Navigating Shopper Promiscuity Challenges in Today's Market with Devora Rogers

0:28This is the story of the one. Nothing reveals opportunities and challenges in the way that talking to humans does. It just doesn't. 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. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now.

1:12Hey 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. But I'm 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. And sometimes we venture back into the things that I always 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've got to go to the source.

1:52That's why we got, 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. Yes. Appreciate you coming on. I get to get, I don't always get to get my nerdy marketing hat on, but I kind of want to get it on today. Let's do it. In the beautiful LA, Santa Monica area, correct? Yeah. Yep. Yep. So what is it? Is Alter Agents, I mean, is it 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? Yeah, we're a full service research shop.

2:37So research shops tend to be a little bit different than ad agencies. Our offices aren't as cool. We got rid of our office during the pandemic, which has been great. We're fully remote and the team loves it. and it's given us access to amazing talent all over the U.S. But yeah, we have a little, I came from the ad agency world, so we have a little ad agency in us, you know? Okay. We give off one day a month just because, I feel like that's an ad agency thing. Yeah, exactly. It's also, it brings me flashbacks of focus groups in New York, sitting there talking to people about Test Man and Can You Hear Me Now, which was one of the first campaigns I worked on back in the day for Verizon.

3:17If you worked in New York and you didn't work on Verizon at some point, then, you know, you just didn't like cut your teeth right. But do we still – are focus groups still a thing? I'm going to give you the German answer, which is jaen. Yes and no. Look, 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. You know, people just don't want to leave their houses right now. So it's like if we do a focus group in L.A., getting people on time in four o 'clock in the afternoon, traffic's bad.

4:03It's really hard. So 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. we the agency research we always call it with the best names of shit it's like it just sounds important but it is important and that's why i was so thrilled you know when your your people reached out and it's for our audience it's important for people to kind of know what the sentiment of today is like you know what's motivating shoppers and and consumers uh what how does one learn what's doing those things?

4:50What are the techniques today? What should we listen? And sometimes 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 feel like the inputs can be so confusing now because the channels are... That's the thing that just blows my mind with you doing what you do. I think about what I did 12 years ago. Then the inputs felt complex, but they worked, you know, now it's just like so many, how do you balance all of it? Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I feel like that I have that same feeling that you have when I look at my clients who handle, let's say CPG brand marketing in a space where you've got to compete on Amazon.

5:38You've got to figure out TikTok. You've got, I mean, like to me, that's now brain science. And so we actually literally do brain science to understand because the amount of channels that people can be in, the importance of being offline, online, you know, a mix of both, you know, dealing with private label, like it is rough. And so it's our job to help clients focus on what's really going to matter for them, you know, when they bring something new to market or when they're trying to compete with their competitors. Yeah. And that's the thing that's interesting. I really want to dig under. I've watched these worlds with, I came up in what I feel like was a great mecca of brand marketing.

6:24You know, like the importance of that, of building brand over time and the resonance of that and reaching frequency and all of these things. And then, you know, kind of in my in-between land, the last 10 years of owning an agency, but kind of being on our own planet, you know, and doing podcasting and all that. Performance marketing, the savior of all things came in, right? Which I rolled my eyes a little bit, drove me crazy. I'm like, you know, 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?

7:06I 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. But have we just completely lost our mind that we still have to build somewhere along the way, the awareness and the consideration. Yeah, I agree. I'll start with the bad news for brands. The bad news for brands is that consumers have more options than ever before. We call it shopper promiscuity. Think about it. I'm married.

7:48I don't know about you, but if I had four amazing suitors outside every single day, standing outside my house being like, you know what though? I'm pretty great. Like I'm an amazing chef. Like I'm really, you know, I'm really good in bed. Like, like it'd be hard to stay loyal. Don't let's just be honest. Right. And that's what brands are facing. There are consumers have so, so many choices. They could go anywhere. They could at any time of day. Um, and so that access that, uh, that the choice that they have creates this promiscuity. And so 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.

8:32And 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. And many people hate it, including the people that use it because, you know, things don't shift that much. It's hard to really make sense out of it doesn't and and again it's it's narcissistic it's like do you i mean imagine imagine ryan if you and i went out let's just say for like a little friend hang yeah and the whole time i was like hey ryan what do you think what do you think about my hair what do you think about my cashmere sweater what do you what do you think about my friends did you look at my friends do you think that they're 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 So we have really drawn a line in the sand.

