Brand Loyalty Is Dying: Devora Rogers on Shopper Promiscuity and Modern Marketing

Whether you're a big company or a midsize company, you've got to do the work to show up with the thought leadership, the data that says, here's what we're seeing. Will you take a risk on me? And then if it works, turn it into a massive thought leadership thing that you take around and give out. You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes deep with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what you need to know now in business. Hey, even life sometimes. I'll give you some life advice. Probably more the marketing and business guy. And that's why I like to bring the best, the brightest, and some of the smartest people in the industry on the show. Sometimes we venture back into the things that I always was kind of had my hands in, in the agency world. Less today with the podcast network, but definitely keeping a pulse of what's happening in marketing and research and what brands are thinking about. And ultimately, I got to go to the source. That's why we've got the research poet. We have the chief strategy officer of Alter Agents. It is Devorah. What's up, Devorah? Hey, how's it going, Ryan? Good to be with you. Appreciate you coming on. I don't always get to get my nerdy marketing hat on, but I kind of want to get it on today. Is Alter Agents look, feel, act like an ad agency? I know you're not involved maybe in the marketing campaigns, but in many ways, is my mind in the right place? We're a full service research shop. I came from the ad agency world, so we have a little ad agency in us. Our focus groups do a thing. Yes and no. If you enjoy traveling and going and having shitty food in a back room while people talk about things for days on end, then you might do focus groups. And some people still do that. But honestly, we have moved to virtual focus groups because you get better respondents. People just don't want to leave their houses right now. We do them, but I would say judiciously. And more and more, we're moving to something we call mobile ethnographies. They've also been called selfnographies, which is really freaking cool. It's important for people to know what the sentiment of today is. What's motivating shoppers and consumers? How does one learn what's doing those things? What are the techniques today? When I have brilliant people like you on the show, it's like almost what you don't do and what you don't listen to sometimes because I I feel like the inputs can be so confusing now. That's the thing that just blows my mind with you doing what you do. I think about what I did years ago. Then the inputs felt complex, but they weren't. Now it's just like so many, I mean, how do you balance all of it? I have that same feeling that you have when I look at my clients who handle CPG brand marketing in a space where you've got to compete on Amazon. To me, that's now brain science. We actually literally do brain science to understand because the amount of channels that people can be in, the importance of being offline, online, a mix of both, dealing with private label. It is rough. It's our job to help clients focus on what's really going to matter for them when they bring something new to market or when they're trying to compete with their competitors. That's the thing that's interesting. I really want to dig under. I came up in the what I feel like was a great mecca of brand marketing, the importance of that of building brand over time and the resonance of that and reach and frequency and all of these things. And then kind of in my in-between land, the last 10 years of owning an agency, but kind of being on our own planet and doing podcasting and all that. Performance marketing. The savior of all things came in. I rolled my eyes a little bit, drove me crazy. You can't drive a sale until someone's aware of you. And last time I checked, you have to play that game too. But what's been your perspective the last 10 years? I want to turn to more specifically some of the nuances that you work in, but I just wanted to pick your brain a little bit. As someone that's in it with the consumer, The performance versus brand thing and the last 10 years of, hey, let's just scoop up all of the bottom of the funnel. Have we just completely lost our mind that we still have to build somewhere along the way the awareness and the consideration? The bad news for brands is that consumers have more options than ever before. We call it shopper promiscuity. If I had four amazing suitors outside every single day, standing outside my house, being, you know what though? Like, I'm pretty great. Like, I'm an amazing chef. I'm really good in bed. It'd be hard to stay loyal. Let's just be honest. That's what brands are facing. Consumers have so many choices. They could go anywhere at any time of day. That access. the choice that they have creates this promiscuity. The difficult news is that brands continue to be brands. And what brands often do as brands, both in marketing and in research, is they do something we call brand narcissism. A lot of research is built on this idea that if you just track people's relationship to your brand, then you'll know enough and then you'll know what to do. It's called brand tracking. It underpins all of research and marketing. Many people hate it, including the people that use it because things don't shift that much. It's hard to really make sense out of it. It's narcissistic. Imagine, Ryan, if you and I went