Sephora to Nike: Success Stories in Community-Driven Marketing

Join host Alena Pilichowski as she welcomes marketing expert and author Mark Schaefer in this insightful episode of the podcast. Mark discusses his impressive career journey, starting from his corporate roots at a Fortune 100 company where he pioneered social media strategies, to his entrepreneurial journey establishing a successful business in digital marketing.

In this episode, Mark dives deep into the concepts of community and belonging as highlighted in his influential books, "Marketing Rebellion" and "Belonging to the Brand." He predicted the necessity for brands to foster authentic emotional connections with their customers through community-building. The COVID-19 pandemic proved his insights were spot on, as people were desperate for a sense of community while stuck at home.

Listeners will discover powerful examples from leading brands like Nike and Coca-Cola, which excel in community-driven marketing, and gain insights into the potential for small and medium enterprises to create thriving communities. Mark also addresses the challenges of measuring the impact of community-driven marketing with a compelling case study on Sephora’s Beauty Insider forum.

Tune in to learn how businesses of all sizes can harness the power of community to revolutionize their marketing strategies and build lasting customer loyalty.

Episode #19 // Mark W. Schaefer

The Breaking Through the Mayhem Podcast - Episode 19

Title: Sephora to Nike: Success Stories in Community-Driven Marketing

Host: Alena Pilichowski, VP of Marketing at Sightly
Guest: Mark Schaefer, Executive Director, Schaefer Marketing Solutions
Recorded on June 26th, 2024

TRANSCRIPT

Alena Pilichowski
Hello everyone, and welcome back to Sighty’s Breaking Through the Mayhem podcast.

I am your host, Alena Pilichowski , and I am thrilled to be joined today by Mark Schaefer, who is one of the most compelling voices in marketing today. Mark is the author of some of the world's best selling marketing books, such as belonging to the Brand and Marketing Rebellion. You can see them on his bookshelf right behind him.

He has a fantastic marketing blog and his own marketing podcast. He is a college educator and an advisor to some of the world's top brands, so we're really excited to chat with him today about some topics near and dear. To say Liz, such as brand authenticity and community. Thank you so much for joining us, Mark.

Mark Schaefer
I'm delighted to be here.

Alena Pilichowski
So we wanted to start things really general, since it's your first time on the podcast to just get some background on you, on your career journey. And I think what would be most compelling to me is going through that, through the lens of the role that community played along the way, and kind of how you were able to get to where you are today, fostering and leaning on a community.

Mark Schaefer
Well, I started in the corporate world. I worked for a fortune 100 company for many years and really was a pioneer in the social media space. We created some of the first internet portals. We did some of the first internet marketing anywhere. And that's where I really started getting, you know, engaged with community for the first time.

I mean, it was hard to do anything globally or even regionally, before the internet. So the internet really enabled a lot of that. I started my own business about, I guess it was maybe 16 or 17 years ago and just became endlessly fascinated with digital marketing and social media. And the thing that I think that made me different, Alena is that I had been working for, you know, a major global company for many years.

And so I had a unique perspective on, on the blogging scene. And for many people, it was a refreshing perspective because it was really rooted in a lot of marketing experience and how companies really work in, in, real life. The thing that really started getting me interested in, in the community, the idea, we started exploring this around 2017 and, I started writing a book called Marketing Rebellion.

This ended up being probably my best known book, is used as a text in many college classes. And the idea behind that book was that our old ways of marketing just don't work anymore. People are tired of being intercepted and interrupted and nagged and spammed, and we just have to stop. And we have to double down on things that that people love.

And there was a chapter in that book about belonging and community, and I projected that this was going to become a major part of marketing in the future. One year after the book comes out, boom, pandemic. And a lot of people are telling me during the pandemic, Mark, the things that you talked about in this book, they're all coming true.

We've stripped away all the hype. We've stripped away all these, you know, the old trite advertising narratives. We just had to get rid of all that stuff. We didn't know what to say. We didn't know what to do in this pandemic. And we had to force ourselves to really connect on a more human way. And, people started surging into communities, especially online communities, because that's all we had.