9:26Our CEO, Rebecca Brooks wrote in our, in our book, Shopper Promiscuity. Sorry, we didn't end up getting to name it that because we had a British editor and they didn't want the word promiscuity in there. I know it's too bad. It ended up being influencing shopper behavior. The original name was Shopper Promiscuity. I know the Brits, sorry. She was like, Oh, let's not, we can't. But in, in, 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. Like brand tracking isn't delivering the answers that you want.

10:01And to 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 like 17 % of them express that same brand loyalty. So that's the bad news. Yikes. 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 and whatever.

10:52Way of a buy one, give one free. Yeah, you can. 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, my, you know, billboards up that you won't even know what my website is or what I'm selling. I get so mad at those. I love those. They think they're like fooling somebody.

11:28Like, like they think they could do something like, cause we're just so wrecking. It's just so distinguished, you know, that it will, people will get there. I get mad. I like, my husband has to listen to me for 20 minutes being like, who did that? He's like, okay, the ivory tower of the creative department. Right. Or they say, okay, so either we're going to go the 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.

12:11So essentially what we've seen is consumers and shoppers becoming really, really smart. And 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. Hmm. So more sources than ever before, more knowledge than ever before. And I'm going to put, I think, implied words in your mouth. They know they're being marketed to. 100 right and they're okay with it too like 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 yeah but do better tell me more i have a one of the few people i would call mentor christopher lockhead uh in marketing i don't if you know Chris.

13:14He'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 it. I choose to believe that brand isn't dead. Yeah, I would agree with you. You know, at the end of the day, people are the way our brains work, right? So we, we, we do neuroscience, right? And I don't know if you know this, but it turns out half the reason we like our spouses is because we see their face every day.

14:00Familiarity. It's, it's a, 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 or And that's the same for like, so for brands, right? So brands, you wouldn't want to give that up. Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's a name. It's a, it's a logo. Your brain recognizes it's a logo or, or a, um, a service that you associate with something good. So if that goes away, it, I do think 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.

14:45But I don't know that everybody has that benefit. I know. That's always my argument, too. I'm like, not everybody's going to be the category king. You know, like even if they want to, they don't have. There's a lot of money. And I think, you know, Chris devised the line, well, you know, because he gets to work with the companies that he chooses to, to help them carve out the category when they've decided they want to do that. but there's a lot of money to be made as the uh you know second person second best in the category and no i know as somebody that's very competitive that doesn't like to play for second in much of anything uh but at the same time i do like to be successful and there's not all it's first isn't always the goal second i'll play for second yeah honestly like i'm pretty competitive that's pretty get a second right or even like five percent like you yeah being top five percent pays the bills yeah so exactly but the brand thing is interesting the familiarity and i just always think and you talk about in a lot of your studies and like a lot of the writings i've read from you it's just like that and the promiscuity is like the biggest thing is like does it matter its single moment of truth you know if that performance bug comes in and i'm going to the yeah 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 a whole other thing but you go in and i buy arm and ham a toothpaste but if there is a half price deal on colgate and that's a flavor thing So I'm probably going down a whole nother road, but I think, you know, where I'm headed with this.

16:25It's like, am I cheating? You know, like, well, I mean, think about all the places in our lives where we make left turns. Yeah. You know? Yeah, it depends. Right. It depends. Mustard is a category that I like talking about. Ah, yes. It's good. 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 gravy pond or give me the cheapest that I don't care. Is it mustard? Fine. Right. My father-in-law is like that. Doesn't care. You know, maybe if there's like a flavor, he might splurge, but otherwise it's just like yellow mustard is sufficient.

17:03And then there are mustard aficionados like, you know, mustard sommeliers, you know, and they're going to know every little thing. They're going to do little tastings. Right. Right. So there are in every category mustard aficionados. You you may not be an aficionado in one category in your life, but randomly in another you might be. And even among people who consistently choose value over. I'm somebody that chooses like I'm like, oh, is there a more expensive price that I can pay? I'll do that. You know, it's great. You are that person, right? Do you want to charge me more? Do you want to charge me more, please?

17:48Yeah, please do. But there are people that are the opposite who are, and it doesn't matter if they're wealthy or not, right? That they're going to consistently choose the value option. Yeah. 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. 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.

18:22So 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. Cause like, let's say they become obsessed with, I don't know, let's say like, I feel like there was, you know, like an underwear, a direct to consumer underwear brand, right? Like me undies or whatever. And people become obsessed early on and they're, they're like the look, 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.

