Marketing strategist, author and adjunct professor, Mark Schaefer talks to Eric this week about what comes after purpose and why the traditional role of CMO might be dead. He argues that the CMO must be in charge of the entire customer experience, and how some brands – like Glossier and Everlane – are doing it right.
In a world where isolation and loneliness are on the rise, community is more important than ever. Mark argues that consumers want to believe in the brands they support, that they to want to participate in and to belong to a brand. Belonging is such a human drive – and Mark believes that beyond purpose, companies will need to start using technology to connect to people in deeply personal ways.
For more from Mark, check out his podcast and his blog at Businessesgrow.com.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
If you prefer to watch this episode, visit (and subscribe!) to Rival’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
Mark: But we need to start experimenting because what we did in the past probably isn't going to work in the future. And so we need to be pushing into these other directions or we're going to become obsolete.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone, my guest today, the one and only Mark Schaefer. Mark heads up his own business called Schaefer Marketing Solutions. His company helps you and your company stand out in a world of overwhelming information density, and we drill down in our conversation into what that means, how to stand out in a very crowded world. Mark is a very well known keynote speaker. He is a podcaster. His podcast Marketing Companion has over 235 episodes. He's also the author of nine books, including Marketing Rebellion, which has been on my list for a while, and he has a new book out that he talks about as well. I really enjoyed this conversation with Mark. We cover a ton of ground, and as you will hear, we share a lot of perspectives on modern marketing touches on a lot of different things that we really tie into how we think about Challenger B, brand building, challenger go to market strategy, and what really differentiates challenger businesses from incumbent businesses with how they think about and deploy their marketing function. Specifically, we talk about a challenger d TOC brand that he really loves how they're doing things differently, particularly thinking about the relationship between the brand and the customer. We talk about how to build brand advocacy, people who actually don't just care about buying your product or service, but will promote your brands to their friends and family, to their communities. We talk about the importance of measurement and Mark as a measurement geek, a self-proclaimed measurement geek obviously loves data, but I really like his perspective on how to not let this dashboard mentality of trying to measure everything and quantify the short term ROI of everything. Don't let that hold you back from doing big, bold, big, bold, brilliant things. And then lastly, we talk about this concept of community, what it means, why it's so important for brand building, and also how it nicely segues and creates a ton of opportunity in the web, three point in the web 3.0 space, which we all know is going to be a massive challenge slash opportunity for modern marketers. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Mark Schaefer. Mark, thank you so much for joining. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. How are you today?
Mark: I couldn't be better. It's a beautiful spring day here in America and I'm, I'm getting ready to talk about marketing, what could be better?
Eric: You are our first guest from Tennessee, so congratulations. But it does seem there's a lot going on down there. I mean, at Vayner Media, we opened an office in Chattanooga. I know someone else actually who's at Vanner Media who just moved to Nashville I think, and another friend as well. It seems like there's stuff going on in Tennessee.
Mark: Well, it's a great state, it's a beautiful state, it has a mild climate. We have lots of outdoor activities. The cost of living is low. I live in a city that's in the foothills of the great Smoky Mountain National Park, and it's a college town and it's trying to keep it quiet though, Eric. We don't want it to get crazy, some other cities that are blowing up. So it's really, it's a terrible place. Just forget. Forget we even talked about it. <laugh>.
Eric: Noted. All right, mark, well let's get into it. So starting with, let's talk a little bit about your perspective on the marketing landscape right now. Obviously with the work you do, the research you do, the writing you do and the consulting work you do, you probably see a lot. So I'm very curious to hear a little bit about a brand or a couple brands that you're very interested in right now and why.
Eric: My favorite brand right now is a direct at consumer skincare and cosmetic company called Glossier. I wrote a book called Marketing Rebellion, which is a wake up call for marketing that shows that a lot of the traditional ways we've thought about marketing just don't work anymore. Today consumers have the accumulated knowledge of the human race and the palm of their hand, and they can make really good decisions and their expectation of companies and marketers is different. And I think Glossier is a great representation of that. First of all, the brand was really started with a person with a personal brand. So the emotional connection that launched everything wasn't to a product, wasn't to a coupon, it was to an individual. And I think increasingly marketing is about building an emotional connection between, or branding at least is building an emotional connection between what you do and your audience. And I think increasingly that idea of the personal brand is important. The customer is the marketer. So their marketing department is focused on scanning social media to see where are the conversations about Glossier, how do we elevate these people? How do we amplify these people? How do we reward them? How do we bring them into our community and our culture? If you look at the Glossier website for example, all of the people displaying their products on the website are fans that they found from social media. So the center of their marketing is their customer is the fan. So there's just a lot going, right? They're really in tune with this idea that the customer is the Mark marketer. Emily Weiss, the founder, said that every time they send out a product that's their content marketing, that's an opportunity to make the brand conversational and that's a lot different than advertising.
