#261: How to Stay Relevant as a Marketer in the World of AI with Mark Schaefer

#261 AI & Creativity | In this episode, Dave is joined by Mark Schaefer, marketing strategist, keynote speaker, and author of 11 books, including his latest, Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. Mark has spent decades studying the intersection of marketing, tech, and human behavior, and his ideas have helped reshape how B2B brands think about relevance, creativity, and differentiation in a noisy digital world.

Dave and Mark cover:

• Why playing it safe is the biggest threat to B2B marketers in the AI era
• How to create marketing that actually connects by disrupting the story, the channel, or the storyteller
• Real examples of B2B brands ditching “best practices” and standing out with emotional, human-first marketing

You’ll come away with a fresh perspective on how to stay relevant, creative, and impactful, especially as AI becomes a bigger part of your marketing stack.

Timestamps

• (00:00) - – Intro
  
• (03:34) - – Why most marketing is boring
  
• (08:04) - – The danger of “best practices”
  
• (12:04) - – Why AI is amplifying bad marketing
  
• (15:34) - – The rise of raw, lo-fi, human content
  
• (18:34) - – What AI can’t replicate: shared experiences
  
• (22:04) - – Fear, risk, and the big brand trap
  
• (25:34) - – Using AI to enhance, not replace, creativity
  
• (31:50) - – The real framework behind Audacious
  
• (34:50) - – B2B examples that break the mold
  
• (40:20) - – Why now is the time to stand out
  
• (44:50) - – Making bold marketing happen inside your org
  
• (49:20) - – Liquid Death, Nutter Butter, and brand disruption
  
• (53:50) - – B2B doesn’t mean boring
  
• (57:50) - – The one question every marketer should ask

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***

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Dave Gerhardt [00:00:00]:
You're listening to B2B marketing with me, Dave Gerhardt. Hey. My guest on this episode is Mark Schaefer. Mark is a globally recognized author of 10 books, including Marketing Rebellion, one of my favorite books from the 2018-19 era, and his newest book, Audacious How Humans Win in an AI Market. And that's why I reached out to Mark to have him on this podcast. Because, man, this is the hottest topic maybe ever. And I wanted to do an episode on how to stay relevant as a marketer in the world of AI. Mark teaches marketing at Rutgers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:00:44]:
He runs Shaffer Marketing Solutions and writes a influential blog all about marketing. Go check it out. Google his name. Mark Schaefer. He's put out 11 books, and they're all awesome. And I love them because he really talks about the timeless principles in marketing. He says his whole career can be summed up by basically trying to chase this one thing, which is how do you separate the signal from the noise in marketing? We had an awesome conversation all about his book, but most importantly, what you can do as a marketer to stay relevant in the world of AI. And here's my little hint before we get into this episode.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:16]:
It has everything to do with being human. Enjoy my conversation with Mark Schaefer. All right, so my guest today is. It's not your first book, Mark, but I read the first book that put me on you was called Marketing Rebellion, came out in about 2019. And I remember devouring that when I was at Drift. And the key message in that book was about basically how to win by being human. And I remembered that I really liked your stuff then. I see.

Dave Gerhardt [00:01:42]:
I think it was Tim, who's the CMO at Ahrefs SEO company, SEO Tool. He posted him. He was sitting on a float in a pool reading your book on vacation. And I was like, I gotta. Oh, that's the same guy. And I look it up, and the title of the book is Audacious How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. And damn if there hasn't been a topic that is more relevant to this audience today. And I just shot you a note and you're like, yeah, I'm happy to come on the podcast.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:06]:
So, Mark Schaefer, good to have you. Can you do a brief introduction on who the heck you are?

Mark Schaefer [00:02:12]:
Well, your world is certainly very close to my heart. I spent most of my career in B2B marketing. I guess it's been 15, 16 years ago now. I started my own business, started consulting, and started a blog. And the blog sort of Took off and was invited to write books. I wrote the first book on influence marketing before anybody even knew it was a word. I never.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:38]:
Wait, hold on. What year Was that book?

Mark Schaefer [00:02:40]:
2012.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:41]:
Okay.

Mark Schaefer [00:02:41]:
I mean, nobody.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:43]:
So I work for this guy called David Cancel, who's the CEO at Drift, and he was the first person to teach me this. And he's like. He's called me nephew. He's like, nephew, learn. He's like, what you're going to learn is that all of this stuff has been done before. Everything that seems new is old. And so he's like, go study the timeless stuff. Right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:02:59]:
And so, yeah, I love examples like that because I often talk about, like, Seth Godin wrote a book in 1999 called Permission Marketing.

Mark Schaefer [00:03:06]:
Sure, right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:07]:
Like, yeah, these things go way back. And so anybody that's out here being like, you know, in our world, they're like, oh, B2B. Influencer marketing is all the rage right now. And here I am talking to Mark Schaefer, who wrote a book on that topic 13 years ago.

Mark Schaefer [00:03:18]:
Yeah, I try to write my books that way, actually. I try to make them evergreen enough that they've got some legs, that they'll last for a while, that they'll be relevant. And, you know the book you mentioned, Marking Rebellion, I've written 11 books in all now, and that was my bestselling book, at least so far. And people still love it today. It's being used as a textbook in about 50 different universities because I put a lot of effort into it. I think I called the shot on that one and is especially relevant today. And I think this new book is going to be the same.

Dave Gerhardt [00:03:55]:
Yeah. Okay. And so now you check out. Go to Mark's website, businessesgrow.com and you'll see all of his proof. We like to have guests that have the receipts on this show. And he does. What got you to be this guy with strong point of view about marketing? I'm guessing you weren't just, like, laying around me like, you know, I'm going to make a career writing marketing books. It seems like you're well connected.

