Getting creative to reach the unreachable customer

Mark Schaefer
4 min readMar 14, 2024

I recently received this message from a close friend in Europe … a person who has followed me on social media for years:

“I had no idea you had a new book out!”

This message was a like an electric shock to my marketing pride.

For a period of months after Marketing Rebellion, came out, social media posts about my book seemed ubiquitous — blogs, videos, podcast interviews, newsletters. How is it possible that this friend missed the news?

If this were an isolated event I could shrug it off but I get similar comments all the time. People I consider fans and friends seem unaware of my books or events. For some, it seems to be a surprise that I have a podcast, something I have been doing for more than six years!

It makes me wonder … is there any way to reliably reach your customers, even the ones who profess to love you?

The unreachable customer

The unreachable customer has become a “thing” in my lifetime. In the early days of media, you had a daily newspaper, three network television stations, and some magazines. If you repeated an advertising message through these channels you could reliably connect with an audience that had no other place to go for their news and information.

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Mark Schaefer

Keynote speaker, marketing strategy consultant, Rutgers U faculty and author of 10 books including KNOWN, Marketing Rebellion, and Belonging to the Brand!