Eric: Yeah, and it's also, it's really interesting because like I mentioned briefly before, we press record with the work that we're doing here at Rival and just what fascinates me about the industry and the time I've spent in it is this contrast between how challengers go to market and incumbents go to market. And I think one of those fundamental differences is the way they think about the role or the exchange, the relationship between the brand and the customer. The typical kind of big CPG marketer who learned this stuff in school, they think of the brand as needing to be one thing that has to be communicated consistently to everybody. And then you consistently hear these stories, these hyper-growth challenger brands and a lot of what they're doing in different ways at the executional level, but fundamentally and strategically, they flip that around and say, our brand is the customer and they find ways to one, bring them into the fold. And two, understanding that the brand means different things to everybody. And so it's not about command and control, it's actually about kind of collaboration. I don't know if that's the right word, but I'm sure you can help me there.
Mark: I'm hearing the same thing, Eric, every everywhere I turn, and I'm so fortunate in my career to be able to interact with lots of different leaders in diverse industries. And I am hearing this theme that you are too, that this idea of the brand bonfire, it's like one big fire that's suppo and it's supposed to attract everyone is being replaced by these sparks. And I was talking to a brand leader at Adidas or for some of your listeners, Adidas, and he said that the brand today is a way to amplify consumer conversations. And again, it's like amplifying is creating and amplifying these sparks. I'm not sure I totally understand what that looks like right now, but I think if you look at little things like in America, we just had the Super Bowl, which is a iconic marketing event, and Pepsi celebrates their brand by sponsoring the halftime show. Usually it's a big musical Astra extravaganza, and it's a big cultural moment, and it's not, they're not surrounding it with fizzy soda water, basically just aligning this excitement and this cultural moment with the brand. They're being relevant in a cultural moment. They're interpreting their brand in something that's significant in our world at that time. I think that's more and more of what we're going to be seeing personally. I think it's going to be a challenge for big companies built on traditional marketing and advertising to change in these ways. We've got culture and organizations and relationships with advertising agencies that sort of built up this scaffolding to hold these traditional practices in place. It's hard to change. Maybe we're afraid to change a lot of, some of the things we talked about with Glossier, for example, about how they're just activating consumers. That's hard to put on a dashboard. It's a lot easier to show a beautiful ad with Hollywood celebrities and you can see show these impressions, but that's not necessarily what works anymore. And in marketing today, increasingly we're going to have to try to do things that maybe the measurement is difficult or uncertain, but we need to start experimenting because what we did in the past probably isn't going to work in the future. And so we need to be pushing into these other directions or we're going to become obsolete.
Eric: I want to talk about that as you know, because I brought it up earlier. I also want to unpack a couple of the things that you said because I think they're super important and tend to not get as much attention or weight when we talk about the state of the marketing industry and why it is where it is. So you said people, it's hard to change. People don't like to change a hundred percent. There is a lot of money being made keeping things the way they are. Talk about the Super Bowl, not just the 6 million per 32nd spot by spent a decade in advertising agencies. I know how big those bills are to produce a Super Bowl commercial. There's a lot of money like the ad agency side of this, which is supported by the traditional CMOs. They make a lot of money. Having a brand that gets pushed out to mean one thing to everybody to buy above the line tv. You create a big 32nd spot and you push it out every quarter with a different quarterly campaign. They're not set up with the talent, the structure and their business model doesn't align to do the types of things that Glossier does. But I think that will change. You're seeing challenger agencies come up, boutique agencies start to come up. But the more important thing for me is the industry will always fund follow the demand, which is where the money's coming from. The changing of the guard at these big brands at the CMO level is going to be super fascinating to watch over the next five to seven years because the people that are starting to take over don't come from that, where a lot of them don't come from that world anymore. They come from the world of the Web 2.0, the digital social thinking about things a little bit differently. And so I think that's going to be a really interesting transition that all transitions happens gradually and then all at once.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think this is part of the angst and anxiety and disconnect we're seeing in the CMO role because the very famously, the tenure of CMOs is quite short. I think the average is 18 months or something like that. And I think part of the reason is because there's this disconnect between you've got a board of directors, they want marketing to be coin operated. You put coins in and you get more coins out. The CMO is looking at where consumers are right now, and if you try to create coin operated marketing with them, they're going to run away. It's a different day. They're truly different expectations. So CMOs are caught in this changing world pressure from the board versus reality of consumers. And there's a huge disconnect. And I think that is where a lot of the pain we're seeing in the short tenures of CMOs and the new pressures on CMOs and also this trend where the title of CMO is changing to Chief Experience Officer cxo, which is entirely appropriate.I wrote a blog post recently that talked about if you are, perhaps you need to be spending most of your time as a marketing executive in your transportation department if you're missing shipments in your HR department, if they're not staff, if they don't have enough money to staff their customer service department appropriately. I mean, customer service is sort of in a meltdown right now in this pandemic era. So I mean, marketing is any place your company touches the consumer, it is the customer experience. And I mean had experiences in my life where I was spending most of my time in procurement, <laugh> or transportation in my traditional marketing jobs because that's where we were creating customer pain and we had to eliminate those problems if we were going to succeed in the marketplace.