And, so that was really the genesis for me. After I wrote that book, I realized that was the most important chapter in the book that probably deserved to be its own book. And so I went down that path and wrote, belonging to the brand came out in 2023.

Alena Pilichowski
Wonderful. Yeah, I really enjoyed reading that. A lot of that resonated with me. and then thinking about that inflection point with Covid shortly followed by BLM, I remember, you know, or not BLM after the George Floyd stuff and kind of that influx and, and how the social world was talking about things. And I remember at Sightly, the majority of our advertisers for a period of time would just pull budgets because they didn't know what to do -

Mark Schaefer
Didn’t know what to say.

Alena Pilichowski
Or creative. And it really was a huge incentive. And some of the brand values and inputs that we've put in our platform, but kind of forcing brands to take a stance and to show their hand when previously they could get away with maybe not doing that as much.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah. And I think the time is right, because, you know, number one, as I sort of signaled in Marketing Rebellion, we just need new ways. We just have got to relate to people in human ways. And if you think about it, a brand community might be the only kind of marketing people really want in their lives. not only want it, but but they need community in their lives. And I think the other thing is that, I mean, it just really weighs on me a lot.

The, the mental health issues in the world today. And it's in the news all the time. just the levels of loneliness and isolation and depression and, you know, I'm not saying, oh, let's create a brand community to solve the mental health issue. You know, I think we need to look at it as a business strategy. But I also say community helps.

It really does community. It helps to give people a place to belong.

Alena Pilichowski
So in terms of a brand’s approach, would you be able to delve into some examples of brands that have done that effectively in terms of fostering community in a way that feels authentic and they're not just, you know, pushing their product in a different forum.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah. Well, sort of my go to answer when I, when I went to look at the best companies in the marketing space is like, what are the best managed companies? What are the most successful companies? Because generally the best managed companies do everything well. So if you look at the best brands like Nike, Lego, Sephora, Ikea, they're big into the into the community space.

They're pioneers in the community space. They're years ahead of many other companies because they, you know, they see this is the way to go. This is the that the best way to create direct, authentic emotional connections with their customers. And that's what brand marketing is, is all about. This is the ultimate, brand emotional, connection. And so we would expect the best companies to be leading in those areas.

Disney would be another one. Coca-Cola. Right. Another one. so those are some of the and I and I mentioned quite a few of those in my book.

Alena Pilichowski
Right. And do you think those same concepts of community can be applicable to much smaller companies or like B2B companies?

Mark Schaefer
Absolutely. In fact, I think in many cases this is a space where smaller or medium sized companies can excel.

And let me tell you why. So I was working with a big, big, consumer product company, one of the biggest companies in the world, and they want to get into these community spaces. And the way they're thinking about it is how does a brand show up in community? And I kept saying, a brand does not show up in a community.

A person shows up in a community. And this is like a foreign concept. They're saying, wait a minute, you mean we actually have to do this? Well, let's all have our advertising agency do it. Nope nope nope. I mean, if you want to be part of these communities, it has to be a real person. And so it's I think, a lot of the big companies I just talked about, they've scaled, right?

I mean, they've scaled and they've, they've they've had a big team. And so they've committed to this on, and on in, in a very, you know, in a cultural way, in a company wide sort of commitment. But it's a lot easier, I think, for small to medium sized companies just get out there and and try it. But one of the things I found, Alena was, almost every community starts with five people, right?

Even Twitch, arguably the biggest community in the world, started with five people. And so it's, you know, it's not a huge commitment. it's not a big, financial, commitment. And so I think, easily small and medium sized businesses. And it's definitely happening in B2B. I've got some B2B examples in my book as well. I try to have a little bit of everything in there.

Alena Pilichowski
Right. Yeah. I think, when I think of, you know, the idea of fostering community and getting leadership buy in the obvious next question. And we are marketers, so everyone gets very bogged down by KPIs and, you know, legacy measurement. So I was going through, you know, one of the communities you mentioned is Sephora.