Dave Gerhardt [00:04:14]:
You clearly have experience in this world. What was the marketer Mark before author Mark?

Mark Schaefer [00:04:20]:
Well, I started out as a journalism major in my undergraduate program. And in my junior year, I took a marketing class and I opened up Principles of Marketing by Philip Kotler. And it started off by saying marketing is a combination of sociology, psychology, and anthropology. I thought that is the coolest thing ever. I want to do that. Marketing is all things human, and we don't normally talk about it that way anymore. And I just loved it. I just loved, loved it.

Mark Schaefer [00:04:59]:
And so, long story short, I got into this career and ended up being a marketing leader at a Fortune 100 company and had an opportunity to go out, do my own thing and started consulting and never looked back. I started my business when social media was getting hot and started a blog. And at that point, all the bloggers were basically kids. And I was someone that had 27 years of international business experience and I had a different perspective. And what I was observing, Dave, was a lot of the information. It was more than wrong, it was dangerous. It was like a really naive way to look at business, how business really works, how marketing really works through this authentic lens of social media. And so after blogging for about six to nine months, I decided I gotta tell people what's really going on here because this is.

Dave Gerhardt [00:05:59]:
I gotta tell them the truth.

Mark Schaefer [00:06:00]:
This is bullshit.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:01]:
So what was it that I love that I like type notes in my slack. I like to take my own show notes and share them with our team. But I love this. We obsess over the tech stack. This is paraphrasing. We obsess over the tech stack. We talk about AI prompts, but marketing is really just understanding people. And I love that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:06:18]:
I often we talk to a lot of members and other marketers and it's like, it's not the sexiest advice in the world, but basically every marketing channel has been proven to work. TikTok works, email works, YouTube works. Like, there's some example of someone somewhere who has found a marketing channel that works. But yet we spend most of the time like debating over to your point, like, this tech tool or this tech stack thing or that, or, you know, should we do this on Instagram versus TikTok and you. Sometimes I want to shout from the hills that it's like, it is this thing, Mark, it's really about understanding people. What was the biggest, like, bullshit thing, though, that went off to you? Like, when you say this is dangerous. And I've seen some people talking about this lately.

Mark Schaefer [00:06:54]:
There's so much, what is it? Here's the biggest thing. And this is a generalization. We can get into specifics if you like. But the generalization was. So I grew up in this company that was kind of run by engineers and accountants. And so they rewarded debate, they rewarded dissent. They really wanted to know what you thought and they wanted to get to the right answer. In the marketing world, it's guru led.

Mark Schaefer [00:07:25]:
So no matter what some guru says that becomes sort of like a guiding principle that just gets stuck. It's like it becomes a fossil. It was said so long ago. And all the leaves are floating to the bottom of the lake, covering it up. And we don't even remember how we got there. And people repeat this stuff and sometimes it doesn't even make sense. And you just think, have you thought this through? Is this really how you think the world works? And there's very little debate. The best practices are basically set by gurus.

Mark Schaefer [00:08:02]:
And then everybody agrees and then everybody copies each other. And it's easy to copy each other because news spreads so fast. And so the guiding principle of great marketing is not about conformity, it's about non conformity.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:18]:
We move now into more of the country. But I used to live in this neighborhood and it was a bunch of houses along this golf course. And this like modern farm style house design, it became very popular. Sure enough, one neighbor, I'm playing big golfer, I'm walking down the 14th fairway. One neighbor redoing the house, right? What happens? Over the course of two years now, all 12 houses that line that hole on the golf course, 10 out of the 12 have now redesigned the house to be the same freaking design.

Mark Schaefer [00:08:45]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:08:46]:
And you may like that design, but yeah, I like this as a frame of reference where like, if I'm a marketer going into a market, I think the fun opportunities be like, okay, these 10 companies that we compete with all do it this way. The step one opportunity is to just not be like them.

Mark Schaefer [00:09:01]:
Right? Yeah. And that's sort of the main thesis of the new book is that I start off with some research that shows how boring the world is. B2B and B2C. And I think the number's around 2/3, around 60 something percent of B2B and B2c. Marketing inspires like no emotional connection whatsoever. The reaction is either disdain or just a blank. And if there was like a CEO of the advertising industry or the marketing industry that said, oh, two thirds of what we're doing is terrible, they'd be fired. And the people that did this research were so aghast that most of our marketing is so bad, they thought of the most boring thing they could think of, which was a cow eating grass.

Mark Schaefer [00:09:54]:
They made a video of a cow eating grass. They put it through the same research, and it did just about as well as most B2B and B2C marketing. And so now we're living in this world where people are saying, oh my gosh, you know, AI is going to Come for us. But AI is just piling on. The world's boring and AI is just piling on. So this is an opportunity to say no. You know, we've got to change the story. The greatest sin we can have is to be ignorable.

Mark Schaefer [00:10:22]:
And we seem to be content with that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:10:25]:
So do you think, like, first let me, before I ask you that AI question. But it can't be that we're all just morons, right? Like, I know a lot of smart marketers who are maybe trapped at the wrong company. Is there something in my experience, it's like there are a lot of smart people out there doing marketing. I don't want to say, like, all the marketing sucks because everyone is dumb. I haven't found that to be the case. I found that it's usually there is some, like, company strategy, things that are flawed, and show me a company with a great strategy from a business standpoint, and I'll show you a marketing team that can be successful. Is that where you see it?