Eric: It all comes down to that. And I think a lot of where the traditional industry has ended up, if you think of the four P's or the six P's of marketing, it's about promotion. It's about taking the product to the market. Whereas if you brought in, and sometimes it's about back to basics, it's not like a lot of this stuff is new. Being customer-centric, having marketing, being the thing that connects the product to the market, all that stuff has been there for a while. But I think sometimes, well actually, I don't know what it is, but sometimes it gets, we get distracted, we get on kind of the wrong path. And I think there's an opportunity to really bring it back to basics, which in large part, we look at these challenger brands, how they're doing things that seem new and different. Actually they're just kind of going back to the things that have always worked, but they're doing it in a way that fits the world of today. And the other thing I think is interesting, the whole ROI conversation around market. Well said. I mean, fundamentally a business has growth objectives. Part of that is going to be profit. But the businesses that I think are winning now are not only focused on profit growth and shareholder return means more than just the bottom line if you want to be competitive with what consumers are expecting today. But the whole idea of marketing exclusively being measured on a short term ROI basis actually, and ironically I think defeats the whole purpose of why you have a marketing function. Short-term ROI is called sales. You have marketing to drive long-term growth, long-term cash flow. And so I don't have the answer. And obviously attribution and measurement and media modeling and all this stuff is very complicated and needs to be applied to the specific business and industry that they're in. But the conversation can't just be about what is this delivered to the bottom line in the next 90 days? Cause that's not the reason that you have marketing to begin with.
Mark: There's a lot of things going through my head and I want to say that you're at, you're 100% correct. I agree with you, but it is really uncomfortable because I'm a measurement geek and I grew up in the Milton Friedman School of Economics that says, your goal as a corporation is shareholder return. And that's it. And then we see, oh, four or five years ago ago, BlackRock came out and said to their, whatever it is, 1 trillion portfolio of companies, the profit you return is not everything. We're also going to be looking at how you do it. There was an article on the Wall Street Journal that said that letter from the chairman of BlackRock changed the definition of economics now. So we are in a profound time where it's not just sales, it just isn't, and it can't be. And what I'm thinking about is this evolution is not just making a shareholder return. On top of that, how do we make it in a responsible way? How are we accountable? And I think the next piece of this is how do we do this in a way that is so transparent and so connected to our consumers that we feel like we belong to that company? And as a story comes to my mind oh, the brand was Everlane. Now Everlane is a direct-to-consumer retail company. I'm not their demographic, but I really love how they're expressing their purpose and values to the world. And one, it's complete transparency. When you go on their website, you can see to the level of where the clothes are being manufactured, there's videos of the plants, there's reports about how much does it cost us to do this, how much of the people being paid? And now what the CEO is doing is he's eliminating all plastic from their operations, even plastic pens, all plastic. There was a story in one business magazine about how he was in an airport and wanted to find something to eat, and he's a real health fitness junkie, and he ended up eating McDonald's hamburgers because that was the only food he could find in the airport that wasn't wrapped in plastic. And to me, that is just such a profound statement of a company living its values in every way and every day from top to bottom that it creates this emotional connectiveness, this sense of belonging in me, even though I'm not their normal consumer. I went and bought a jacket off their site just because I wanted to support what they're doing. So Eric, I think there's almost like an evolution that it, it's, it's got to be more than just standing for something got to be going. I mean, just demonstrating it and showing it in such a way that people actually feel like they belong to you. I've got a chapter about this in that book that I mentioned, marketing Rebellion. And I said, one symbol of this is when people will put your sticker on their laptop. It's almost like a tattoo. I mean, you're showing the whole world. I believe in this company, I belong with them. They're not going to let me down. And isn't that the ultimate goal? If somebody would believe in you so much, they'd put a sticker on their smartphone or on their laptop.