They have, Beauty Insider and they have a forum, and I'm a customer of theirs. I've looked through there before, and just anecdotally, one time I saw someone post asking what makeup they should buy from Sephora for their 11 year old niece for their birthday, and other people in the community chimed in. And the answer was you don't.

You go to the drugstore and an 11 year old doesn't need your beauty products. And I kind of love that where it's like, you know, they're fostering this trust because they're not certainly not pushing products or telling them other name brands you'd find at a drugstore. And so on one hand, an executive might see that and be alarmed, but on the other hand, you know, they've proven that long term and far reaching, it creates brand loyalists.

But it just kind of made me smile and made me think about kind of the tricky approach that measuring would have with something like this.

Mark Schaefer
Well, and I spend a lot of time on this in, in my book, because that is a big question. And I'm glad you brought up Sephora, because, I actually studied that company, a lot because 80% of their revenues come from that community.

And here this is a company. They've got brick and mortar stores in every significant city in, in the world. But 80% of their revenues come from this online community. So we better pay attention to this. Yeah. And their number one metric is engagement. Now, this is like a mind shift for me because when it comes to social media, I am not a big fan of engagement as a metric.

There's almost there's no research really, that shows any sort of connection between engagement and brand loyalty or even revenue. And I can speak from experience that you can engage yourself broke, you can engage in, engage and engage and engage it. Just spinning your wheels in online discussions without, you know, any connection to revenue. Now, in the community world though, the way why this this is so important to Sephora is they say that engagement means relevance if they if their customers are engaging in the community, if they're active in discussions, if they're responding to their content, their products, their ideas, that's a leading indicator to sales because it shows they're relevant.

So I like that idea. And for a traditional marketer, when you when you start really getting into the success factors of community, it really is a different way to think. It's it's very it's almost like 180 degrees from what we learned in business school. And so it's not about controlling the message, it's about giving up the control and letting the community control the message.

You know, it's not about, you know, building a staff of employees. It's about granting power and status to the people in the community. It's not about the ROI and sales. It's about engage. It's about discussion. It's about collaboration. It's about co-creation. It's about organic advocacy. All super important ideas for marketing, but not sometimes easily attributable to revenue. You've got to do that eventually. But that's not really the leading indicators in a community.

Alena Pilichowski
Right.You have to really put your customer hat back on which, to your point, kind of is a 180, because you can get so deep in the trenches in the marketing world, I always laugh about my, first brain and my work brain. Like my work brain. If someone gives us $500,000, you're like, okay, that's good.

You know, in my off work brain to be like, yeah, vacation for the next five years. But, like, you're able to compartmentalize. And I think for some reason, when we think about how we talk to consumers, we're really comfortable having those kind of two separate approaches when in reality, your your customer hat is going to be the one that resonates with people. And that's why this approach really works.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah, absolutely.

Alena Pilichowski
So pivoting a little bit to thinking about sort of platforms that come to mind for me when I think of community, the two that popped right away were TikTok, which I kind of want to get your take on. And then the other one is Reddit, and I am very fascinated by Reddit because there are some of the most niche sub subcultures in there, and people are hyper active in there.

And just very, very interesting little sub worlds going on in there. So I'd be curious for those two platforms if you would kind of deem those communities. what what are those? Because I think there's a lot of nuance with those.

Mark Schaefer
Yes. Great question. So I think it might be helpful to just go back up one step and talk about my definition of community.

What's there's a lot of people confuse community and audience. A lot of people say, my social media community, my blog community, it's not really a community, an audience. Which is fine, by the way. Nothing wrong with it. But a community is different and a community is different in three ways. Number one, the community that it has, people that know each other, there's communion.

It's like a neighborhood. So people who read my blog, they don't know each other. If I go away, they go away. You know, the content goes away. But a community is like a legacy. It's just when it's people who know each other. And, Alena, this is one of the most important ideas from a marketing perspective, because the research shows when people get to know each other in a brand community, it creates a layer of emotional switching costs between you and the brand.