18:55And cause you, the idea that you could just have loyal people that'll stay with you and that's everyone is just no longer true. So 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, you know, to to to fill up the back. Right. So that we don't completely lose when the explorers and promiscuous folks go away. you you have a lot of job security because you know why you know what i just heard devora is and it's very true it the the it depends word is it it's so unique to every different brand and every different category and i know this instinctively but i almost forget it too because think we all like to paint with broad brushes and make statements like TV is dead or Facebook is dead.

19:51You know, I've been hearing Facebook's been written those trends. I've written those trends reports, by the way. But the answer to the truth is, but it depends because depending on your product and depending on the category, the categories of consumers that buy that product, They can be very promiscuous in one, but brand loyal in another. Listen, years ago, I did a call with someone who was very senior at the milk board. OK, 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.

20:34Milk is an everyday household item. Nobody. 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. 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. Yes. There is goat milk. My doctor, my child's doctor told me to get camel milk at one point. Oh, my God. Okay.

21:16Yeah. Yeah. So. A lot of inputs. We're in a different world. And 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. Yeah. And that's why you got to get underneath it, like 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 before i want to go next door is attribution ultimately that's right you know like the old pepsi saying or i forget who says it you know i know that 50 of my marketing works great i just don't know what 50 and we've been chasing that attribution game but there you and how do you where do you fall them that?

22:22Like, cause again, you know, I get, you know, the 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 were all 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? Yeah. Well, you know, there were folks who built, you know, these tech stacks and they said, we'll just, we'll be able to answer it all and we'll know everything. You know, it didn't really play out that way. And certainly now some of the changes that have occurred in tech and, you know, some of the questions calling into, you know, a question, you know, whether cookies are, you know, privacy, all kinds of different things, I think has shown us that there isn't an easy fix for attribution.

23:18There'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, I don't want to call them colleagues, but we have people who are trying to use synthetic respondents, which by the way, that means not a real human, in case anybody didn't know. Artificial. Artificial, not real, fake, to essentially answer research surveys. And 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.

24:05It just doesn't. And so I think that 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. How to small brands, you know, I know that the techniques and online have probably brought the scale. I mean, I just remember what it costs. You know, I haven't been in a focus group in 12 years, but like it was, it's expensive, you know, like research and stuff. So, but how to, I mean, I guess the online equations probably made it more attainable, but it has.

24:55Yeah. Yeah. So a couple, a couple of thoughts on that. So my mentor, you mentioned yours, my mentor was a guy named John Ross, who was, had been the CMO at Home Depot and he oversaw Home Depot's growth, you know, the biggest growth, um, you know, of its development. Right. Um, and I learned a lot from him around how I think about research and retail and shopping. We wrote a book together, um, called fire in the zoo, which is all about the difficulty of selling at retail and, um, and all that kind of stuff. And, you know, he used to do, so they had, you know, every imagine, you know, they had Deloitte, they had all every consultant in the world was working for Home Depot at the time.

25:36Every 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, you know, 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?

26:13And 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. So 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. Okay. Yeah. And today clients do that methodology at scale when they're trying to figure out where is everyone going for information?

26:48Where should I be? I don't have billions of dollars. I have to choose between TikTok and Google or podcasts and, you know, Google search. What should I do? So, you know, 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 ,000,$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. And, you know, OK, 30 people, that's not the same as a thousand.

27:30But 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. Yeah, I remember that. Is a random question. 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. Mm hmm. 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? Is there something? As a marketing tactic. Yeah, just marketing, you know, maybe it's a channel.

28:18And I mean, so what might it be? I mean, honestly, podcasts are pretty amazing. We've been tracking podcasts for 15 years. And for a long time, it was like they were down there with the dust bunnies. Nobody used them. They weren't driving influence. And now we see that they are widely used, I would say, by about 30 % to 40 % of the population. So there's people that don't use them. Fine. But, you know, 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.

29:03But consumers tell us that they do not penalize brands if something I mean, 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. Oh, talking with Devorah. She is the research poet. Devorah, back to this attribution game, who does get the credit? I mean, like, how do we answer that what 50 % is working or not working? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there's some really great, you know, speaking about podcasts, right? There's a lot of podcasters that use codes and that kind of thing that gives you an opportunity to know what's working.

29:49We'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. And that's not going to be good for consumers or brands, but that's an aside. I think you have to live with some level of uncertainty. You're never going to know everything. You just never will. But you can find out a lot. Let's say you're, you know, 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?

30:28And we only talk to people who actually made the purchase. So these aren't intenders. 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, we take note. Or like 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.