out for like a little friend hang. And the whole time I was like, hey, Ryan, what do you think about my hair? What do you think about my cashmere sweater? What do you think about my friends? Did you look at my friends? Am I more innovative than my friend? You'd be like, get out of here. You wouldn't want to talk to me. And that's what brands do with their precious research. We have really drawn a line in the sand. Our CEO, Rebecca Brooks, wrote in our book, Influencing Shopper Behavior. In a chapter in that book, she wrote what I call her Jerry Maguire letter, basically, to the research and marketing industry saying, we're missing the boat here. Brain tracking isn't delivering the answers that you want. Add to that insult to injury, and then I'll tell you the good part. The challenge is that when we survey shoppers by generation, brand loyalty basically stair steps down. So if you're a boomer, then you're pretty likely to keep buying, let's say 60% of boomers are going to keep buying products that they've been buying. By the time you get to millennials and Gen Z, it's 17% of them express that same brand loyalty. That's the bad news. But I would agree with you that performance marketing has shown us that the answer is not just the race to the bottom. Yeah, you can get people to buy things if you do enough coupons and promotions or whatever. Way to buy one, get one free. Yeah, you can't. But you may not have a lasting voice or presence in the space that ultimately means that brands still do have to do the hard work. What's interesting, though, I think, and I think where the opportunity for brands is, is that brands have this idea that it's either all or nothing. I'm going to put my brand out there, show you my brand logo again and again and again. I'm going to have my billboards up that you won't even know what my website is or what I'm selling. They think they could do something because we're just so recognized. It's just so distinguished that people will get there. Either we're going to go all in. It's just our brand name, brand recognition, build brand. Or we're going to go all the way to the bottom and give you all these little details. But actually, the center space is where we really see the opportunity for brands. Tell them about your products and what they do and why they're better and why people should believe in you as a brand. Essentially, what we've seen is consumers and shoppers becoming really, really smart. Every piece of research that we've done over the last decade shows that people consume more information than ever before about everything, but also all of their purchases. More sources than ever before, more knowledge than ever before. And I'm going to put implied words in your mouth. They know they're being marketed to. And they're okay with it too. And that's the thing too, is that brands don't have to pretend like they're not. We've actually seen an increase in people accepting advertisement as a useful source of information. They get the exchange, but do better. Tell me more. One of the few people I would call mentor, Christopher Lockhead in marketing. I don't know if you know Chris. He's a category pirates is his brand. He doesn't believe in brands. He just believes in category creation to where you carve out exactly what you are. You market the problem and you become the solution. I think that's a little bit of what you're saying with telling people about what you are. I agree with about 75% of him. I choose to believe the brand isn't dead. I would agree with you. At the end of the day, people, the way our brains work, we do neuroscience. Turns out half the reason we like our spouses is because we see their face every day. It's a brain thing. So the next time you get in a fight with your spouse, just be like, am I with you just because I see you every day? And that's the same for brands. Brands, you wouldn't want to give that up. It's a name, it's a logo your brain recognizes. It's a logo or a service that you associate with something good. If that goes away, it makes it harder for consumers. They'd have to do more work. It's not to say you couldn't. And I do think category matters a lot. And if everybody could do what he's suggesting can be done, cool. But I don't know that everybody has that benefit. Not everybody's going to be the category king. There's a lot of money to be made as the second person, second best in the category. And look, as somebody that's very competitive that doesn't like to play for second in much of anything. Or even like 5%. Being top 5% pays the bills. But the brand thing is interesting. The familiarity, the promiscuity is like the biggest thing. Does it matter at single moment? moment of truth. If that performance bug comes in, I'm keeping it simple here, like the store, but whether it's a luxury thing or not, luxury is a whole other category. I mean, you go in and I buy Armandham a toothpaste, but if there is a half price deal on Colgate, am I cheating? Think about all the places in our lives where we make left turns. It depends. Mustard is a category that I like talking about. And the reason I like talking about mustard is that there are people that don't care at all. They're like, I just give me the grapevine or give me the cheapest. I don't care. Is it yellow? Fine. My father-in-law is like that. Doesn't care. Maybe if there's like a flavor, he might splurge. But otherwise, it's just like yellow mustard is sufficient. And then there are mustard aficionados, mustard