Mark Schaefer [00:10:58]:
Well, I've got a little video on my YouTube channel. It's sort of like a movie trailer for the book. And I start off by saying, it's not your fault. The most people, they want to create, they want to innovate, they want to do better. But we have this infrastructure of fear in our industry. There's a scaffolding of fear holding boring in place. We're afraid of upsetting a customer. We're afraid of losing a customer.

Mark Schaefer [00:11:30]:
We're afraid of becoming the next Bud Light. We're afraid of disrupting an industry where boring has been normalized. We're afraid because if we take a risk, it's going to be hard to get it through the legal department. In some industries, boring is regulated. We don't want to go to jail, and there are certain things we need to follow. But sort of the rallying cry of the book is, if you are merely competent because you're afraid you're vulnerable, AI is going to chew you up and spit you back out.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:08]:
Well, is that because more people. Because all that stuff is going to be commoditized.

Mark Schaefer [00:12:13]:
Like a lot of marketing, it's going to be commoditized. Competent is a commodity.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:16]:
Right.

Mark Schaefer [00:12:17]:
Competent is ignorable.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:19]:
You said you were early to have a blog. Right. And it was like at that time, just having a blog and a strong opinion. You didn't have to worry about fighting for traffic. You were just one of the few people doing it.

Mark Schaefer [00:12:28]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:12:29]:
Today we can write amazing emails and blog posts and articles with AI So AI is going to eat all that stuff, and then what's left is going to be the.

Mark Schaefer [00:12:38]:
It's the people who have the courage to be a little crazy, to be raw. It's interesting, Dave, how, you know, my book didn't come out that long ago, just a few months ago, but the world is moving so fast that a lot of the things I talk about in the book are already coming true. So one of the themes in the book is about being raw, about being real. And there's a guy I interview in the book, wrote a whole chapter about him named Michael Krivica. Michael is the king of viral video. He has had more number one videos on YouTube than any man alive, any person alive, to be accurate. And the beautiful thing about this book is all the people I talked to spill their secrets. And one of the things he talked about is he said, you know, lots of people try to copy me, but they never can because they polish it.

Mark Schaefer [00:13:31]:
When I create videos, it might be a little out of focus here and there. Maybe the audio wasn't quite right. Maybe there's dust on the lens he never uses AI he said, I want something real, raw, with real human reactions and real human emotions. Now look at some of the stuff that's in the news right now. One of the big aesthetic trends is lo fi, right?

Dave Gerhardt [00:13:59]:
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:14:00]:
What was the big story? I think it was in the Wall Street Journal maybe a week or two ago, where there's this backlash of video game companies. They're spending millions of millions of dollars to make video games that look like movies. And the gamers are saying, no, we just like hanging out with our friends. We like the lo fi sort of aesthetic. So it's like, gosh, this is something I just talked about in the book. And you see story after story after story of this backlash against perfection about this. We're hungry for something real. We're hungry for something that's a little disruptive.

Dave Gerhardt [00:14:37]:
Yeah. You know, we started doing events for our business for the first time this year. And the first event we did sold out in like, two days. And then even the event itself was this unbelievable buzz because people just wanted to hang out. They just want to hang out. And it's like, I started to think about it, and I've heard other people. Chris Sacca had a great rant on this, but basically, like, in the world of AI, it's going to be like those analog, those real human connections are the things that we're going to crave. You know, whether it's, you know, You've seen the trend now, like, raw, dogging a flight.

Dave Gerhardt [00:15:14]:
No headphones, no water, no Internet. You just sit on the flight. And that's supposed to be like, you know, being present. We're going to crave those experiences. So that's a good one. Talking about just the quality of the creative. I think about this with B2B a lot. A lot of the ads that I see on LinkedIn, for example, my brain right away knows it's an ad because it looks like the creative director approved the safeness of that ad.

Mark Schaefer [00:15:34]:
Yeah, that's another thing that Kravica talked about. He said, never make an ad. If you start something with a logo or a celebrity immediately, you either tune it out or you look at it through the filter of, they're selling me something. Yeah. He said, create something that connects, has this emotional resonance that most marketing doesn't have. Then you see who made it. At the end you say, oh, that's pretty clever. But I want to build on this comment you made about live events, because this is a key idea in the book.

Mark Schaefer [00:16:05]:
And again, the book is about where do the humans fit in this thing? And this idea of shared experiences is really important. I dissect this idea called collective effervescence. And it's this emotional contagion, this awe that occurs when people come together in new and stimulating and meaningful ways. And here's a simple example. When I was a young guy, you probably won't be able to relate to this at all. You'll think, I'm making this up. When I was a young guy, you had to save your money to buy a record album. And once you got that record album, everybody would come to your house.

Mark Schaefer [00:16:46]:
You listen to the record, you'd flip the side over, you listen to the second side, you'd read the lyrics on the liner notes, you'd have a little party, right? Then you get some pizza.

Dave Gerhardt [00:16:57]:
It was an experience.

Mark Schaefer [00:16:58]:
It was a shared experience. Now, today, we have millions and millions of people who experience the world by themselves through their earbuds. They consume all of their tv, movie, music, books, everything, culture, by themselves. And yet this idea of craving the shared experiences has not gone away. It's part of the human fabric. And what you've done with your business is exactly what we should be doing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:30]:
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:17:31]:
And again, this is something AI can't touch. This is us, right? Bringing people together and creating this collective effervescence. We're creating awe. So I challenge your listeners to think about what would your marketing look like if your plan was Add more awe.

