Mark Schaefer
Customers no longer believe corporate messaging, no longer feel loyalty, and no longer encounter brands the way marketing plans assume they do. Marketing budgets keep funding tactics built for an attention economy that does not exist anymore. The unresolved question for senior commercial leaders is what actually creates preference and belonging when advertising impressions have lost their pricing power.
Mark Schaefer is a marketing strategist, futurist, and Rutgers Business School lecturer whose work helps commercial leaders rebuild brand growth around human connection, community, and creative audacity in an AI-saturated market.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Mark Schaefer
- A connected, multi-book argument about where marketing economics are actually going, from Marketing Rebellion to Belonging to the Brand to Audacious, rather than a single talk track repackaged.
- A working position at the front of the AI-and-marketing conversation, anchored in his Rutgers “Mini-MBA: Digital Marketing in the Age of AI” and his book Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.
- A serious thesis on community as a marketing asset, with case work on brands like Sephora, that gives CMOs a defensible alternative to paid-media-only growth plans.
- Direct consulting and keynote experience with global enterprises including Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force, which means examples land for both regulated and consumer-facing audiences.
- A teaching habit, three years studying under Peter Drucker and an active Rutgers executive education role, that shows up in how he structures sessions: argument, evidence, frameworks leaders can take into a Monday meeting.
Biography highlights
- Executive Director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, with consulting work for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Dell, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, the U.S. Air Force, and the UK Government.
- RBS Executive Education Lecturer at Rutgers Business School; teaches the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI and graduate marketing classes.
- Author of twelve best-selling marketing books, including Marketing Rebellion, Belonging to the Brand, KNOWN, The Content Code, Cumulative Advantage, Return on Influence, How AI is Changing Your Customers, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World.
- Audacious launched with the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover and reached #1 in Amazon’s marketing category.
- Founder and co-host of The Marketing Companion podcast and publisher of the {grow} marketing blog.
- Featured commentator and contributor across The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, CBS News, BBC, NPR, Wired, and Harvard Business Review.
- Keynote speaker at South by Southwest, the Institute for International and European Affairs, Marketing Summit Tokyo, and Social Media Week London; has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton.
- Named the third-most influential digital marketing authority by Brand24 in 2025.
Biography
The cost of reaching a customer keeps rising while the trust those impressions buy keeps falling. Marketing Rebellion: The Most Human Company Wins set out the argument that built much of Mark Schaefer’s reputation, that businesses are no longer built on advertising impressions but on human impressions that help customers believe, belong, and find meaning. It is used as assigned reading at more than 70 universities and has been translated into 20 languages.
That argument has continued through Belonging to the Brand, which makes the case for community as the next durable marketing strategy, and Audacious: How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World, which examines brands like e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon to show how creative nerve, not algorithmic optimisation, captures attention in saturated markets. Audacious reached number one in Amazon’s marketing category and launched with what the publisher described as the first AI-driven Augmented Reality book cover.
His authority is grounded in operating credentials, not commentary alone. Schaefer runs Schaefer Marketing Solutions and has consulted for Pfizer, Cisco, P&G, Coca-Cola, McKinsey, Adidas, Johnson & Johnson, and the U.S. Air Force. At Rutgers Business School, he is the Executive Education lecturer behind the Mini-MBA in Digital Marketing in the Age of AI, and he has lectured at Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and Princeton. He studied under Peter Drucker for three years, and the structural rigour of that lineage is visible in the way his frameworks are built.
He also runs the infrastructure most marketing thinkers only write about. The Marketing Companion is one of the longer-running marketing podcasts in the field, and the {grow} blog has been a fixture in the discipline for over a decade. The result, for senior commercial audiences, is a speaker who treats marketing as a system and tests his arguments in public, every week, against an audience that includes practitioners and competitors.
Key speaking topics
- Human-centred marketing strategy
- Brand community as a growth strategy
- AI in marketing and creative work
- Personal branding for executives and professionals
- Customer trust, loyalty, and the post-advertising buyer
- Content strategy and influence
- Cumulative advantage and competitive momentum
Ideal for
- CMOs, brand directors, and heads of marketing rebuilding strategy around community and human connection.
- CEOs and commercial leaders questioning the ROI of paid-media-led growth plans.
- Heads of customer experience and digital who need to integrate AI without losing brand distinctiveness.
- Communications, PR, and corporate marketing leaders in regulated industries facing trust and credibility challenges.
Audience outcomes
- A reframed view of where marketing value now sits: human impressions, community, and creative nerve over paid reach.
- Concrete case examples, including Sephora, e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon, that audiences can map against their own categories.
- A working position on how to use AI in marketing without becoming indistinguishable from competitors using the same tools.
- A clearer set of questions to bring back to brand, content, and customer experience teams about what they should stop funding.
- A vocabulary for talking to boards about brand and community as commercial assets, not soft costs.
Talks
A keynote on why creative audacity, not algorithmic efficiency, is the durable advantage in an AI-saturated market.
Key takeaways:
- Why “out-humaning” AI is a stronger commercial position than out-automating it.
- Case studies from brands such as e.l.f. Beauty, HBO, and Giant Spoon on disrupting the story, the channel, or the storyteller.
- A test for marketing leaders to identify where their current plan is competing on sameness.
A keynote built from Schaefer’s most-cited book, arguing that the business is no longer built on advertising impressions but on human impressions.
Key takeaways:
- The five constant human truths that anchor marketing strategy across cycles.
- Why brand storytelling matters less than amplifying the customer’s story.
- A framework for bringing customers into the marketing process rather than targeting them.
A keynote on why brand community is now a defensible commercial asset and how to build one with measurable return.
Key takeaways:
- Three converging trends that make community a strategic priority for CMOs.
- Lessons from brands such as Sephora, where online community drives a disproportionate share of revenue.
- How to measure ROI from community without reducing it to vanity metrics.
A keynote on personal brand as a professional asset for executives, sales leaders, and senior specialists.
Key takeaways:
- The four-step structure Schaefer uses to help professionals build authority.
- Why personal brand is now a leadership and commercial competence, not a marketing add-on.
- How to use content and platform without becoming an influencer.