James Kennedy interviews marketing expert Mark Schaefer about how music artists can cut through the online noise. Schaefer explains that social media reach is no longer enough, arguing that creators must build genuine communities where fans can connect deeply with one another. The conversation also covers overcoming social media burnout and the power of consistency.
James Kennedy: This is a question that nobody in the music industry in particular has been able to answer for me yet concisely is what the hell do you do to get heard above the noise of everybody else also doing their thing
Mark Schaefer: That is the big question and you know it's funny that's basically what I have devoted my career to for the last 12 years or maybe even longer and it kind of started around 2011 where I made this observation that and you and I before you push record we started talking about the shift right the shift in the world the shift in the industry the shift with media for me it was really happening around 2010 2011 and I saw that the power in the world was moving from these big consolidated media companies and advertising agencies to the people once you can start creating content and remember you know in the early days of the internet being a musician or an artist it really wasn't that feasible because we didn't have the bandwidth we couldn't download anything yeah right you couldn't upload you couldn't download but then things started moving along and that's when the power started to shift so in 2012 I wrote the first book on influence marketing called return on influence nobody was even talking about it nobody was even using that word but this was the significant change where people creators artists musicians they could start creating their own brand on the web they could create their own influence their own power their own audience without a gatekeeper yeah this was a historic moment this was a historic moment so that was sort of the beginning of this trajectory okay I saw the power shifting I wrote this big book and then ever since then I've been trying to figure out okay what do we do about it because it's true it happened and now everybody's creating content and music and now if you thought it was noisy before you ain't seen nothing yet because now we've got chat gpt yes and we've got now we've got robots creating our content and they never get tired and they never get hungry and they don't go on strike so they're going to be creating infinite amounts of content in some ways it's great because it unleashes a new level of creativity I mean let's say you're a musician but you're just not a writer and what chat gpt does is it does for writing what the calculator did for math right if you hated math the calculator made you adequate you could do your taxes even if you never even understood what you were doing and chat gpt can do that now for writing we've got programs out there like mid journey you can do that sort of thing for art you know I'm now creating artificial intelligence generated art for all of my content all of my blogs oh wow and it's beautiful and compelling and it's fun to do it's just fun to create and so the positive the beautiful thing about this James is that it unleashes a whole new level of creativity if you were afraid of writing now you can be a writer yeah you know if you never were that artistic now you can create beautiful images you can do art that goes along with your music at the push of a button so that's the good part about it the exciting part about it and there are also a lot of challenges but that you are asking the right question is what do we do and I think the short answer and maybe we can explore this a little bit more is so I wrote a book in 2019 called marketing rebellion yeah and the subtitle was the most human company wins so it's most human fill in the blank most human university most human symphony most human non-profit because that is the key to how you stand out in this world is to recognize that people want to experience the authentic human connection you got to peel back the curtain and show the world this is what it's like to be me this is the good this is just like you did in your book right you peel back the curtain and said okay this is what it's like to be me this is what I'm learning this is how I'm growing these are the mistakes I made and that vulnerability is missing in most of the world and all of the marketing so if they get that from you you earn this connection that can turn into community
James Kennedy: Great point yeah that makes a lot of sense there is a kind of like an advertising burnout isn't there fatigue you know we get content saturation from every angle everybody's on the make everybody's trying to sell you something to someone that just have a direct humane conversation with you is a breath of fresh air because everybody's got something to sell and it is a as you said it's a very very noisy world out there right now and how anyone makes any sense of it I don't know I think my community struggles a lot with this because we may be talented in creative areas but not necessarily talented in business or marketing areas so we do struggle with that sort of thing but we are ironically perfectly placed because communication and authenticity and artistic expression is what we do you know so you would think we would be best at it I think the confusion within my community definitely from my own experience and that of my peers is we're not really entirely sure what the process of marketing is in a basic sense what are the sort of key fundamental principles of marketing what am I doing what am I hoping to achieve how do I start and how do I get there and how do I keep it going