Dave Gerhardt [00:17:50]:
I love that it's so relevant because it almost seems counterintuitive. It's like everybody's going to use the AI tools and you want me to post unfiltered videos on the Internet. Okay, but it makes so much sense. You kind of want to just go in that direction. Be like, we're going to be the human brand. What do you say? To some. And you've been in marketing at Fortune 100 level companies and I've seen the list of your clients on your website. You deal with some of the biggest brands.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:18]:
There's always someone who listens to this that will say, yeah, well, Dave, like we can't, in my industry, we just can't do X or this isn't going to work because We're a Fortune 500, you know, cybersecurity company. So what's your. How do you handle that? Objection.

Mark Schaefer [00:18:32]:
Usually they're right and here because it's just if you look at the opportunity in the world, it's made for small to medium sized companies.

Dave Gerhardt [00:18:47]:
Right.

Mark Schaefer [00:18:48]:
Let me tell you something. I gave a workshop recently to one of the biggest consumer product companies in the world and they were interested in brand communities. I wrote a book about brand communities called Belonging to the Brand. And they invited me, they said, this is great. We need to understand this, this is the future. One of the great massive advantages of brand communities is if you do something in a community that's so cool, so worthy that people talk about it outside the community, you have this organic advocacy and that's better than any advertising you could ever have. This brand manager took me aside, he said, I understand this, this is really great. But when other people carry your message, how do we control it? That's the world, man.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:39]:
It's crazy, right? Yeah. Like how do you.

Mark Schaefer [00:19:41]:
I can't fix that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:42]:
I can't. We were just on vacation and a friend of mine said, oh, you're going to be in Aruba with the kids. Go to this restaurant. The restaurant wasn't like, here's how to make sure that they say the right thing about our restaurant.

Mark Schaefer [00:19:54]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:19:55]:
So eventually you reach this point as a brand where you're too big and you're not going to be able to do this type of stuff.

Mark Schaefer [00:20:01]:
You know, I've talked about this infrastructure of fear or the scaffolding of fear. I mean, here's another little example. I was working with a brand manager at another big global company. So they've got a universal contract with an advertising agency. So every advertising and marketing idea they have has to go through the agency. So she read my books, she connected with me. She wanted to do experiments with new types of content, with connecting to their customers in new ways. She takes us to the agency, they come back with a proposal, it's an ad.

Mark Schaefer [00:20:39]:
And she said, they don't know this, but I worked at a different company three years ago. They gave me the same proposal three years ago at a different company. She said, I am so frustrated. I'm ready to either break all the rules and get fired or quit. So that's the fear, right? That's the scaffolding of boring that is in place for a lot of big companies. And that's a hard world. I was on an advisory board for a big pharma company and they wanted to do this experiment with social media and everything we said, the lawyer said no. We're sitting at this table and it was me and the brand managers and the ad agency and, and everything we said, they said no.

Mark Schaefer [00:21:32]:
I knew what the regulations said, I knew where the boundaries were. Finally it got to the point in the meeting, I was an outsider. I blurted out, did you even read the laws? Now it was kind of embarrassing that I said that, but it was true. They hadn't read the laws or they didn't understand the laws. They just didn't want to change. They just didn't want to add any layer of risk. So, you know, big, big companies, it's hard. I don't know how they're going to adjust to this world.

Dave Gerhardt [00:22:06]:
Are there good parts of AI, like a lot of people in our world are really excited about it for oh.

Mark Schaefer [00:22:12]:
Yeah, we're living in a time of magic. You know, there's no other word to say it. It's just absolute magic. What I've been writing about for 15, 16 years now is this intersection of marketing and technology and humanity. And there's never been a more interesting time. And I love art and I dabble in watercolor painting. I'd love to be an artist, but I'm not an artist and I'm not an illustrator. And yet I can have like art illustrating ideas on my blog that can be beautiful and diverse and, and settle and send messages about what I'm trying to address that day in incredible ways.

Mark Schaefer [00:22:57]:
It's become like a search engine for my imagination. AI gives voice to the voiceless. It makes non artists artists and non writers writers that it can unleash all this potential and all this creativity. And the other thing I think we need to embrace is, is I saw this study where they were looking at the impact of AI on researchers. Not surprisingly, when they started using AI, the researchers had more discoveries, more patents, and more product launches. But the most interesting part of this study was that the very best researchers who used AI became even better. It created more distance between the experts and the more average people. So that's why I'm saying, like, what are you afraid of? You gotta embrace this.

Mark Schaefer [00:23:51]:
If you're great, it's gonna make you greater. If you want to explore new parts of creativity, it allows you to do that. It can challenge you and stretch you. I mean, I wrote my own book, but one of the ways I used it was when the book was completely finished. Finished. I uploaded it to ChatGPT and to Claude and I said, what's missing? And I'll be darn. They both came back with the same answer. They said, you need to have a chapter on measurement.

Mark Schaefer [00:24:20]:
And in my original outline, I had a chapter on measurement and decided not to do it because I was, it was too hard, I was getting too tired. But I wrote the chapter and it made it a better book.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:32]:
Yeah, that's a great example, a great gut check. You could even make a world where like, I'm just thinking on the fly of like, okay, this guy's telling me that the future. You gotta create these really human driven campaigns to stand out. Your marketing has to have that human element to it. The way you're gonna stand out is by being human. I would go to ChatGPT or Claude after listening to this podcast and basically tell it everything about my brand.

Mark Schaefer [00:24:52]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:24:53]:
Tell it about everything about my competitors and say, hey, I'm really into this guy's theory. Here's what he's written about. Right. I'm interested in this theory about creating human. Here's how we do marketing today. Help me generate a list of 10 ideas or 10 ways we could bring more human touches and elements into our marketing. And I bet we'd get some good ideas from that. So you're not, hey, don't use AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:10]:
We're saying you can use these tools to enable you to be a better, more creative marketer. But the creative stuff is what's going to win. And so you got to.