Eric: It's that they don't just want to participate. They want other people to participate, and they want their brand as it's perceived through others to be associated with yours. And that's the type of advocacy that no amount of paid marketing, no number of Super Bowl spots can buy you. I want to talk more about belonging. I also want to make sure that we finish the conversation around measurement. So you wrote an article recently that I pulled as part of our brief here, and you talk about how you can keep up with marketing change and the pulse of culture, or you can measure, but you probably can't do both. Well so what do you mean by that?
It's this idea that too much of marketing is dictated by a dashboard and what we're comfortable with, and you mentioned these disruptor brands and disruptor agencies that are coming. One that I love very much is an agency called Giant Spoon, and they do immersive experiential marketing. Their mantra there is or an advertising agency that aspires to never make an ad, where I heard about them is they created an activation at South by Southwest three or four years ago to promote the television show, Westworld. I mean, I cannot even imagine how many millions of dollars were spent. They created the set of Westworld in this old abandoned ghost town in Texas, took people on a bus to this ghost town. They had actors in the ghost town creating stories. People were there for hours, they had food, they had drink. Somebody in a costume walked up to me and said, oh, you go to the post office there's a letter waiting for you.
Mark: So I go to the post office and there's a letter and there's a letter from Rebecca says, mark, don't leave before you talk to me. Find me. So now I go to the bar, I say, where can I find Rebecca? Bartender says, oh, last time I saw her, she was down here. She's wearing this plaid dress. So now I'm immersed in this thing. And there's thousands of people there, and every single person has their phone on recording and streaming and documenting. So this was one of the most fantastic promotions of Westworld or anything you could think of, because all these people now are advocates. So I got to meet the founder of Giant Spoon. I said, I just got to know when you're meeting with HBO and that you have this dream, this risk that's going to cost millions of dollars. How do you know if it works? How do you measure it? He said, we had one measure and one goal win South by Southwest, which if you're not familiar, it's like a big gathering of thought leaders every year in Texas where they had this activation. So it's just create the most buzz. It wasn't about attribution. It wasn't about subscriptions, it wasn't about ad revenue, it was just something really sort of qualitative. It's just stories. Do we have the most stories? And to me, that that's not for everybody, but it's bold. And what I would propose is that if you're stuck in this world of dashboards, if you've got a dashboard and you are measuring things, the same things that you measured three years ago, you got to start experimenting in other things. You got to start experimenting in word of mouth, experiential influence maybe content marketing, different things that may have uncomfortable measures or maybe even no near term measures because you're missing out on opportunities. And just because you can't measure it right this moment doesn't mean that's not what the world wants of you.
Eric: So it's not that measurement doesn't matter or that you shouldn't try to measure things. It's that you shouldn't let that and that dashboard mentality hold you back from being on the front foot with culture, taking advantage of these big ideas and opportunities when they present themself, that type of thing.
Mark: It's a different way of thinking about it. And I also think there's a lot of ego involved. There's ego involved. For me, I like having a dashboard and seeing the line going up month after month. That doesn't mean I'm working on the right thing necessarily if I'm looking at subscriptions or I'm looking at, but people aren't buying things from me. So I mean, one mentality I think is to take 5%, 10% of your marketing budget and do something new that you know haven't done three years ago or two years ago. And then imagine if this had a positive impact, what would that look like? And then if it works, if it worked the way you imagined it, then maybe double down, see if it works again. And then eventually the measures will get there. I mean, the measures will catch up, but culture is moving so fast. Expectations are moving so fast, and we've got to move faster than our competitors. And if you're doing the same things you were doing three years ago, you're not.