sommeliers. And they're going to know every little thing. They're going to do little tastings. There are in every category mustard aficionados. You may not be an aficionado in one category in your life, but randomly in another, you might be. Even among people who consistently choose value, I'm somebody that chooses like, I'm like, oh, is there a more expensive price that I can pay? I'll do that. But there are people that are the opposite, and it doesn't matter if they're wealthy or not. They're going to consistently choose the value option. We tend to leave out a lot of the people that are choosing the value option in our research because they tend to not be very interesting. But I guarantee you, whoever they are, one thing in their life, most likely, unless they're just like a total weirdo, they have something that they really want to be higher quality premium endocrats. And for that, they're willing to do the research. They're willing to do the looking and they might be harder or easier to move. So that's the other thing is that this promiscuity means that there are a whole group of people who are just promiscuous and they might be amazing to initially grow your brand because let's say they become obsessed with a direct to consumer underwear brand. People become obsessed early on. They're the explorers. They're the ones finding new things. They're evangelizing. And they are the ones that you can lose very easily. So you kind of have to know at every stage of building your business, the idea that you could just have loyal people that'll stay with you and that's everyone is just no longer true. You have to sort of plan for, okay, I'm going to have these people that are going to come in. They might help me build my brand early on, but then they're going to defect because that's what they do. And then I've got to get the other people to fill up the back so that we don't completely lose when the explorers and promiscuous folks go away. You have a lot of job security because you know why? You know what I just heard? Devorah is. And it's very true. It depends, Word. It's so unique to every different brand and every different category. I know this instinctively, but I almost forget it, too, because I think we all like to paint with broad brushes and make statements like... TV is dead or Facebook is dead. The truth is, but it depends because depending on your product and depending on the categories of consumers that buy that product, they can be very promiscuous in one but brand loyal in another. Years ago, I did a call with someone who was very senior at the milk board. The call went very poorly. She had seen the work that we did with Google, the zero moment of truth work. And she's like, I want that. But I don't believe that people are doing a lot of different searching and researching and sources using a lot of different sources for milk. Milk is an everyday household item. And I tried to convince her on the call. I was like, listen, I know you think that. And for a lot of people it is. But even if for 15, 20% of people, it starts to shift. What's that going to look like? She didn't believe me. The call went poor. I didn't win. Never heard from her again. It was like really a bad call. Look at where we are now. Go into the milk aisle and tell me that that wasn't completely disrupted. There is pea milk. There is goat milk. My child's doctor told me to get camel milk at one point. We're in a different world. Anyone who thinks that a category is never going to shift or be disrupted is in for some surprises. And once it does, you either are ready or you lose your share. And that's why you got to get underneath it to know within your own product and your own category, what the mindset, what are the media, what are the mind thought process, what are the problems that you're solving or not solving. And it's hard, it's frustrating because we want and we've been chasing, especially which is where I want to go next door is attribution. Ultimately, that's right. I forget who says it. I know that 50% of my marketing works great. I just don't know what 50%. And we've been chasing that attribution game. Where do you fall on that? I get hand raisers on Google. SEO is important. They're searching for you and it gets a lot of credit. But did my friend down the street, good old fashioned word of mouth, put it in my brain. And so who gets credit and how do I know what to do more of? There were folks who built these tech stacks and they said, we'll be able to answer it all and we'll know everything. It didn't play out that way. And certainly now some of the changes that have occurred in tech and some of the questions calling into question whether cookies are workable and privacy, all kinds of different things has shown us that there isn't an easy fix for attribution. There's no special key that just unlocks it permanently. You have to do the work and you have to do the work among humans. Now, working in research, we have people who are trying to use synthetic respondents, which, by the way, that means not a real human. Artificial. artificial, not real, fake, to essentially answer research surveys. I look at that and I go, why would you do that? You could use big data to do that. You could use any number of things. Nothing, nothing reveals opportunities and challenges in the way that talking to humans does. It just doesn't. Attribution is worthwhile. And certainly if you're doing a lot of media spend, you've got to do it. But we feel