Mark Schaefer [00:25:17]:
I know you said you hadn't got through the entire book yet, but there's a chapter at the end about using AI. How do we use AI to be disruptive?

Dave Gerhardt [00:25:27]:
Yeah, this is a more of a personal question, but was it tempting to use? Like, you've put out 11 books now. Got to figure that Lee Child is right. Is Using AI to write, you know, the next novels. Was it tempting to, you know, if I was thinking about writing a book, how would I not think about AI? Was there something you wanted to put on? This personally was attempting to use AI.

Mark Schaefer [00:25:48]:
So I did an experiment last year. I wrote this little book that people loved many years ago called Social Media Explained. And I wrote the first edition, I wrote the second edition. It was time for a third edition. And writing a book can be just a completely exhausting experience. It takes everything out of me. And I thought, there's gotta be a better way. I am going to write an AI driven book.

Mark Schaefer [00:26:13]:
I'm going to use every trick in the book to write this book the easiest way I can. So I started using it and it was just a complete failure. And the reason is, is because AI is like a puppy dog. It bounces around. It just wants to please you. And so you put in a query and it looks through billions of points of data throughout all of history and comes up with the best average answer to try to win your heart. And the best average answer of anything is a terrible book. To me, a book is about insights.

Mark Schaefer [00:26:49]:
It's about a revelation. Here's something I learned. I want you to learn it. Here's an experience I had. This will help you. Here's a story from my world that helps explain this. And for me, I mean, writing is natural and enjoyable anyway, and it just was forced. And my books have dad jokes in them.

Mark Schaefer [00:27:12]:
That's part of my personality. Maybe there's humor in the books. So I just gave up. It was a terrible experience. It was just better and faster for me to just do it myself. And so now when I wrote this new book, I just went back to my old process, my old sort of hunting and gathering of stories, statistics, examples, case studies, and weaved them together in a new book and. Actually, you know, it's an interesting question you have, Dave, because a book to me is my legacy. It's something very, very important to me and something I take very seriously.

Mark Schaefer [00:27:52]:
Most business books today are a blog post with 240 pages of fluff. There's no fluff in my books. And I wrote a book.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:03]:
I wrote a book. And it could have been a blog post. And one of the comments was, there's a one star review on Amazon. And the guy wrote, should have been a blog post.

Mark Schaefer [00:28:12]:
Oh, boy. Well, sorry for. Sorry for kicking that crusted turd, Dave.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:17]:
No, it's. I'm doing the right thing now. You. Yeah, you've written 11 books for a Reason.

Mark Schaefer [00:28:20]:
But, you know, I was more inspired to really, really work on the craft. And I just thought, I'm going to make this better than ever. I'm going to make it the writing better, I'm going to make the humor better, I'm going to make the stories better, I'm going to make the editing better. So now that I think about it, it's sort of ironic that it was the least AI book I possibly could have written.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:45]:
It sounds like you didn't want to make a mass produced piece of work. Right? It would be very.

Mark Schaefer [00:28:50]:
AI did help me with the research. Some research.

Dave Gerhardt [00:28:52]:
Oh, sure.

Mark Schaefer [00:28:53]:
Like, I had some holes to fill in terms of specific case studies where I wanted to feature like a nonprofit or small businesses.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:02]:
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:03]:
And so perplexity was good. Helping me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:06]:
That's an amazing way to do it. Like, that's an example of like, you're selling yourself short and you're being silly if you're not going to use the best research tool in the world to like, comb through the Internet.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:15]:
No. I mean, yeah, certainly the message of the book is like, where do humans fit in the world?

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:21]:
But I want to run through this. So mar in the book. So the title of the book is Audacious. He's a great marketer himself. And so the Audacious is actually the framework in the book. And so I'm just going to run through these for you at home. So A is authentic, genuine human stories. U is about being unique, original perspectives that I can't generate.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:38]:
D is daring. A is accountable. C is what?

Mark Schaefer [00:29:41]:
I don't know where you're getting this. This kit must have come from AI.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:44]:
Yeah, it is. This is. This is my clawed research is not made it up.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:48]:
That's a hallucination.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:49]:
Get out of here.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:50]:
Nope.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:51]:
This is amazing. We're on a podcast talking about. I never heard it.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:55]:
Wow. But thank you for playing.

Dave Gerhardt [00:29:58]:
Damn.

Mark Schaefer [00:29:58]:
Let me tell you the real framework.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:00]:
That's amazing.

Mark Schaefer [00:30:01]:
That is really amazing. You've just become a case study, my friend.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:05]:
How great is that?

Mark Schaefer [00:30:06]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:07]:
So what is true?

Mark Schaefer [00:30:08]:
Not even true.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:09]:
Rutgers is not true. He's not from Knoxville.

Mark Schaefer [00:30:13]:
I teach at Rutgers.

Dave Gerhardt [00:30:14]:
But I'm just kidding.

Mark Schaefer [00:30:14]:
So. But the framework is this. So I got to meet the greatest creative minds in the world and I was looking, okay, how are they breaking through the boring. How are they becoming the signal over the noise? Is there a pattern? Is there a framework? And I found that there is. And what they did was they said, okay, you know, here's your marketing, here's your story. What is your marketing story? It's the narrative. It's where you tell it, and it's who tells it. And if you disrupt one of those things now you're commanding attention because you're doing something very, very different.

Mark Schaefer [00:30:56]:
And there's examples and case studies for each of these, but those are the kind of the three big buckets of the book. How do we disrupt the story? How do we disrupt where the story is told? How do we disrupt the storyteller? Beautiful.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:10]:
That's so funny.