Mark Schaefer: This is a good intellectual challenge for me to describe the marketing process in five minutes or less because I don't think I've ever done this before James so here we go oh that's cool all right number one what is the process of marketing and what are the principles of marketing what is marketing marketing is the process of creating a customer you know underneath that there's a lot of things you can do you kind of have to understand what your customers like and where they are and what's going on in their lives and how much money they have but essentially it's creating a customer for a musician is creating a fan that's going to buy your work okay now there are two different kinds of marketing and this is where a lot of people get [confused] one is direct marketing so this would be if you go into a store and you see a coupon for Coca-Cola so Coca-Cola they need to move more product they can have a coupon and then they'll sell more stuff and it's pretty easy to measure you do ads you do coupons you sell more stuff it's pretty easy to measure that's called direct marketing that's not so relevant to artists and musicians
James Kennedy: It's not so right
Mark Schaefer: I mean I'm imagining you've probably never had a sale you know you probably never said it's Boxing Day we're going crazy two for one special I mean that's not how it works right now here's what does work this is the second kind of marketing and that's called brand marketing so let's go back to the Coca-Cola example I gave a speech in Poland before the pandemic and it was huge thousands of people in this audience it was amazing event and I said when you think of Coca-Cola what do you think of it's sort of a rhetorical question but somebody from the audience yells out polar bears so even in Poland you think of Coca-Cola that's polar bears now why does Coca-Cola do that because they don't want you to think about high caloric sugar water that makes you sick right they want to create an expectation a feeling yes when you interact with this product it's supposed to make you warm and friendly and happy and you share it with family special occasions and you drink it on the beach that's Coca-Cola it's a feeling that you expect now we're getting somewhere so the key to marketing for a musician or an artist is to create a feeling that you expect and you deliver on that feeling every time and that feeling is going to connect to your audience that's why some people might like Taylor Swift and some people might like Radiohead and some people might like Ozzy Osbourne they're completely different feelings completely different expectations but it connects to you in some authentic and organic way okay now all right so here we are our job as a musician is to create a meaning a feeling that connects us to our audience that makes us different that creates loyalty because as long as you deliver on that and that's why a musician might struggle so let's say you got a rock and roll artist and all of a sudden they create a country album now you're going to lose a lot of people because the expectation has been breached okay so that's really what marketing is about now the good thing about the world today is that every person has an opportunity to reach directly to their fans through all kinds of different kinds of social media outlets and so we don't have to worry about gatekeepers we don't have to pay advertising agencies we just have to really show up in a human way that reflects our brand that's consistent with our brand and typically as you sort of mentioned an artist and their persona it's generally going to be consistent with who they are anyway yeah I mean unless you're Kiss you know then all bets are off but for most singer songwriters you're going to be so the idea is how can you take people along on your journey and let them in on what you're doing now we're going to connect the last dot and this really this is where I have a new book out so this is like the evolution of my thinking and my new book is about community so most artists naturally they're doing something on social media social media is cool because it gives you the opportunity to connect to people who have never heard of you before so you can reach this vast new audience you've got the potential to possibly reach the whole world but it's a weak relational link I have 180,000 followers on Twitter if I put out on Twitter hey everybody I've got a new book or I got a new album out how many people will buy it almost none because it's like throwing a message in a bottle out into the ocean right it's just ephemeral the people are there the connection is possible but is it really going to connect with people so the strategy is to take them to the next step which is an audience so do you have something they can subscribe to a blog a podcast a video series an Instagram account now it's not throwing a bottle in the ocean it's reliable reach they're saying I love you I want to hear from you I want to know everything about you and now you've got an audience and if you say I've got a new album out they're going to buy a lot of albums right so the strategy is create this brand connect on social media but bring the social media connections into an audience encourage them to subscribe now unfortunately this is where most businesses and most artists stop I've got my thing I've got my audience that's cool the ultimate emotional connection that's what we want we want the strongest possible emotional connection that is a community okay so let's use Kiss as an example they've got the brand they're on social media they've got an audience but they've also got the Kiss army the Kiss freaking army now here's the difference in an audience it's a cult of personality if you go away the audience goes away but in a community people know each other there's communion there's a purpose bigger than the music it's like look at my Kiss t-shirt look at my Kiss makeup my recording from this show yeah oh my gosh they're on their final tour right and so it's like a neighborhood and here's the interesting thing that I found in my research James so my new book is called belonging to the brand the last great marketing strategy because we're blocking ads we're in a streaming economy we don't want ads we don't see ads we don't believe ads but we need community we don't just want community we need community to be fully human human beings we have got to be in community this is the only kind of marketing that people actually want so the key the ultimate is to bring people into a community and then focus on getting people once they know each other and they have a place where their friends are they're never going to leave you because that means they got to leave their friends right
James Kennedy: Yeah they literally belong to the brand