that brands have to put in the work and ultimately get answers from real people dealing with real challenges that either your company can or cannot solve. I know that the techniques in online have probably brought the scale. I mean, I just remember what it costs. I guess the online equations probably made it more attainable. My mentor was a guy named John Ross, who was, had been the CMO at Home Depot. And he oversaw Home Depot's growth, the biggest growth of its development. I learned a lot from him around how I think about research and retail and shopping. We wrote a book together called Fire in the Zoo, which is all about the difficulty of selling at retail and all that kind of stuff. So they had every, imagine they had Deloitte, they had all, every consultant in the world was working for Home Depot at the time. Every single one. They had any amount of data or research they wanted. And guess what? As the CMO, he felt like he still didn't know why people were making choices. And so he would go down and put on an apron, stand in the paint aisle, and he would ask people a series of very, very simple questions. What made you decide to come in today? Where'd you go for information? What of that information was most influential? What of that information specifically? Was it price? Was it what we told you about the product? Had you ultimately decided that you wanted to come in and make a purchase? And he would go do those conversations. And, you know, small business owners can do that. Yeah. You don't need a research agency to do that. If you're really on the no budget side, I would say small business owners need to at least be having those conversations. They won't be at scale. And you got to be aware of that. Did you tell him to take it with a grain of salt, what he learned in those conversations, or do you think they were meaningful? We turned it into a quantitative methodology. And today clients do that methodology at scale when they're trying to figure out where is everyone going for information? Where should I be? I don't have billions of dollars. I have to choose between TikTok and Google or podcasts and Google search. What should I do? And then now you can do these self-nographies. We use a company called D-Scout, which I'll give them a shout out. I think they've built something really cool. There's another one called Recollective. And, you know, for a relatively small sum, 20, $30,000, you can send out real people into the real world and find out how they're responding to your product or service or stores. 30 people, that's not the same as a thousand. But you know what? If you work in research, the truth is after about 12 or 18, you start hearing a lot of the same things. You're doing a lot of research, different clients, different things. And I'm sitting here saying we can't paint with a broad brush, but I'm going to ask you a broad brush question. What's a medium or a tactic or something that might surprise people listening that is popping up over and over again in the influence or magnitude that it has? What might they be? Honestly, podcasts are pretty amazing. We've been tracking podcasts for 15 years and for a long time, they were down there with the dust bunnies. Nobody used them. They weren't driving influence. I would say about by about 30 to 40% of the population. So there's people that don't use them. Fine. But there's a decent audience that is really listening and really attuned and they really love the hosts. And so that can be a very powerful channel for brands. And a lot of brands have worried that podcasts are not brand safe because you can't control everything that happens. It's different if it's like a bigoted show. But if it's just like bad language, consumers don't care. It hasn't hurt our numbers. And I have a potty mouth. Yeah, same. Especially on Fridays. Talking with Devorah. She is the research poet. Back to this attribution game. Who does get the credit? How do we answer that what 50% is working or not working? There's a lot of podcasters that use codes and that kind of thing that gives you an opportunity to know what's working. Yeah. We're seeing creators do that. Creators are certainly having a moment. I'm a little bit worried about creators with the growth of AI because I worry that it could kind of turn things into slop. That's not going to be good for consumers or brands, but that's an aside. You have to live with some level of uncertainty. Yeah. You're never going to know everything. You just never will. But you can find out a lot. Let's say you're throwing money at TV and radio and podcasts and 10 other things. We do a study where we then ask people, what sources did you use before making a purchase? And we only talk to people who actually made the purchase. So these aren't in tenders. These aren't random consumers. They actually bought the thing that our brand is selling. And if we see that TV is just really low, not a lot of people are using it, but it's really influential. Yeah. we take it. Or another one that we see a lot, like people kind of make fun of catalogs. Do you know catalogs are like actually not so bad? Not a lot of people use them, but the people that do, they buy shit. Really influential. So we're looking at things through the lens of how many people are using it and we can find that out through research and how influential is it? And we can find that out through research. And then like we can hook that together with other attribution models to say, you know what, let's plus up the catalogs or the TV isn't showing up in some of our other stuff. But let's plus it up because consumers, a thousand of them, 80 percent are saying it worked. That's what it's just applying the percentage and the scale. So then it's like, OK, we know that this has impact at some level, which research that you could help them would tell. And some portion of that makes up 100 percent of the impact. 