Mark Schaefer [00:31:11]:
And you don't even know where to go at this point.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:16]:
No, it's just like a perfect example of like, it's just everything you just mentioned. Like, you gotta be able to like, check some of this stuff, right? Like, that was a perfect example that played out in real time.

Mark Schaefer [00:31:27]:
I would be embarrassed to put out a framework that's spelled out audacious. That would be so contrived.

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:38]:
I was gonna say.

Mark Schaefer [00:31:41]:
Mark, how did you embarrass yourself this way?

Dave Gerhardt [00:31:45]:
Your car doesn't have a. A, period U, period D, period A. You don't have an audacious, like, bumper sticker on your. I was expecting. Get a sticker or something. I should have known once you needed to put your own dad jokes in the book and put your own fingers on it. I think that's a good tell. You mentioned measurement before.

Dave Gerhardt [00:32:00]:
And anytime we talk about concepts like this, being human, building a brand, being memorable, obviously the question is, okay, Mark, but how do I measure that? We did this thing and I didn't get six new sales in the last month. Like, this is not working. Do you think about measurement for something like this?

Mark Schaefer [00:32:19]:
Well, measurement is so hard in the marketing world in. In many cases, especially when it comes to brand marketing. So what I did with the chapter on measurement in this book was to confine myself to the idea of audacity and risk taking. So kind of the premise of the book is if you step out of your comfort zone and you start pushing outside of the normalized dull of your industry, that you'll be rewarded over time. But how do we know we're doing this? So the framework really is your own observation about how new is this really? How much of a risk is this really? There's five different measures. So when I came up with this concept, I actually took it to some agencies. I said, would you use something like this? Does this make sense? And they said, yeah, this does make sense. And they added two comments.

Mark Schaefer [00:33:23]:
Is that one that this would really be sort of. It's not a standard measure. It's a relative measure that if you're in an industry that's just so conservative and so boring and just moving one little step up could be massive. It could be a huge risk. That was the first one, the second one, the second comment, which I think is absolutely brilliant and it would be an amazing experiment. You could take this measure and you could see what other companies are doing. And a lot of people say, hey Mark, ever since I read this book now I'm like noticing audacious. I'm noticing the things, kind of the content and the marketing that's doing like what you said.

Mark Schaefer [00:34:06]:
You could put that through my filter and put their competitors through the filter and then see what's the impact on the relative financial performance. That would be super interesting. You know, my favorite case study in the book is probably Liquid Death, which is, you know, I know you probably have some listeners outside of America probably don't know what Liquid Death is, but it's more or less a startup, four or five years old. It's now the fastest growing beverage in America and it just disrupts everything that we've been talking about. I mean, when I took my first marketing class, I don't remember much about it, but I'm sure the first rule of marketing was never associate your brand with death. So they just start with wrong and build from there.

Dave Gerhardt [00:34:54]:
And everybody said, how can you sell water? It's literally water in a water in bars.

Mark Schaefer [00:35:00]:
So think about it this way. The founder of Liquid Death didn't get into that business because he was obsessed with water. He got into that business because this was a completely boring vertical that they just. Everything was the same. It was clear, it was wholesome, it was clear plastic packaging. And they had names like Rainbow Springs, right? And the whole world is just hungry or in this case, thirsty for something new and something disruptive and bold. Now think about the automotive industry. It's all the same.

Mark Schaefer [00:35:37]:
My favorite example is pizza. Why shouldn't pizza just be nuts? It's a celebration. It's crazy. You know, young people love it. The most innovative thing we have in America is nobody out pizzas the hut. What does that even mean? Almost every industry is so freaking boring. Now don't even get me started about B2B. So all you need to do is just be one notch above boring and you're making progress.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:06]:
Okay, so the reason I love the Liquid Death example is because I think that if you want to do this and I feel like what you're talking about, it's not like you're going to do one single, one off creative campaign that is different. It's like, no, let's fundamentally, like, the reason Liquid Death worked is because that was why they launched the brand. They thought about all those things from the beginning. It's not just the fact that it's this cool can and it's water and they got fun names, but like everything down to like the micro copy. Like, you know, if you look at the back of the can and it says something about like how you should recycle the can or something, even that copy is fantastic.

Mark Schaefer [00:36:39]:
Everything. Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:36:41]:
So the big opportunity, right, Mark, is like if we can just like press pause and rethink the whole brand strategy. Because we need to start with a story that reflects this position, not just like a one off marketing campaign. We're not just going to run one LinkedIn ad with like a kind of blurry image.

Mark Schaefer [00:36:57]:
Yeah. I mean, I think an interesting intellectual question might be, could Coca Cola do that? And what Mike Cesario, the founder of Liquid Death, says in my book, he said, literally, there's no way we could compete in the water business because Coke and Pepsi are in the water business and they could copy anything we do. You can't have a special flavor. You can't have a special ingredient. The only thing you have is your brand. That's it. It's the only way to disrupt against the big brands. And I think for Coke or Pepsi to pull something like that off, it'd have to be a sub brand because they've got just too much to lose.

Mark Schaefer [00:37:39]:
It would be too confusing. Right, right. To have a disruptive brand, you've got to be a disruptor. Another favorite example is Nutter Butter. Do you know what I'm talking about with the Nutter butter videos on TikTok?

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:50]:
No. Oh my gosh, no.

Mark Schaefer [00:37:53]:
It's insane.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:54]:
I'm looking right now.

Mark Schaefer [00:37:55]:
Do yourself a favor.

Dave Gerhardt [00:37:56]:
Why does Nutter Butter have 1.6 million followers on TikTok?

