If the job of marketing is to influence behavior, then we should be measuring behavioral adoption, not consideration or brand love, as an indicator of success.
Consideration, after all, is a cognition, not a behavior, and we all know the Inception-like level of complexity that’s needed to measure thoughts. Unless you have an fMRI machine at your disposal, it’s quite difficult to quantitatively assess what people are thinking. Measuring behavior simplifies the process by underscoring the reason we go to market in the first place, our objective as it were: to get people to move.
Market Segmentation
“Some MCs be talking and talking trying to show how Black people are walking. But I don’t walk this way to portray or reinforce stereotypes of today, like all my brothers eat chicken and watermelon, talk broken English and drug selling.” – KRS-One “My Philosophy”
Wendell R. Smith authored a groundbreaking article in the Journal of Marketing back in 1956 where he introduced the idea of segmentation to the world. It’s been a mainstay ever since — from MBA classrooms to blue-chip brands. Segmentation is the exercise that marketers undergo to shape a heterogeneous market, where everyone is uniquely different, into homogeneous-like clusters, where they’re more alike based on a particular context or criteria.
However, far too often, marketers base their segmentation efforts on demographics: age, race, gender, household income, education, geography and the like. These are the instruments we use to describe people—not because they’re accurate, but because they’re easy and easily observable. My age is my age, my gender is my gender (be it fluid or binary,) but these monikers do not accurately describe who I am.
It’s no wonder why so many marketing effforts continually miss the mark. We characterize people by demographic tropes, not by who they really are.
Cultural Consumption
“I do this for my culture.” – Jay-Z “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)”
The term culture finds a home in a broad array of literature but tends to cumulate as a system of conventions from which a group of people and their corresponding roles and norms are established and governed. We see it demonstrated in our ethnicities, nationalities, religions and passion points whereby we invest ourselves.
Whether you’re into skating, gaming, collecting comics or performing cosplay, each of these collectives has a system of characteristics that are normalized within the community and expected of those who self-identify as such. Therefore, those who see themselves as a member of the community subsequently adhere to these norms to promote social solidarity among the community and remain in lockstep with its members.
Consumption, by its very nature, is a cultural act. These characteristics also impact how we consume. What we buy, where we go, what we eat, how we vacation—all these things are informed by what is normal to the cultures by which we self-identify.
And the truth is, just like Jay-Z, we are all doing it for the culture—the unique culture to which we belong. The better we understand the conventions that make up the culture to which people subscribe, the more likely we are to drive behavior adoption among them.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. For 50 years, hip-hop has been providing cheat codes for business leaders through the mythology in the music and the self-presentation of its practitioners.
While we were bobbing our heads to the beat, these urban scholars were providing a masterclass for bringing products to market, thanks to their uncanny ability to understand consumer behavior and refashion the old into something inescapably new. This should be required reading for contemporary marketers considering how successful hip-hop has been at getting people to move — which is, after all, the core function of marketing.
As we turn the page on the half-century mark of hip-hop, I’m reminded of the modern-day rags-to-riches anthem “Juicy” by The Notorious B.I.G. where he reminisces on the advancement of hip-hop over his regrettably short-lived life. On the track, he rhymes, “Remember Rappin’ Duke, ‘Duh-Ha, Duh-Ha?’ You never thought hip-hop would make it this far.” That was almost 30 years ago.
Hip-hop wasn’t even old enough to legally buy a beer at the time. But considering the propagation of hip-hop since we lost B.I.G., something tells me that the next 50 years might be even more surprising. Marketers, take note.
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