So you mentioned Sephora and people helping each other in the community. Their friends, they're connected. They love helping each other and talking about, you know, cosmetics and, and fashion and skincare and to leave that community. And they don't want to leave that community. They literally belong to the brand. Right? This is a really important factor. Number two is purpose.

People gather because there's an intersection between the purpose of the company and the purpose of the people in the community. The community members. So again, let's talk about Sephora. Sephora. They want to be on the edge of new things with cosmetics and skincare and new techniques and new products and that's what their customers want to. So that's what their community is all about trying new things, experimenting with new things.

So there's a perfect intersection. Sephora doesn't have to sell, sell, sell. All they need to do is feed this demand to learn more about what's going on in the world of of fashion and cosmetics. So purpose is really, really key. Then the last part we hinted at this a little bit already is this idea that the customers are really in control.

The marketing department, you know, you might have a mission statement, you might have a marketing point of differentiation, which is sort of like bolted to the center of the Earth. But in a community, there's got to be a flow. And that's very exciting because it's keeping you relevant. Those ideas, those conversations, you know, the connections, the questions that's going to make you relevant.

So it's a little bit about giving up control. Now let's get specifically into your question. Do we meet those three conditions in Reddit? 100%. these these community forums are, are very, they're very vital. They're filled with personalities that love this these niches, they love helping. They love sharing. They love talking about, you know, Star Wars or, you know, whatever they want to talk about.

They become friends. They connect the collaborate, they're all trying to learn something together, or they're trying to change something together. So they're united in this purpose. You know, tick tock is is is really, really, interesting to me. And this is, you know, some of the debates I've had recently on, on my podcast and where I get to on, on TikTok is normally groups are connected on Tick Tock through a hashtag, and it's an affinity group that can lead to community.

So I think it's not specifically a community. It can be a fan base that becomes a community. It can become a discussion. It can become a a mission or a cause or a source of, you know, social justice that becomes a community. But typically on TikTok, it doesn't really meet those requirements of community. It's, it's but it's I see that definitely there are important affinity groups there.

There, important audiences there. there's a connective tissue there that people love, and they feel like they belong there. But it's not necessarily a community.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer
What do you think? What do you think about it? Challenge me.

Alena Pilichowski
I think I think I agree with you because TikTok, at least in the way I use it, has taken a little bit of a pivot.

I remember peak Covid where their user numbers just skyrocketed, and I am a terrible dancer, but I am embarrassed to admit I did one of the dances and there was a little bit more of this like exchange where I would see in my feed one of my friends doing a dance. And so I said, you know, I have nothing to do.

I'm stuck at home, I'm going to do the dance. And in that sense, there was this sort of I don't know if it checks all of your boxes, but sort of this entertainment exchange. And it was with people I knew and cared about and kind of in a way creates a community around this form of entertainment and the dances.

And then it really pivoted to being much more, I would say, in a category similar to YouTube, where people got kind of carved out as these creators, and they kept that really authentic, gritty potential. First take type of content, which I think represented a big pivot in what users now expect in social media, which I think was really cool.

But now it is more of an audience. There's somebody creating three pieces of TikTok content per day, and I'm consuming it. I'm not trying to make them laugh back there. It's-

Mark Schaefer
Right. Yeah, right I love that. That's a very that's a great distinction.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah. So I, I think I've it's kind of come full circle for me in the app.

But because of that underlying obsession with authenticity to the point that when brands repurpose TV creative on TikTok, it doesn't do very well because that's not what the users are expecting. I think that's authentic. grittier perception is what made me think of community initially, what I was thinking about platforms.

Mark Schaefer
Good question. Yeah. Great discussion.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah. I think authenticity and inconsistency are a topic you bring up a lot with brands. How can brands be held accountable? I think there, we've seen it a bunch of times. I mean, the example that's just coming to mind for some reason for me is, the Apple iPad commercial, right? Yeah. And it sparked amazing discussion within our leadership team.