Eric: Yeah. And I think fundamentally for everything, speed is so important. It always has been, but especially in the competitive and constantly changing world of today, how quickly you decide and execute on doing something matters almost as much as what you do. And one of the things that we see challengers doing differently, and these could be startups like Glossier, but they could also be hbo, because you don't have to be a startup to think and act like a challenger, is they take this approach, like you said, of kind of it's test and learn, but it's actually kind of build and learn. They're doing things that are going to work to some extent, but as they go, they're also focused on what feedback it gives them about the direction to continue building in. And so I think that's one of those kind of fundamental mindset shifts that I think, or I hope people can pick up on and learn from. So Mark, let's circle back to the conversation around belonging. I know this is a topic trend. This is something that you've been kind of noodling on and exploring. So I don't know where you want to take it from. I know there's a couple points that we'll probably dive into as we dig in. Yeah. Where do you want to start when we talk about belonging?
Mark: Well, you know, mentioned something early in our conversation about how a lot of what marketers are coming back to, it's not really something new, something that was foundational, and maybe they're at the beginning, and in many ways we've lost our way. And I had an experience recently where I went back to my ancestral home in America of Pittsburgh. It's where my family grew up. And my grandparents used to go to this Italian store, they called it the Italian market. And this is a store that's been there since 1903, and it's still there. So I go into this place and they've got this case, this 30 feet long with cheese and all these smoked meats and sausages, and it's got the worn out floors and the handwritten signs. And this little lady comes up to the counter and she says, oh, you know, how you doing, Johnny? How you doing, Johnny? How's the family? Johnny says, oh, how are you, Mrs. Oh, I got something for you today. I got something. I know Mr. O'Reilly's going to love. Let me package up a little something for you here. You know, just take it home to Mr. O'Reilly. I think he's going to like this. And I'm standing back. I'm immersed in this always on digital social media world, and I'm standing back with this longing that I want to belong here. I don't belong to any place like this where I went up along where someone will know my name and package up a little something from me. And I think this is really in our hearts. I mean, our DNA and our expectations and how we buy this is the way we bought for centuries. Then we got into this mass marketing world, and I think it's inevitable that it is going to come back in some way, that we're going to find ways to use technology to connect in these deeply, deeply personal ways beyond purpose to where we really feel like we belong in a community which is different from an audience. And it's one of the ways, frankly, I've failed in many ways in my career where I have a big audience. I have people who really, who love me, and they buy my books and they buy my workshops and they hire me to do consulting. But a community is an audience is one way they know me, maybe I know them. But a community is where people know each other. And so there's like communion, right? In a community where it's not just one way people, there's communion and there's purpose. There're there, they're building something together or they believe in something. Maybe they believe where your company is heading or what they're working for or you're how you're trying to change the world in a responsible way. And then there's also relevance, which by the way, what is a brand? Brand is simply a journey of relentless relevance you and have to reimagine and reinvent yourself. That's really Eric. The theme of what we've been talking about all this time is disruptors and connecting and changing and connecting to our fans and our customers in new ways. It is, it's becoming relevant every year. Relentless relevance. So to me, community is people know each other, there's communion and there's purpose and there's relevance, and that's different from an audience. I think that is the evolution. And I think I've been writing a lot about that, that and studying and thinking about it. I mean, is there a purpose for business and belonging? And I know there is. And the other thing that's significant about being relevant now is that we have a belonging crisis in our world. People are more lonely and isolated and frankly depressed than ever because the more time they spend on the internet, the more lonely and depressed they feel. And now we're in this pandemic still, and it's become loneliness and isolation has become a health crisis. And so there, there's this outpouring and this cry and this need for communion and community and belonging. Now let's connect the dots to web three. It's kind of what Web three is all about it. It's about moving from audience to community, to creating a landscape where people are connected and they share and everything. Decisions are decentralized. There's positives and negatives to that, by the way. So I think that I see that we're sort of on this cusp of having belonging being the next great marketing strategy.