90%. There's probably always that ambiguous 10% that we don't know. Cousin Eddie that told them about it or influenced them in the projection. People like to write that off. Cousin Eddie matters. If Cousin Eddie bought from you and demonstrated any aspect of being an evangelist or somebody who's really excited about the product... Give Cousin Eddie some codes. Give him some ways to get other people on board. Cousin Eddie is great. We'll take him. What's the biggest problem you've solved? When you think about it, every client's your baby, I know. So we don't have to call. But Devorah is a big deal. I'm telling the audience this. And so she's worked with a lot of big brands. She's smart as hell. I wanted to brag a little bit, but also to the types of problems that you've solved and the scale and maybe what your research drove as a change. It's like choosing among my children or my favorite poems. It's really tough, Ryan. But the one that's been most enduring and I think for me is a really good B2B case study that brands can continue to learn from is about in 2012, Google came to us. I was working at the time at the IPG Media Lab. Google was having trouble convincing brands that people would buy things online. Clients did not believe people would buy things online. Google, who's however many trillion dollar company right now, I don't think that most of their sales guys are making decks anymore, slide decks, that they have to get themselves a meeting with the client. People are like, yeah, generally Google delivers results. But at that time, the sales guys had to go in, they had to look sharp, they had to have nice shoes and they had to go in person. And they had to say, you know, we have this offering called search and we're starting to see that people are interested in buying things online and they're doing research. And even if they don't buy it online, attribution, they appear to be looking and we think that they are then buying it later elsewhere. And clients are like, nah, what are you talking about? Nobody's going to buy laundry detergent online. They're just not going to do it. Well, our research proved that they were. And it became a study that was called ZMOT and it went global. People started for a while were hiring directors of ZMOT and they turned it into a case study, a major thought leadership initiative. And what that taught me is, first of all, never be too certain about technology. what the future looks like because 12 years ago, people were like, nobody's going to buy laundry detergent online. Look where we are. I haven't bought laundry detergent in a store, in a store myself, pick it up off the shelf. Why would I do that? It's heavy. It's pain in the ass. Why would I go in there? Right? So it taught me to be humble about what the future holds. And also whether you're a big company or a midsize company, you've got to do the work to show up with the thought leadership, the data that says, here's what we're seeing. Will you take a risk on me? And then if it works, turn it into a massive thought leadership thing that you take around and give out. And I speak a lot about thought leadership. And I think that brands are wise to do the research and then where they can figure out how to tell that story publicly in a way that makes them look great. How much of the zero moment of truth, that's what we're talking about with ZMOT, and if you go Google that, if you have it, it's one of the most widely read research studies of all time. How much of that still is in play? A lot. We've been doing it for 12, 13 years, and we have norms and stuff, right? So we have watched the fortunes rise and fall of various media types. We saw where radio was increasing and then falling and going over to streaming and then newspapers have watched that decline, have watched podcasting grow. And we have about 50 sources that we've been tracking since that time, whether they're increasing, decreasing, growing in influence, that kind of thing. And what has happened is just that consumers are using more information than ever before. There are categories where they might use less. Fine. But on the whole, if they're going to go buy an expensive workout machine or plan a trip to Italy, they're going to spend a lot of time. Because now, here's the thing, is that now searching and being online as you research is like a form of entertainment. It's just an activity. You could listen to a podcast, you could read a book, or you could plan your next purchase that you get excited about. And depending how research-oriented you are or neurotic, you might read hundreds of minutes of things. Did I answer your question? You did. You did. And it made me think when you're saying that I tell people all the time that TV's not the radio because I don't know that people aren't watching it, but their head's down on their phone. They're hearing ambient. The message is there. So it has an impact. We talked about attribution. Attention is another one that has been a real topic of interest. Everyone said, okay, fine, fine, fine. We don't know all the