People had great takes and, you know, ultimately they ended up apologizing for it, which I don't know. Everyone can have their opinion. It felt like a bit of a flip flop, but it's just like, if even Apple can't be consistent in kind of sticking to their guns, it's like, what's going on?

Mark Schaefer
Well, so, I have a, I get kind of hung up on the word authenticity.

I think authenticity is too high of a bar for a lot of brands and a lot of people, because I think authenticity is like, you're the same all the time. You're the same everywhere. You know, you're disclosing everything. And that's really not how brands and companies work. It's not really how most people work. But I do think there's an expectation for honesty.

I think that's a better word. And, you know, I liked that Apple had an honest response to the commercial. I definitely saw that it was tone deaf. I understood that, right. and, and usually when that sort of thing happens, what I, the reason behind it is there's an executive in the room who's in love with it.

00:24:33:23 - 00:25:00:22
Unknown
Alena Pilichowski
Right. Loudest voice in the room.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah, there's an executive in the room who just. And people are afraid to say. Yeah, yeah, you know, what about this? Right. And and and even like agencies, they don't want, they don't want to upset people. They don't want to lose the account. I was surprised, really, that a company is as big and, and normally is connected to their customers as Apple, you know, messed up that way.

But, you know, like you said, it shows it that anybody can, can screw up.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah, exactly. So maybe it's comforting in a weird way. Maybe not. Another topic I wanted to touch on, and I think about it especially through the lens of content. But the topic being AI, Ijust wanted to get your take on what kind of what role it's taken in your life as a marketer.

Things that concern you, things that excite you. I, for one, have seen it really changing the volume of content for good or for bad. So kind of wanted your take on that.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. So we're going to start a whole new podcast on this one.

Alena Pilichowski
We could!.

Mark Schaefer
All right. oh. Let me try to be as succinct as I can. mean, I'm like, everybody, whenever you talk about, AI use two words: exciting and terrifying. Right. You know, the exciting part is, it just unleashes a whole new level of creativity, right? It gives a voice to people without a voice. People who can't write can become writers. People who are not artistic can become artistic.

It's going to unleash unbelievable opportunities and unbelievable delight. so that is, you know, that's the exciting part. I, there's still some work to be done on the AI side to really make it, I think, you know, a strong everyday use case for most small businesses. If it fills in the gaps of creativity and writing and stuff like that.

But the good thing is, the exciting thing is, is that AI is coming to us. So everything we use is going to have a layer of AI on it. You know, whether it's Microsoft or Google Docs or whatever you use. And we're already starting to see that. So, you know, the use case is coming to us.

And I think that's going to be very, very exciting when we'll be able to talk to our computers or talk to a smart device. That stuff just happens for us. That's going to be great. You know, a lot has been written about some of the existential threats about AI. Probably the thing I'm most concerned about is the elimination of many entry level jobs.

I think about my own career, you know, I would say primarily what people know me for today is a marketing strategist and a writer. And the reason I'm a good writer is because I had mean bosses with red pens, and they corrected me and corrected me and corrected me. And I became better and better and better over time.

I had those entry level jobs where I could work on press releases and company magazine articles and, and, and people would be patient with me and make me better. And it makes me worried about what's gonna happen if people aren't going to be able to hone those skills in that kind of a way. I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal that said, College graduates are going to have to be prepared to enter like a mid level management job, like, how's that going to work out?

Okay, so I mean, I'm totally immersed in it. I'm experimenting every day, having conversations every day, trying to push the edges of the thing. so I definitely see the potential. I think there is going to be a shake out.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer
I just think there's so much going on and these, larger language models, it takes so much money. It takes so much energy. It takes so much data that not all. And there's not a big revenue stream coming in. So, there's, there's going to be a shake out, and, but, you know, overall, there's no better time to be in marketing.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah, I agree, I mean, it's been fascinating to see how AI is playing such a part in our platform at Sightly.

