Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy – Mark Schaefer #94

In episode 94, Mark joins Sales Lead Dog for a second time to talk about his recent book, “Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.” Before the Covid pandemic, Mark predicted that the final frontier of marketing is community, and now, post-pandemic and in our current world, building community has become even more essential. In today’s episode, Mark speaks about how to build authentic communities by examining your company’s culture and community leadership. Join us to learn about community, the last great marketing strategy.

Mark W. Schaefer is a globally-recognized author, keynote speaker, futurist, and business consultant who blogs at {grow} — one of the top five marketing blogs of the world. He teaches graduate marketing classes at Rutgers University and has written 10 best-selling books. Mark’s new book Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy describes an essential new path to connect to customers in the modern digital world.

His many global clients include Pfizer, Cisco, Dell, Adidas, and the US Air Force. He has been a keynote speaker at prestigious events all over the world, including SXSW, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and the Institute for International and European Affairs. Mark has appeared as a guest on media channels such as CNN, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and CBS News.

Quotes:

“Put down your algorithms for a minute, put down your automation for a minute. And let’s look at what human beings really want. Let’s remind ourselves what marketing and sales are supposed to do. And one of the chapters was about belonging and community. When I finished writing the book, I thought, that is the most important chapter in the book, that is the future of marketing. When all this other spammy stuff starts to fade away, we’re still going to have each other, we’re still going to have community. And that’s what’s that’s really going to be the future.” (2:00–2:36)
“This book is about creating community or considering community, because it is the greatest overlooked sales and marketing opportunity in the history of sales and marketing opportunities.” (4:20-4:33)
“Most communities fail. And the reason that they fail, the number one reason that they fail, is because they’re designed to sell things.” (10:47-10:59)
“What can you do in this world, as a company, that you could do better? If you had customers along the ride with you? What do you want to be known for 10 years from now? What’s your legacy? What would happen if we brought our customers along with us and actually let them lead the thing? That’s where the magic starts to happen.” (12:09-12:31)
“The very first question you have to ask is, do we have a culture that can sustain this?” (21:21-21;27)
“Community is an implied social contract. What other marketing or sales promotion do we have that’s an implied social contract? There isn’t one.” (21:49-22:02)

Links:

Mark Schaefer: LinkedIn
Business Grow Website
Amazon: “Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy”