The cultural strategist on what 1.7 million conversations reveal about Black life online
Most researchers study communities from the outside. Dr. Marcus Collins has spent his career doing the opposite. The marketing professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, former Chief Strategy Officer at Wieden+Kennedy, and best-selling author of For The Culture built his entire practice around proximity. He also co-hosts the podcast From The Culture with Amanda Slavin. So when SPILL, the social platform built by and for Black users, approached him to lead an in-depth study of its community, Dr. Collins already knew what most researchers miss. The data would only be as good as the closeness you brought to it.
The resulting report analyzed roughly 1.7 million exchanges on the platform across all of 2025. What it found was not a collection of statistics. It was a living, breathing record of how a community talks, buys, resists, and builds.
What SPILL actually is
Dr. Collins is clear that SPILL is not simply another app. “SPILL is a community that happens to convene online,” he said. “They share cultural characteristics that help them identify a world of randomness, turn it into something meaningful, and ultimately decide what’s acceptable and expected of people like them.”
That framing matters because it shapes how the research was conducted and what it was looking for. Dr. Collins was not interested in metrics. He was interested in meaning.
The Black community is not a monolith
One of the report’s sharpest findings is also one of its most straightforward. The Black community resists being flattened into a single story, and for good reason. “There is Black church culture, Black Greek letter association culture, HBCU culture, Jack and Jill culture, deep urban culture, suburban Black culture, gay Black culture,” Dr. Collins said. “Together, they make up the mosaic that we call Black culture.”
For brands that want to engage this community, Dr. Collins says the entry point is not a campaign. It is curiosity. “When you start with understanding that there is not one unified Black experience, it unlocks curiosity. And that’s the best way to explore culture.”
Why language is the front door to culture
The research also found that language on SPILL functions as a form of protection. Dr. Collins described it as a gatekeeping mechanism born from necessity. “Because Black culture in all of its many manifestations has been appropriated and exploited to such great fidelity in this country, the community has realized that they have to guard the community by guarding language,” he said. “The wordsmithing that happens within this community is unparalleled. It’s like an Olympic event.”
Getting the language wrong is not a minor misstep. It signals that you were never really listening.
How the Black community buys
The report captures something that most marketing research overlooks. Spending decisions in this community are not individual. They are communal. “Almost every major consumption undertaking was being debated,” Dr. Collins said. “Y’all going here? Y’all watching this? Have y’all driven this? Constantly checking, not for permission so much, but for validation.”
Boycotts, he explained, are not the starting point. They are the result of negotiations that were already happening. “The boycott is a byproduct of the negotiation. It’s a negotiation that happens on the platform, among the community, where they’re deciding what’s acceptable for people like them.”
What brands keep getting wrong
With Black buying power projected to reach $1.7 trillion by 2030, the gap between that figure and how little research is dedicated to this community is hard to ignore. Dr. Collins put it plainly. “The Black community are the best consumers on the planet, because we buy things that aren’t even marketed to us.” The brands that figure this out, he said, are the ones that contribute rather than extract. “Beats by Dre were able to win in the community not because they exploited it, but because they contributed to it.”
The full report is available at whatsthetea.spill.com.