Mark Schaefer: A community creates a layer of emotional switching costs they can't leave you they're going to always be loyal to you because that's where their peeps are that's where their friends are and it's the most powerful kind of marketing there is so there you go that is artistic marketing strategy in five minutes
James Kennedy: That was amazing thank you so much for doing that if there was an audience here now there'd be a standing ovation I'll just imagine it in my mind
Mark Schaefer: Yes please do because when this episode goes out there will be a fragmented audience all around the world who'll be doing exactly that finally it makes sense now someone has just condensed it all down succinctly into five minutes and cleared up all of the noise on this issue so thank you so much for doing that that was brilliant and a lot of what you said resonated with me personally because I've fallen foul to a lot of those pitfalls myself in the sense that when I first discovered the power of social media I really threw myself into it head first and I built up organically a large audience of over several hundred thousand followers across my various pages online which was awesome right but only a very small proportion of that following became an actual engaged audience and listening to what you just said I think it's because I focused exclusively on attracting as large an audience as I could and not on building an actual intimate human community so what's the missing link there how does one go from utilizing the amazing powers of social media to attract and build their tribe you know but also to then develop that into the sort of self-sustaining community that you just described
Mark Schaefer: Well there are two things I think in terms of the artists I mean normally if I was talking about a company I would start with the culture of the company I mean is it a culture is it a company that really cares about their customers or do they just want to hit their quarterly sales number I assume if you're an artist or a band that doesn't really matter because you are the culture now here's the big thing that a lot of people miss let's go back to this idea of brand and what you stand for here's an example that's easy to understand Patagonia so when you hear this brand Patagonia you know they stand for environmental sustainability responsible recreation I mean everything they do and everything they say I mean I think I just read last year the founder of the company is selling the company and taking all the product out of the company and they're selling the product out of the company and giving it to environmental causes wow so I mean that's what they're about I've got a friend who only buys Patagonia which by the way is not the cheapest clothing but he says I only buy Patagonia because my purpose intersects with their purpose so he literally belongs to the brand so you get back to this idea of what do you stand for what kind of sense of fun or what sense of social commitment or what's going on with you and then you move people into a community because they want to be part of whatever you're part of right it might just be fun it might just be I want to be entertained in a certain way that's perfectly fine other ways it might be people who are part of the community who want to grow maybe they want to change the world in the same way you do and the artists might think well look I can change the world in a bigger way if I've got my fans with me yeah I can have more fun if I have my fans with me I can create better art if I have my fans with me I can get on a bigger stage if I can have my fans with me so what can you do bigger and better and have a bigger impact if you can change the world in a bigger way people are coming alongside you because they believe in the same thing you do so that's next and then they need a place to gather it could be I mean a lot of people today are going on to Discord right my community is on Discord I have a community dedicated to learning about the future of marketing there are people there from all over the world challenging each other with new ideas now you know how does that grow you know my purpose is I'm writing books and blogging and giving speeches about the future of marketing so that's my purpose and that's their purpose and we're growing each other and we're learning and every blog post I write now every speech I give somewhere in that is an idea that came out of this community we're pushing each other and learning and so maybe you say hey everybody we're going to get on Discord and then you set up chat rooms of things that are going on and maybe every once in a while you come on and give a little play a little song or say hello use the audio channel use the video channel on Discord have a little event prime the pump and then watch for leaders who emerge people who want to start a discussion maybe they want to start a newsletter about you maybe they want to help you with promotions maybe you set up people in different cities if you're on tour on the ground kind of people and you find those volunteers who build the community for you and so now I mean I've got people in my community we're doing experiments in the metaverse I'm not doing it they're organizing the whole thing they decided some people wanted to start a podcast we're starting a podcast we're writing a book we're writing a book together it's going to come out in June we're doing experiments with NFTs and the last thing I'll say is we're talking here about Discord and online community but every community the best communities have an offline component as well so if you're an artist you have a special section where your community sits or you have a meet and greet or you have a party before the show for your community because once they see each other face to face remember that the love and the friendships in a community that spills over to the artist that's as important as the love for you if they love each other then you don't need any more marketing your marketing is over it's marketing without marketing because you build this group of people who you know they're going to do the marketing for you they're going to talk about all the things that they're learning about in this community and spread the word
ENJOYING THE CONVERSATION?