Mark Schaefer [00:38:00]:
Yeah, that's right.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:02]:
So they're special. Butter Butter.

Mark Schaefer [00:38:04]:
Their videos on TikTok are like an LSD fever dream. And you look at these videos and you think, what in God's name are they doing? This has nothing to do with cookies. And their sales have quadrupled in the last 12 months. Again saying, because what is a Nutter Butter? It's a forgotten brand.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:24]:
My grandmother's favorite cookie. I don't know.

Mark Schaefer [00:38:26]:
Yeah, that would be their good slogan. Something that you traded for an, for an Oreo as a child or something.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:33]:
Interesting. That's a really good example because.

Mark Schaefer [00:38:35]:
Because it's the whole cookie industry, it's the same, it's just the same. And it's ripe for disruption.

Dave Gerhardt [00:38:43]:
But like if you go to their website, it doesn't feel like their TikTok stuff at all. I went to their website and it's the Nutter Butter website that you would expect. So this is a good example based on what I asked you before. It's like, where do you start with this? It seems like my one minute knowledge of this is they were like, let's go hard on this crazy angle just on TikTok. And that's going to raise the awareness for we don't need to change the brand to do this.

Mark Schaefer [00:39:05]:
Yeah, I think there's two things because one of the ideas here, it's the main idea of the book, is that and you sort of hinted at this, it's not a stunt, it's got to be sustainable. So it's going to be really interesting to watch Nutter Butter as a case study because they're putting out all this bizarre content, but there's gotta be like a storyline, there's gotta be some through line. So like on Reddit there are discussion groups trying to figure out what are these names. But at some point you gotta have a payoff as to how this comes together. Number two, at some point there's gotta be an integration with the main brand. Even if it's like a hat tip, like somewhere on the package, like one of their main images for some reason is a shrimp. Like a shrimp cocktail shrimp.

Dave Gerhardt [00:39:56]:
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer [00:39:57]:
So there's gotta be some little hat tip, a secret message for children on the packaging where maybe mom and dad don't know what this is, but we are on TikTok and we know what this means. So there's got to be some kind of integration for it to be sustainable.

Dave Gerhardt [00:40:13]:
Let's talk about B2B. So people love these examples. You said don't get me started on B2B, but let's spend a couple minutes on there because maybe let's just riff on this. I don't know if you have an example on this or not, but maybe we can just riff on this. Like if I'm a B2B company, if I'm a B2B manufacturing company or you know, fintech company, like, how can I put something like this? Like, how should I be thinking about this? Like, yeah, I love this guy. This episode is really helpful. This is interesting. I want to do this, but like my company makes payroll software.

Mark Schaefer [00:40:39]:
Well, first of all, in all of my books, I Work hard to have diverse examples. B2B. B2C. Small businesses, big businesses, big budget, no budget nonprofits. So there's something for everybody in these books. And I go out of my way, like I said, to make sure that there's something in there for everybody. I think another misconception is like, somehow people that work in B2B, they're not real people. They don't really like things the way the things that other people like.

Mark Schaefer [00:41:14]:
Now, I understand there are differences in terms of the sales cycle, maybe the complexity of the sale or whatever. But in terms of awareness, the idea of capturing attention, especially if you're a disruptor, why are the rules different? People are hungry for something cool and new and maybe even bizarre. You know, we used another, better example. And I tend to default by saying, you know, Gen Z. Gen Z are running businesses now. Gen Z, they are the procurement department. Now we've got Gen Z people in the American been voted into the American Congress.

Dave Gerhardt [00:41:51]:
I just had this discussion with our team. We're sending out an event email and we wanted to write an email that was like, hey, we know the event ticket is expensive. Here's how to like, get your boss. A bunch of people were like, oh, I need my boss to. I'm not going to pay this out of my pocket. I need my boss to do it. And so we wrote an email and it was very stiff. And I say, well, why is this even so stiff? And they said, well, we got to make it appeal to the boss.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:13]:
I'm like, well, who do you think the boss is? The boss isn't a robot. The boss is also a human. We can have fun with this. I think that's okay.

Mark Schaefer [00:42:19]:
You know, awareness is the most precious commodity and you want to create something that makes them go, oh my gosh, I never saw anything like this before. Yeah, of course we need to be involved in this. Wow. Who are these people? Spark that curiosity, Mark.

Dave Gerhardt [00:42:34]:
Do you think that the marketer in the company can push the company to do this? Or does it have to come from the founder level? You know, and obviously, let's remove Nutter. But I say, like the average person listening, this is like a, you know, VP of marketing at a $17 million revenue company has, right?

Mark Schaefer [00:42:52]:
So there's actually a chapter in the book is at the end of the book, then the chapter is titled the most important chapter in the book. Because throughout the whole book, people are saying, okay, I'm fired up, I'm getting it, I'm ready to go. But then by the end of the book, you're thinking, okay, now how do I do this and not get fired? And that's what this chapter is about. So both of your points are relevant. That the leader of the company controls the culture. Control your culture is your marketing. That's what's going to show up in the world. If you're a button down pharmaceutical company, that's how your marketing is going to look.

Mark Schaefer [00:43:30]:
If you're kind of a wild and crazy startup ready to do anything to help your customers, that's what's going to show up. So on one level, yes, the person at the top of the company that owns the budget and the strategy, they also own the culture. And there's no such thing as a grassroots changing of culture. If you're down there, you know, marketing manager, just hoping for a change, you've got to somehow get to the people at the top. Now how do you do that? It's all about experimentation. And for me, I built my whole career on pilot programs. Pilot programs, you know, so you go to your boss and you say, hey, there's this new thing. We could take a little bit of money and we could try this and we're going to do like a six month program and it'll end in six months and be able to evaluate.

