ChatGPT planned Mark Schaefer’s Paris trip down to the metro stop. It knew his gluten intolerance. It curated restaurant lists and optimized his itinerary for budget and taste. It did everything right.
He still flew Delta. Still stayed at his preferred hotels. Still packed his On Cloud sneakers. The AI did not get a vote on any of it.
That’s not a quirk. That’s brand doing exactly what brand is supposed to do. And it’s the starting point for everything Tom, Curtis, and this week’s guest unpack in Season 3, Episode 5 of Bullhorns & Bullseyes.
Mark is a marketing strategist, author of multiple books on brand, community, and AI, and the person behind the concept of content shock—which Tom spent six months thinking about before accidentally Googling it wrong. He’s also the reason Tom now subscribes to a newsletter he didn’t go looking for. That’s brand doing its job, once again.
The Sisyphean Task Nobody Wants to Hear About
Right now, a significant amount of marketing energy is being poured into one question: how do we get AI to mention our brand?
Mark’s answer is gentle but pointed. It’s a Sisyphean task—pushing the boulder up the mountain only to watch it roll back down. Most businesses don’t have the resources or the competitive positioning to win that fight. And there’s a more productive question available: what would make someone already know, trust, and choose you before they ever ask the AI anything?
Tom draws the parallel to the SEO era without hesitation. Companies spent enormous sums climbing search rankings, only to admit their best leads still came from referrals. Curtis, who spent the first decade of his career as an SEO specialist, doesn’t argue the point. The conversation isn’t anti-technology. It’s pro-strategy.
What People Buy Versus What You Sell
Mark has a habit of starting engagements by handing executives a piece of paper and asking them to finish a sentence: “Only we…” More than nine times out of ten, five people in the room produce five different answers. That’s not a messaging problem. That’s the absence of a marketing strategy.
The gap between what a company sells and what customers actually buy is where brand lives—and where most companies are losing ground. Mark tells the story of a regional telecom company whose team was obsessed with the sophistication of their technology. When he went out and talked to their customers, nobody mentioned the technology. What they said instead was: when something breaks at two in the morning, these people show up. They’re a security blanket.
The CEO was furious. Not at Mark—at himself, for spending five years unable to articulate what his company meant to customers, only to hear it solved in a single conversation. The exercise works because it forces you to go find the answer rather than assume it.
Curtis frames it as coherence before creativity. Until you know what you actually mean to the people buying from you, any creative or tactical work you do is speculative at best and wasteful at worst. That’s the chaos tax.
Why AI Can’t Do This Part for You
This is where the conversation gets direct. Curtis raises something Mark has written about: if you use AI for customer research, your competitors are running the same prompts and getting approximately the same output. The AI is reading the internet and producing a homogeneous answer. It’s doing its best job and that best job is, by design, consensus.
The 15 to 20 percent that actually creates competitive advantage requires talking to real customers. Not synthetic personas. Not AI-generated sentiment analysis. Actual conversations, conducted with some frequency, because what customers value this year may not be what they value next year. The market is not static.
Mark is careful to say this isn’t an argument against performance marketing, SEO, or advertising. It’s an argument that if those are the only tools in use, something foundational is being skipped.
The Emotional Continuum: From Ad to Community
Mark maps out a hierarchy that reframes how most brands think about their audiences. Advertising creates some emotional connection at the lowest level. Owned content channels—a podcast, a newsletter, a YouTube series—create an audience, which is a higher level of connection. Someone subscribing is raising their hand and saying they want more.
Community is different in kind, not just degree. The distinguishing feature: people in a community know each other. And here is the finding from Mark’s research for his book Belonging to the Brand that anchors the whole argument: when people form real relationships inside a brand community, that goodwill transfers to the brand. They belong to it. They do not leave.
The implication is that a company should invest as much in the connections between community members as it does in its own relationship with customers. That’s the architecture of advocacy.
Tom acknowledges the obvious counterpoint: none of this shows up cleanly in a report to the CFO. He and Curtis are clear-eyed about the challenge of making the case internally. Mark’s suggestion is to hand someone the book and let the business case make itself.
The Pandemic of Dull, and the Way Out
Tom introduces the concept of content shock—Mark’s term, from years ago, which Tom had mentally filed under “content tsunami” and spent months unable to find. The question he puts to Mark: in a world now flooded with AI-generated content, what does standing out actually require?
Mark’s answer is not “be human.” He calls that phrase hackneyed. His answer is closer to: approach the level of art.
Art, in this context, is not about craft or credentials. It’s about interpreting the human experience in a way AI cannot replicate. Mark shares the story of giving a five-hour lecture at McKinsey—his dream company, the pinnacle of what his career could produce—and feeling inexplicably depressed watching the sun set over Manhattan from the 64th floor of the World Trade Center afterward. He almost didn’t write about it. He was sure he’d be dismissed.
It became his biggest post of the year.
Not because he’s a great writer. Because the experience was real, specific, and recognizable. That is what AI is contributing nothing to. It is, in Mark’s phrase, accelerating a pandemic of dull. The content that rises above it is content that only a particular human, with a particular life, could have produced.
Curtis connects this to what he sees in his clients’ data. The posts that perform—an executive at a hospital bedside, a founder at their kid’s basketball game—are not performing because of the algorithm. They’re performing because they’re true.
Pesty, and What That Pest Control Company Did Right
Tom ends with a story about pest control.
A company knocked on his door, promised flexibility, and then wouldn’t let him out of his contract. He complained publicly. People came out of the woodwork with the same story. He swore off the category entirely.
Months later, a small ad appeared in a local newsletter. It said: stop letting your pest control company scam you.
Tom clicked immediately. He subscribed to the product—DIY pest control called Pesty—without reading a single performance claim or feature comparison. The packaging had puns. He is now an enthusiastic apostle, recommending it to everyone he can.
He never even checked whether it kills spiders more effectively than Ortho.
The company understood his anguish. They didn’t describe their product. They described him. That’s the whole lesson, compressed into one pest control ad. Mark calls it a ribbon on everything the episode covered. He’s right.
Watch and Listen to Season 3, Episode 5
Available on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere you listen.
Bullhorns & Bullseyes is hosted by Curtis Hays and Tom Nixon. Season 3 drops a new episode every two weeks.