GET JAMES KENNEDY'S LATEST INTERVIEWS, WRITING AND LIVE SHOWS STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX
James Kennedy: That is a great point amongst many amazing points that you've dropped so far, which is something I hadn't previously considered in my use of social media as my means of audience generation. Because if I understand what you're saying correctly, you're saying that the role of social media has now changed. It might be a great place to meet new people and meet your audience, but it is no longer the end destination. It's no longer enough. You now need to have that other home, that other hub where your guys, your tribe exclusively mingle, which isn't just an open town square, as Elon Musk calls it. You know, it's your home. It's your club. It's your private membership area where your tribe can assemble and become that thriving and collaborative tribe that you described.
Mark Schaefer: Exactly. 100%. That's the goal is, you know, it's, I don't have a good analogy at the top of my head, but it's almost like you're planting the seeds in social media that the harvest comes in your audience and then your community. So you want to connect with people in social media, but somehow encourage them to opt into whatever they can subscribe to and then eventually become part of a community on Discord or Reddit or wherever you want to have your community.
James Kennedy: Yeah. And it's a lot more platform options now as well, isn't it? You know, outside of the main, the major ones, you know, like a Telegram, you've mentioned Discord already, you know, Mastodon is one that I want to try and check.
Mark Schaefer: Well, you got to be careful because like Mastodon is similar to Twitter. It's still an audience, right? I mean, you've got to have a home base like Slack or Circle or a Facebook group where people can go every day, any time of day, day or night, and they can come in there and meet friends who share their love, share their passion of what's going on. You've got to have a home base and if it's Facebook or Twitter or something like that, it's probably not even an audience. A community is, what defines a community is when they know each other. If you've got an audience that's great, by the way. I mean, I've got a huge audience and they buy my books and they hire me to give speeches and hire me to do marketing consulting. That's great. But the ultimate connection is community. And let me give you a quick example of how this works. So I teach a class on personal branding. It's $1,500. It's still quite a bit of money. And so every time I have one of these classes, I have to promote it. I have to put it on social media. I have to put it on LinkedIn and I try to limit the class to 10 because I give people a lot of individual attention. And last class, I only got eight. I couldn't fill the class and I was doing all this work to try to fill the class and I only got eight. In my community, someone said, you know Mark, I saw that you teach this class. It would be great if you could teach this class just for our community so that these are people that know each other. We could have friends in this class and then we could help each other. And then we'd be in this community talking the same language. I said, well, okay, here's a signup list. I'll let 10 people in and 10 people signed up in two hours. Wow. No promotion, no social media, no work. Because it's the ultimate marketing. It's marketing with no marketing. Right. If my community gets big enough and strong enough, I'll never have to worry about content, marketing, advertising, or SEO ever again. There's a chapter in my book that would be very, very relevant to artists. I've written 10 books and in the new book Belonging to the Brand chapter four, I did something I've never done before. I devoted the entire chapter to one person. This is a woman. She was an entrepreneur, had a great business. This is 2015. She got pregnant. Some people are saying, well, you got to give up the business now. You got to be a mom. Some were saying, no, you got this great business. You got to fight for the business. She decided I want to do both, but I don't really feel supported. I want to do both. She started talking about these ideas in a Facebook group. She had five or six followers. She had five or six people that said, yes, we need a group that will support moms who want to be entrepreneurs. Long story short, she now has a Facebook group with 80,000 women in it. Wow. She's making a million dollars a year. No sales, no marketing, no advertising zip. No SEO, no content marketing, nothing. She has no salespeople, no marketing budget at all because she has 80,000 people in this community. She said, my only job is to make them feel validated and safe. Wow. This is a safe place to talk about these issues. So she creates courses, videos, coaching events, a paid membership VIP level. So she's like doubling her business every year with no sales budget, no marketing budget. Any artist could use that model. It's like I had this little victory selling 10 slots in my class in just a couple minutes. And it's just like, oh, that's how this works. What if I had 80,000 people in my group? I could sell anything. I could fill everything. My marketing would be over. That's the beauty of community. It's the ultimate marketing. It's the ultimate emotional connection with no marketing.