Mark Schaefer [00:44:21]:
So you build this thing and you build in some quick wins and you do a good job communicating it. And usually in six months your boss is gone anyway, they forgot about it and now you're just doing it. But what I find in most companies is that if you have a really good leader, that person wants to stay ahead, they have a mandate to clobber the competition. And if you have some new idea because you read this audacious book and okay, that makes a whole lot of sense, let's give it a little try. Between the Internet and social media and AI, it costs almost nothing to do. Pilots today, going back to the liquid death example, they did a pilot program, they imported, they built a company before they even had a product. They launched the product on Facebook just to see if people would buy it.

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:17]:
Right.

Mark Schaefer [00:45:18]:
They didn't even have a product. They brought in a few thousand cans from Europe. What they found is, ooh, the bars. Love it. All right, didn't know that, let's go with that. And so it cost almost nothing to pilot and launch that product. I also look at this idea of around change from two other perspectives. One is, what if you're the leader and you do want to change the culture? And the other one, what if you're a freelancer what if you're an outsider, how do you get people to adopt ideas that are a little bit more courageous?

Dave Gerhardt [00:45:55]:
There's this company, they're called WellHub and they're like a HR benefits type of company. So they're B2B and they did a podcast, like a narrative style scripted with actors style podcast called Murder in hr and they hired actors and it actually got to be super popular. I think it was one of the top podcasts in the like mystery crime category.

Mark Schaefer [00:46:21]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:46:21]:
Wink wink, not not happens to be put on by like a B2B benefits company. Yeah. I think that's an idea that seems to fit in this bucket is like, let's take a chance on something. And you know, I think where marketers get stuck is like, we can't go do the crazy thing. Like, we can't stop everything and then go do the crazy thing. And the crazy thing doesn't work out and now we're screwed. It's like we got to do that in parallel. Like the pilot program.

Mark Schaefer [00:46:42]:
One of the positioning case studies in the book is a cybersecurity company. I mean, it's just so boring and so complicated. And they found a way to explain what they do and how they do it through a card game. They created a card game that's now used as a teaching school at universities by the government. They're selling expansion packs to this game on Amazon. They also created a comic book and the comic book became so popular it's being licensed by a comic book distributor now. So again, it's just a B2B company that just is trying something different. And again, B2B isn't any different than B2C.

Mark Schaefer [00:47:27]:
It's just people like comic books. They like to play games, they like to learn in a new way that makes it easy to understand. So I think the whole imaginary wall between that is sort of melting away.

Dave Gerhardt [00:47:41]:
Yeah. I think people look, you meet somebody new, the very first question they ask you is like, oh, hey Mark, nice to meet you. What do you do for work? Like, we. It's always kind of been my pitch. In B2B, at least we put a lot of self worth value into like what we do for work. And so I think in B2B you just need to maybe make more content as it relates to that person at work versus buying comic books.

Mark Schaefer [00:48:00]:
Yeah.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:02]:
Okay, Mark, this was amazing. I guess I got my hand in the cookie jar. I probably owe you finishing your book now I'm going to go read the seven steps of the Audacious Framework. And I'll report back. I'll give you a grade on each one.

Mark Schaefer [00:48:13]:
Do that.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:14]:
So obviously go check out mark stuff businesses grow.com or just Google him. Mark Schaefer I would go get Marketing Rebellion and read Audacious. This is like the most important topic right now is like, how do we as marketers stay relevant in this world of AI? And Mark has a great perspective on it. I just want to leave with this quote. This is early and audacious, but this is the crux of what Mark talks about. I think this is such a powerful thing to leave with and this is what the job of marketing is. I spent nearly two decades researching and writing about one crucial problem. How can our marketing messaging become the signal above the noise in a world of oversaturated content? That is kind of the one question that I want to leave people with.

Dave Gerhardt [00:48:52]:
Put that on a post it note, pause this and like bring this back to your team. Question everything inside of your company. I love the book the Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh. And he has this quote about when he went to the 49ers, he was like, the right mantra for a team is like the worst thing you can say is, oh, that's the way we've always done it. Right now is a great time to question everything and to stand out and hopefully be Audacious. Mark Schaefer, thanks for hanging out with me. I'll continue to follow you. Love your stuff and you're a great resource for us.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:17]:
So thank you.

Mark Schaefer [00:49:18]:
This has been a great conversation and thanks for all your great questions and thanks for thinking of me.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:24]:
Thanks, man. Appreciate it. All right, see you later. Hey, thanks for listening to this podcast. If you like this episode. You know what? I'm not even going to ask you to subscribe and leave a review because I don't really care about that. I have something better for you. So we've built the number one private community for B2B marketers at Exit Five.

Dave Gerhardt [00:49:45]:
And you can go and check that out. Instead of leaving a rating or review, go check it out right now on our website, exitfive.com our mission at Exit Five is to help you grow your career in B2B marketing. And there's no no better place to do that than with us at Exit Five. There's nearly 5, 000 members now in our community. People are in there posting every day asking questions about things like marketing, planning, ideas, inspiration, asking questions and getting feedback from your peers. Building your own network of marketers who are doing the same thing. You are so you can have a peer group or maybe just venting about your boss when you need to get in there and get something off your chest. It's 100% free to join.

Dave Gerhardt [00:50:22]:
Join for seven days so you can go and check it out risk free and then there's a small annual fee to pay if you want to become a member for the year. Go check it out. Learn more exitfive.com and I will see you over there in the community.

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