attribution answers, but we're going to figure out attention. We're going to see where they're looking. And so they did a whole bunch of stuff with eye tracking and are they looking, whatever. Well, it turns out that you can be attending something without looking at it. You can be attending something and looking at it and your brain can still be thinking about something else entirely. And that does brands no good. What we want to look at is how emotionally engaged are folks. And so we do that through using scotch devices or essentially like Apple watches, sport watches. And we can tell somebody's variable heart rate variability that tells us their oxytocin is spiking in their body and sending them signals that it makes them more likely to do something in the future. And I think that's incredibly powerful. That is powerful. We're doing a little segment on our trading cards because they're so huge. In our news segment, I'm opening like packs on the episode. I think about, well, what's going through my head? Because it's like legal gambling. You know, you're looking, opening. I bet your immersion, that's the measure. I bet it's through the roof. It's usually on a scale of zero to 100 and anything over 50 starts to get our attention because money's on the line. Your emotions are on the line. You can download the app. It's called Immersion Tuesday. And they have another consumer one, too. And you could just track and see. That would be the number that your brain is. Which puts your brain on sports cards. Yeah, and my kids. I have four boys and they're all into it. I'm teaching them business through this lens. You know, they didn't care about anything I did. I'm creating, helping them create a business out of it. I love it. My daughter sometimes does that for me. She'll put on like a fake little focus group and she's only 10. She always serves snacks. So that's, I'm like, okay. Oh. That's a focus group. She knows what she's doing. Last thing before I let you go, Devorah, is the purchase funnel data. I mean, we have the purchase funnel, the purchase cycle, whatever you want to call it. It's still there. You still have to get awareness and then intent and then consideration. And in some way, shape or fashion, even if it's always moving. I'm very ornery about the purchase cycle. I got to tell you. And the reason I'm ornery is because, yeah, it still exists. You still have to get from A to B to C to D, but it doesn't happen in this neat, tidy little order. So when we do path to purchase studies, and we do quite a number of them, I try to break it to clients. I'm like, I'm not going to give you your nice little neat little thing. And oftentimes they're like, but I want the graphic that shows the one thing to the next. Sometimes I give them their little path to purchase, purchase funnel. But what you have to know is that whole huge other things, galaxies of things are happening outside of that. And so the way that we like to kind of envision it is almost like as if there's a room full of balloons floating. And that is everyone's sort of attention and engagement. And some of those balloons rise and fall. Some of them are bigger, some of them. And that's kind of how I like to think about it rather than like a neat little tidy thing, because our research shows that less than 5% and it's actually less than 1% ever do things in the same order in the same way. It's just there's too many things. It's there's trillions of combinations. Yeah. That crystallized something for me, how the influence, a certain stage or certain tactic might be considered a consideration tactic, but its influence might be greater depending on the person. Am I hearing that right? Yeah, absolutely. Devorah, you're a smart lady. Thank you. Thank you. It's been fun to be with you. Hey, it's fun. Fire in the zoo. Influencing shopper decisions and her TEDx's are blowing up. You got to go check them out. She's smart. She's teaching brands what they need to do and more importantly, what not to do. But it's complex. at the end of the day. That's what I think we need to take away. But it's unique. It's attainable to know, but you have to kind of clear your mind. Like I have to even do this myself. You know, I consider myself a bastion of willingness to change, but it's just, there's a lot of complexity, a lot of different influence, but it doesn't have to be overwhelming. And I feel like that's what you crystallize today. I don't know, either with your brilliance or just at least crystallizing it in my head. So I really appreciate it for you. Thanks so much, Ryan. Great to be here. Where can everybody keep up with you, what you're doing, books, etc.? We've got a Substack, Alter Agents. You can find us on Substack. That's kind of where we're writing right now. We shared a little bit about what it was like. Devorah, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks so much. Hey, guys, you know where to find us, RyanIsRight.com. You'll find highlight clips, all of the episodes and our YouTube links. And, of course, where to find our guests, her amazing books, and information on everything that they're up to. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time on Right About Now. Here's the truth. Information doesn't change your life. Execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea. Make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford. And watch or listen to every episode at RyanIsRight.com. This is Right About Now. Now quit waiting. Go win.