James Kennedy: That is incredible. What a story. And that makes total sense as well, because if you're a part of that community and you want to do a crowdfunder for an album or a project or something like that, you go to your guys. You know what I mean? Because it's there. It's all there. That's awesome, man. Jesus. What a story. And like for a band starting out, then let's say they only have a bunch of followers, you know, they haven't really built much yet, but they're a kick-ass band. They're hardworking. They've got a great brand for want of a better word. They've got a great new album coming out, but they're trying to harness the power of social media towards that end goal example that you just used there. But they're not yet at the stage where everything they do is super interesting. And this is a common complaint that I have from so many of my friends is we get social media despondency, you know? Like we run out of steam because the relentless need to find things that are interesting and engaging and fun and insightful or cool or exciting. It's not always possible because so much of what we do in reality isn't any of those things, you know, there's a lot of admin and emails and many people have got day jobs and stuff going on outside of the band and people run out of ideas. They run out of steam. It's very difficult to maintain that kind of momentum, like in a corporation, or in a major label band, they'll have a digital department and a team of people. They're constantly making content, but how do we, speaking specifically about my community as artists, how do we navigate that without getting a little bit of traction, a little bit of hype going? And then all of a sudden it runs out of steam because you just, or oftentimes, like to use my current example, oftentimes you're too busy doing the thing to be documenting the thing. Like I've just received my advance to write my second book. There's a deadline looming. I've got to crack on with the book as much as I'd love to be taking pictures and stuff like that for social media, I've got to actually write the damn book. And there's nothing interesting or cool or exciting about a picture of me hunched over a laptop, writing a book. And there's only so many times I can post that picture because the process of writing a book is exactly that, you know what I mean? It's not interesting. So how do we harness the power of these platforms to the end destination that you have brilliantly described without having to fall foul to filling the world with more pointless crap or staged inauthentic crap? Because we know we've got nothing genuinely exciting happening right now, which will obviously have the opposite effect. How do we navigate that?
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, I mean, again, well, first of all, I want to back up because you said something interesting that I want to build on. You talk about, well, maybe it's a small band and they've got a great band, but they don't have a lot of followers. Every community starts with five people. Right. I mean, it's amazing. It's basically you've got five friends or five fans or five customers, five people who just believe in you and love you and want to help you. And that's where it starts. Right. Arguably, the biggest community in the world is Twitch. Started with five people. The stories in the book, this guy named Justin, he started live streaming his life. He had a camera on his head and just live streamed his life. And everybody thought that was cool and they wanted to do it. So he created this software where you could live stream what's going on in your life. There were these gamers. And they're saying, we want to live stream. People, we want to watch each other play games. And he said, that's not a thing. That's not what this is about. No. They said, it is a thing. It is a thing. He said, okay. And that's how Twitch got started. Just five or six passionate people who said, just give us a chance. So, even if you're small and starting out, don't be concerned about it. I mean, you could be optimistic about it. Because here's the difference. Let's, for the third time, let's go back to KISS. KISS didn't start the KISS army. The army started the army. All right. It was an, they got lucky. Really. They got lucky in a way. They had a critical mass of people that started this sort of movement. But what most bands miss out today, they can create their own movement. You can be mindful about it. We've got the technology today that's helping us. We talked about Discord and Web3 and even the Metaverse. And bands, artists are using NFTs in creative ways. There's a case study in the book where the whole community is built on NFTs. And the NFTs give you advantages and they give you access to certain opportunities to create new content, create new stories. So there's just so many opportunities if the band approaches this like I'm a startup. Right. I'm a startup. I need help. I need help with promotion. I might need help with finance. I might even need help on creative input. So in the startup world, most startups, their marketing begins with community. Saying, look, you're my fans. Let's get going. And then you start with five. And then the five turns to 10 because they're saying, oh my gosh, I'm having so much fun. I met these cool people and we're actually getting to have creative input into this band. They're helping. We get to pick the album cover. Or whatever. Right. Can you believe this? Or, I did this piece of art and this might actually be the album cover. So people, more and more people get involved and then you build the momentum, but you've at least at first, you've got to be involved. You've got to be accessible. You've got to be open. This same community that I talked about that's built on the NFTs was started by an artist and this artist comes in every day and people watch him draw. So you're sort of like demeaning yourself in a way about writing the book. Why wouldn't you just pop on every day and say, well, here's what I've written today. This is where I'm going with the thing. Or I've hit a block today. I thought I was going this way and I just thought I was all wrong and I wasn't being honest and I'm writing the whole darn thing over. Or you just said, I did my best work today. Let me read this to you. Or here's a memory. I'm sharing my book. I've never told anyone this before. I'm going to tell you first. So, there's lots of things that you can do that take five minutes that it's just peeling back the curtain to say, here's what's going on in my world today.