A lot of what we do when we're starting out with a brand is fill out their brand profile, and we really view that as their playbook that will then connect to social listening, connect to activation on YouTube and other platforms. And initially it was a pretty manual process and we could have it take up to like four hours.

Now we use generative AI. It takes a first stab at filling it out, and we find it's a lot faster when people are reacting to AI's first step, but everything's editable, so no one is scared that their job is going anywhere. But we can easily have this starting place where, let's say you're working with a I don't know, you're working with Pepsi, and it scours all of the walled gardens, all of the internet for all the answers we want.

And then they're saying yes or no versus doing it from scratch. And depending on who you're talking to, that's a really scary thing. So that's many use cases for me where there's been virtually no pushback. Everybody loves it. and it's saving hours and hours of time. But to your point, when you're thinking about how it's impacting, you know, somebody's writing an article or.

Yeah, things for entry level people have a learning curve on it. Yeah. It might impact jobs, but we'll see. I haven't seen that this is the case at all. Yeah. So it needs so much help when it comes to content and whatnot. But it is saving a ton of time.

Mark Schaefer
Yeah.

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah. Well so I mean I guess we talked about the good things and the bad things and I just opening it back up to kind of end on a positive note. What do you most excited about for the future of marketing and the future marketers?

Mark Schaefer
Well, I'm actually thinking a lot about that lately. I'm working on a new book that kind of addresses this event. When people say, oh, you're working on a new book. Oh, it must be a book about AI, I mean, what else would it be?

Right. And really, it's sort of the anti AI book in a way. And if you look at, you know, if AI, it keeps getting better and better and smarter and smarter and more and more creative. One of the last things we have left as human beings is crazy. And if you look at you, you mentioned briefly this like, whole this wall of content that's being created by AI.

I saw this demo the other day. This advertising agency is promoting a new operating system where basically you could take, like , one piece of content and you can, like, multiply it and amplify, and it just it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes, it goes forever across every language and every platform. And I'm watching this thing and it just is making me physically ill.

It's just so much noise. and it's just so dull. And I think we've gotten to a point in marketing where we, like, we've almost institutionalized, dull, and so much of our marketing is focused on conforming to Google, or conforming to SEO, or conforming to an algorithm. We've put ourselves in these little boxes and then, you know, we're, you know, we want performance marketing.

We want to, you know, we want to know the ROI of this tweet or whatever. And, we've lost our way. We've lost sight of creativity and this human connection. And I feel in many, many places, maybe 97% of the places in marketing today, you know, marketing is just this empty husk. There's no life, there's no soul.

Yeah. And it's it's time to like, you know, pump some some. It's time for, like, a transfusion in it. And I think the thing that can save us is a little bit of crazy is what does it take to stand out in the world?

Alena Pilichowski
Yeah.

Mark Schaefer
And if you think about the things the, the, the marketing activations or the advertising that you love and you talk about and you share, they're a little bit crazy.

And so I think that's what we need to think about. We need to think about audacity. It is because the wall of noise is just going to get higher right. And so we've we've we've got to you know, what's what's left. You know I think we have to be a little crazy.

Alena Pilichowski
I think, well for the future marketers, I think Gen Z is ready for that.

And I think they're already tired of the noise I saw the other day that, dumb phones are trending because they're sick of smartphones. Like they're going back to basics and I'm like, oh, it's so funny how everything is so cyclical, but, I love that a little bit crazy. All right, well, can we end with some plugs of where else to to find you if people want to continue to learn more.

Mark Schaefer
Sure. Well, it's really easy to find me. All you have to do is remember businesses grow. You don't have to remember my name. Don't have to.. My name is not as hard as your name, but, you know, people, you know, they get messed up with Schaefer, too. You remember, businesses grow. You can find my blog, my podcast, my books on my social connections. And, I’d love to hear from people who hear your show, Alena.

Alena Pilichowski
Awesome. Well, thanks so much, Mark.