Eric: And I would argue it's to what I was saying about going back to basics. I think it's been there for a while. I'm sure that you can find examples of strong brands from 10 years ago, 50 years ago, a hundred years ago, that built communities. And maybe it wasn't as intentional then as like, Hey, I'm going to take this page from the Challenger brand playbook and start to build my community. But actually even for the current ones, it probably is led as much by the culture internally and how they think about the relationship between the brand and the customer to what you said at the very beginning about Glossier, rather than it is anything else. Because the more natural it is, the more profound it is within the company, the easier it's going to be to execute consistently. But a lot of what you talked about is how I think about it as well. And I would actually even level it up to what you said about communion, relevance, connection. To me, that's the difference between audience and community. Audience is one-to-one or one to many. If you're the brand and community, they connect with each other. But what that communion connection and relevance does is it creates more value. And it's all about value. If you can be a brand that creates value, not just through what you say and the one-to-one or one to many connection that you have with your audience and customers, but allow your brand to be a platform for people to get value from others as well. If you add more value, your business will grow. That's true for the product, and it's also true for the brand. And so a lot of that comes from events. That's an easy and obvious way for people to connect with each other. South by Southwest has a community, but you think of brands like Patagonia or Harley Davidson bikers on Harley's relating to each other. They get some value from that experience of seeing someone else and then seeing them as being part of that brand. And so I think it is about everything that you said and the mean, the end that means enables is greater value, which is what ultimately propels the growth of any brand in business.
Mark: I, I'll take it even a step further, more than value also, perhaps one of the last things we have left to create loyalty. And I was in an amazing conversation on a recent podcast of my marketing companion podcast about persuasion. And we talked about how we're in a world where you can't change anybody's mind about anything really. If they have a deeply held belief or view, even if it's disconnected from facts, it's almost impossible to change their mind unless they are in a community with you where it's just like, okay, I trust you enough to be in this community. I'm open to these ideas because I trust you. So I think this idea of belonging is really profound on a number of fronts, and that's why I think this is really the future of marketing and business.
Eric: So I know you touched on web three briefly, but knowing where you sit in the industry and a lot of what you do and help clients with and speak about and write about is, hey, what's coming and how to be prepared for what's coming. We only got a couple minutes left, but maybe you can just kind of share a few of the things that are top of mind for you that you think marketers listening should be thinking about doing, exposing themselves to so that they're prepared for the challenges and opportunities that come up with this shift from Web 2.0 to 3.0.
Mark: I think the most important thing is to become involved. And it's hard to break out of our daily routines and our traditions and how we do things and what's familiar. But again a brand is about being relentlessly relevant. And me to be successful as a marketing professional, I've got to be relentlessly relevant too. And so I'm out there and I'm experimenting and I'm trying things. I've launched a creator coin on a platform called Rally called Rise, and it's 100% an experiment there. There is some financial opportunities, but for me it's about giving coins away, just learning together, trying experiments, see what works. Because this is truly an opportunity for me to transcend audience and build community. And I think this idea of tokenized economies for people, for brands, for businesses, even for communities and cities. Some cities are starting to launch their own coins now. I think you could have a tokenized economy that can encourage buying from local businesses to earn different rewards. And I mean, there's endless possibilities. So, and Metaverse, same way is just like, it might seem weird and scary and futuristic, but just dip your toe in, become conversational and don't be afraid of it. Just start experimenting and try in a little way.
Eric: Got to get started getting started. So Mark, we've covered a lot of ground today. We have, and there's been some very actionable advice that people can draw from all of this, but if you had to sum it up, one thing that people should do differently after listening to this conversation, what would it be?
Mark: I think the big theme in everything we've talked to, talked about is this idea of really being more human in everything you do and being the most human company in your niche. That's not an anti-technology statement. It's this idea, if you're using technology that builds barriers between you and your customers, if you are using technology in ways that customers hate, stop it. And think about this picture in your mind about the Italian store in Pittsburgh that's been there since 1903 and this belonging. How do you show up, show your face, show your heart, show your passion, your compassion in every touchpoint from top to bottom in every department? How do you become the most human company in your industry? And I think that is, that's what's going to eventually lead to connection, community, belonging, and winning. <laugh>.
Eric: Mark, thank you so much for making the time. I really enjoyed this conversation. If people want to connect with you, find out more about what you're doing, and you published a new book recently and you've got all the other ones as well, where do you want to direct them to?
Mark: You could find everything about me at businessesgrow.com. My blog is There, podcast is there all free. And then I've written nine books. My new book is called Cumulative Advantage, about how building momentum for your business and your brand certainly a relevant topic these days in this world of information, overwhelming information density. Yeah. So businesses grow.com. You can find my social media connections and stay in touch.
Eric: Great. We'll include that in the show notes. All right, mark, I'll let you go, but thank you again and it was great to see you.
Mark: Yeah, thank you. It's been great.
Eric: Take Care.
Eric: Scratch is a production of Rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us, check out we are rival.com. If you want to connect with me, email me at eric@wearerival.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it, and please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