James Kennedy: That's fascinating stuff. I mean, it's so interesting for me to hear you say things like that, because that would never even occur to me. That's the difference between someone that obviously has a natural talent for this mindset and someone who doesn't. For me, I would be like, why would anyone care that I'm writing? You know, it's boring. It's a boring process. They'll enjoy the book. The book is the end game.
Mark Schaefer: But James, think how easy this is. It doesn't take a lot of time. It doesn't take a lot of talent. It takes a mindset. Right. You said it exactly right. And a mindset is something that anybody can change. It's just a matter of awareness. It's a matter of what you need to do to make it work. That's a little bit different from the way you used to do things, but that's the way the world is, it's like tuning yourself to the way the world is today. And if you can do that, you can do marketing.
James Kennedy: That's a great point. And I know that my musician friends are going to be virtually high-fiving, loving, finally having some clarity and inspiration on these what are often frustrating and confusing extracurricular things that we also have to do as well as all of the other bloody things we now have to master in this day and age. I don't know. A common conflict that I know happens amongst many of my friends. And I'm sure it's the same across all industries too, certainly for startups and independents is how to prioritize our time because we do so much as it is already. And I know that a lot of my friends feel like, well, do I spend the morning taking selfies and posting on social media, or do I practice my instrument and write the song and the book, whatever it might be, and actually do the thing that ultimately is what I should be doing. And I know that some people do say to designate a day to doing all of that social media stuff. And I know that other people just constantly do it on the fly. Do you have any recommendations about how to manage that most effectively to maintain consistency?
Mark Schaefer: Well, it depends on the situation. If like when I teach my personal branding class, what I do is I emphasize that the people will create some kind of content, a blog or a podcast or a video or something once a week, and I have them commit to 18 months because it takes 18 months to really see if it's not a hockey stick, you know, it's not going to go straight up, it takes time. It takes patience. It grows slowly, but then it starts to build and it starts to work. I'll tell you, here's an example. I'll use my class, the Black Keys. So I got to, maybe six or seven years ago, I got to go backstage and meet the Black Keys. And this is when they were just about, they were blowing up. I saw them in a place that held 2,000 people. And 18 months later, they were playing Madison Square Garden. They were blowing up. And I asked Patrick Carney, I said, what was it? What was the thing that just ignited you? He said, nothing. He said, we've been writing and touring for six years, but we just don't stop. We just create, create. We want to do a little bit better week by week by week by week, a little bit better on our shows, a little bit better on our songs. And you don't give up. So for personal brand, I recommend once a week for a community, probably something once a day, and it could be as simple as I saw something in the news today that blew my mind. What does this mean for artists and let people chime in, or I just listened to the most magnificent piece of music today, it reminded me of you or I just saw today is the 50th anniversary of the Dark Side of the Moon album. This was a special impact of me in my life. Tell me what you thought about it in the community. And then if you do that every day, you'll find after a few weeks, the community takes over, they'll start having their own conversations, they'll start creating their own culture. So, I think personal brand, once a week, creating a community where people are gathering in some place like Discord, I start out doing something once a day Consistent and keep the faith.
James Kennedy: I suppose, as well, you know, because it can be challenging when you're looking at those likes and you can see that no one's cared in that video that you're already proud of. No one's watched it.
Mark Schaefer: Consistency is more important than genius. You just keep showing up. If you want to become part of the fabric of someone's life, you got to show up. You got to keep showing up and do it on a consistent basis. When I started blogging in 2009, I blogged 650 weeks in a row without stopping. And then I took a little break for COVID, got really sick. And then blogged another 180 weeks in a row. I've had a podcast for, we're in our 11th year, never missed an episode. Because you just show up, you show up, you show up, and they know it's Tuesday. What's Mark going to send me? And you show up. And soon, you become a habit. You become part of their life. So, community. What's James got for me today? Oh, look at this. Billy posted something today. That's interesting, too. Oh, now there's three of us. And that's how it works.
James Kennedy: That makes so much sense. Yeah. I must say, you're making me feel like a slacker, Mark, as well. We're 11 years without missing an episode. I think I took a week off after my third episode or something. And I think we should mention as well, probably, we haven't mentioned this yet. There is a meritocratic element to this as well in the fact that you have to actually be good. You have to actually be delivering something of value and be contributing something good to the world. In the case of music, which this episode has been mostly centered around, you have to be good. That has to come first.
Mark Schaefer: Oh, right. You've got to deliver the goods. Yeah. I mean, people are only going to talk about your restaurant if the food is good and the price is fair and the bathrooms are clean and it's a clean environment. In whatever you do, whatever business you are. And if you deliver the goods as a musician, then you've got a chance to build a community and win and blow up.
James Kennedy: Love it. Well, as we come towards the end, I wanted to ask you about the future. Because I'm personally seeing a stark change in the old dinosaur platforms, you know, like Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. I'm seeing like their engagement is thinning out quite drastically. And I know that many people are becoming disillusioned in those gigantic platforms now. But do you think that they're still as relevant as they used to be? Or do you think that they're soon to become like relics of the past and that something else is going to take over? And if so, is there anything that you've got your money on?
Mark Schaefer: They are. They're definitely aging out. And the reason they're aging out is because young people don't want to be there. Young people, they don't want to be exposed. They don't want to be ridiculed. They don't want to be part of this polarized world. So Gen Z, to some extent millennials, they're blockading themselves in digital campfires. They're going to places where they can't be seen and they can't be found. I think Discord is big. I think Discord is a place where a lot of young people are going. It started out as a place for gamers. And now it's become a place for artists, a place for tech industry people. It's kind of like the hot place right now. And Discord is growing and improving a lot. It's very, very flexible what you can do there. I think another place where young people are hanging out, and I don't really know the solution to this, is they're spending more and more time in video games. Places like Fortnite. But brands are showing up there, right? You can buy things in Fortnite. You can go to concerts in Fortnite. So I think we're going to have to see what the next big channel is. Obviously, TikTok is big right now with Gen Z. It's not without controversy. It's not without some legal problems right now. So we'll have to see how that plays out. I predict TikTok will be okay because there's a lot of money there. I'll put my bet on the money. I'll put my money where the money is. But here's the other thing I would look at, James, is that social media fragments along demographic lines and age groups. So really, the only demographic growing on Facebook is 55 and over. Everybody kind of loves YouTube and Instagram. You've got 18 to 34 kind of on Snapchat. And then kind of 20 to 12 on TikTok. But behind Gen Z is Gen Alpha. And they're going to look up at their big brothers and sisters and say, nah, we've got this thing. That's going to be the next innovation. And it's not there yet. I'm hearing it. I'm hearing rumblings. But keep your eyes open. Keep your eyes open. Certainly, if I was a musician appealing to young people today, TikTok is obvious. Discord, I think, is obvious. And then it's kind of lots of other options beyond that.
James Kennedy: Fascinating stuff. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see what the new platforms are looking around the corner and what the next big thing is going to be, you know. But as we're speaking about the future, we need to, as we come towards the end of the episode, talk about what the future holds for Mr. Mark Schaefer. What have you got coming up? What's around the corner? I can see that you've got the brand new book standing behind you there on the bookshelf belonging to the brand. What else have you got happening? And what do we need to let people know about?
Mark Schaefer: I mean, I've always got lots of different things. But the one thing that may be interesting to you and your fans is I have a marketing retreat. And for the first time, I'm going to bring it to you. I'm going to have a marketing retreat at a castle outside of Dublin in September. Wow. And this is all going to be about the future of marketing. I'm limiting it to a small group of people. And it's literally going to be a retreat because it's going to be re-energizing. It's about being relevant in this marketing world. How do we stay relevant? How do we adjust? How do we adapt to all these things in this marketing world? And it's going to be a lot of fun because we're going to be in this beautiful medieval castle. It's built in like 1053. We're going to have falconry. We're going to drink mead. Probably by the end of the event, I'll be in armor. Who knows? But my site is Businesses Grow. So if you don't remember how to spell my name, just go to BusinessesGrow.com. We mentioned my books, my blog, my podcast and my events. You can all find it at BusinessesGrow.com.
James Kennedy: Yeah, the site is amazing. I mean, I will link everything, all of your links into the description for the podcast. And I'll give it a plug after we close the chat as well, because the website, you've got so much free stuff on there as well. Great resources with the podcast and articles and blogs and links to your books, which I think I'm now going to have to go out and buy all of. So definitely go and check out BusinessesGrow.com. And people can follow you also at Mark Schaefer on Twitter and Instagram, which I'll link in as well. Definitely worth doing that, because you share a lot of great stuff on your socials as well.
Mark Schaefer: Yeah, I try to. Instagram, I don't. It's not business at all. It's basically rocks and plants, hiking and kayaking. And it's like peering into my personal life a little bit.
James Kennedy: Well, where can people find out about this awesome event in Dublin in September? Have you announced it yet? Is there a ticket link available?
Mark Schaefer: Yeah. If you go to BusinessesGrow.com and at the nav bar at the top, it says events. And I've got one coming up in America in the spring. And then in September, I've got the first one ever in Ireland because I have so many friends in Europe. They've been begging me to do this in Ireland. And I will just say this is the best thing I have done in my career. Wow. Period. It is magical. It is life changing. You'll meet people that will help you succeed for the rest of your life. So it's a magical, magical event.
James Kennedy: Wow. I'm going to go and grab myself one of those bad boys now. I think a weekend in Ireland as well is always a fun thing to do. So hopefully we'll see you there. Mark, that sounds absolutely amazing. Thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate you. You've really given so much knowledge and insight there to my community, which is a real gift. We thank you so much. And thanks for everything you're doing. And best wishes with everything coming up. Thank you, James. Thank you, Mark. Thanks so much for your time today, man. It's been great to meet you. See you soon.
Mark Schaefer: All right. Great interview. Take care.
Key Points:
Guest Mark Schaefer, a leading marketing expert and author, explains that modern marketing's core purpose is creating a customer, which for musicians means creating a fan.
Schaefer distinguishes between direct marketing (coupons, ads) and brand marketing, which for artists means creating a consistent feeling or expectation that fans connect with authentically.
He outlines a three-tier strategy
Communities create "emotional switching costs" — members stay loyal because they don't want to leave their friends, making community the ultimate form of marketing.
Schaefer advises artists to start small (even five people), embrace a startup mindset, and maintain consistency over genius, sharing his own record of 650 consecutive weeks of blogging.
He argues that aging platforms like Facebook and Twitter are losing younger users to "digital campfires" such as Discord, TikTok, and video games like Fortnite.
Schaefer promotes his new book "Belonging to the Brand" and an upcoming marketing retreat at a castle outside Dublin in September.
Summary:
In this episode of the James Kennedy Podcast, host James Kennedy welcomes marketing expert Mark Schaefer to discuss how artists and musicians can cut through today's overwhelming noise. Kennedy opens with a personal story about his charity song "Sing for Life" being performed by a 400-voice choir in Cardiff, and updates listeners on his book progress and upcoming band plans.
Schaefer, author of "Marketing Rebellion" and "Belonging to the Brand," explains that marketing fundamentally means creating a customer, or for musicians, a fan. He contrasts direct marketing with brand marketing, arguing that artists must create a consistent feeling and expectation that authentically connects with their audience. He then presents a three-tier framework: social media provides broad but weak reach, an owned audience (blog, podcast, email) offers reliable connection, and a true community delivers the strongest emotional loyalty.
Schaefer emphasizes that communities create emotional switching costs, since members stay loyal to avoid leaving their friends. He advises starting with just five people, adopting a startup mindset, and prioritizing consistency over genius — citing his own 650 consecutive weeks of blogging as proof. He also notes that younger audiences are abandoning legacy platforms for Discord, TikTok, and gaming environments, and promotes his upcoming Dublin retreat.
The James Kennedy Podcast is a Society and Culture podcast hosted by musician and author, James Kennedy. Exploring the big questions around health, social issues, the arts, politics, mental health, the human condition and how to navigate this thing called life through casual conversations with scientists, activists, rock stars, philosophers and academics. Please subscribe, leave a rating and support the show.
