Introduction: Understanding Consumer Insights
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 517 of The Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy in today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Devorah Rogers, Chief Strategy Officer of Alter Agents.
Melina Palmer: Ready?
Melina Palmer: Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to The Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello everyone.
Melina Palmer: My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business Podcast. If you work in marketing or consumer insights today, you have a lot of options as you consider the best way to reach potential customers. How do you know which ones are the right ones or that you’re asking the right questions to reach and appeal to them? Which tests should you be running? Given that we all have limited time, budget and other resources, when is it worth jumping into application and when is it better to slow down? Today’s guest, Devorah Rogers and I will be discussing this and more on today’s episode.
Meet Devorah Rogers: A Leader in Consumer Insights
Melina Palmer: Devorah is one of the most influential voices in consumer insights today, shaping how brands from Netflix to Pepsi, TikTok and Waymo understand and influence shopper behavior. As Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents, Devorah designs research studies to solve the toughest brand challenges, leading three times brand growth, and is part of an exciting revolution in research called agile neuroscience testing that uses biometrics and AI to reveal subconscious consumer reactions in real time. Shopper insights and strategy have been Devorah’s passion for 15 years, during which time she has worked with top brands like Snapchat, Activision, Nespresso, Bose and Schwab. She’s also the brains behind the methodology used by Google for their groundbreaking ZMOT research. Whether it’s decoding consumer choice, the rise of shopper promiscuity, or how brands can future proof their strategies, Devorah goes beyond surface level data to tap into how people buy, why they switch brands, and what companies must do to stay ahead. She has co-authored Retail and Shopping Insights books like Fire in the Zoo and Influencing Shopper Decisions and her TEDx on the future of Shopping Retail, which I highly recommend has nearly 300,000 views. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show, notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Devorah and myself, and more. It’s all within the app you’re listening to and at, thebrainybusiness.com/517.
Interview: Devorah Rogers on Her Journey into Research
Melina Palmer: Now let’s jump right in. Devorah Rogers, welcome to The Brainy Business Podcast.
Devorah Rogers: Thanks so much for having me, Melina.
Melina Palmer: Yes, I am very excited to be chatting with you today about. I guess it’s a version of questions and answers. It’s kind of one of my favorite things to be thinking about problems in new ways. Ah, before we get into kind of the meat, of that though, can you share a little bit about, yourself and the work that you do for everyone who does not yet know you?
Devorah Rogers: Sure. so I’m Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents. We are a woman, owned, independently owned research firm, fully remote, which is awesome. and we work with all kinds of brands, big and small. Tech companies, retail companies, CPG companies, you name it. And we do quantitative, qualitative, and neuroscience research.
Melina Palmer: Perfect. And so how did you get into this work and knowing that you have an interest in this area?
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, it was very fortuitous and unexpected. I thought I was going to work in television and film. I met my husband working on, The Apprentice on the night shift of post-production. I worked writing and producing for Home and Garden television. and then I was like, you know what? There’s not enough room for the two of us to both be working in television. This seems like not a good idea. So I got into tech. That led one thing to another. and I ended up working at a media lab that, we had a new president come in and say, it’s all fine and good for you guys to talk about what’s happening with new media and research articles online and then see stuff about it. We need our own research. And so I was like, okay, like, I’ll help. and what ended up happening is that he had a real vision for what he wanted to do, which ended up kind of being the basis of the Zero Moment of Truth work we later did. And I knew how to tell stories. And so, like, unbeknownst to me and the plans that I thought I would have for my life, I became a researcher.
Melina Palmer: Hm. And for everyone who is not familiar with Zero Moment of Truth, can you share just a little bit about what that is? Because it’s one of those things that you’ll hear. People will hear it and be like, oh, that’s where that came from. Like, this is one of those, like, really big deals that doesn’t get talked about as much anymore. I’m sure it’s different for you because you worked on it. So you Talk about it a lot. but I think it’s something that has influenced so much and people don’t understand how kind of pivotal this was.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, so this was one of the early examples of a rising tech company saying we need to use research, thought leadership to convince our clients that we’re not going to just make a sales deck. We’re going to really do the research, make the case. And Google liked some of the work that we were doing at the lab. We called it pre-shopping. I cannot take credit for the great name, you know, like, why I don’t have like a trillion dollars in my pocketbook. And they do. but they liked the idea that we were looking at what happened before people were buying and they were having. And Jim Lecinski, who was the VP at Google at the time, talks about this. he and I have had many conversations about it over the years. He, was looking for a way to give his sales team something that they could really put in front of clients that would convince them because clients didn’t believe people would ever actually look things up on the Internet and, and then later buy them.
Melina Palmer: And like, by the way, obviously, that.
Devorah Rogers: Is not that it was like under 15 years ago. Do you know?
Melina Palmer: Amazing. It’s. Yeah. How, how we shift.
Devorah Rogers: Right, right. And, and the whole idea behind ZMOT that I think is the most enduring is for so many years the way that brands and agencies evaluated success was through these traditional mediums. Right. So they had their info from their TV, investments, they had their radio, so they had like their traditional stu. But they didn’t really know how to measure social because that was totally just emerging, you know, they didn’t know how to make sense of what was happening on retailer sites like Amazon. How do you. What value does a user review have? Like, and so there was no single continuum to allow them to say this is making a difference and this isn’t. And that was. It’s kind of weird that that like, wasn’t happening, but it wasn’t.
Melina Palmer: Well, and I mean, these days now it’s like, how do you actually prove value in radio or TV ads? It feels. And billboards, it feels like so much harder to prove anything that’s in that, like traditional media now that we have online tracking and all the things that happen behind the scenes. So it’s kind of funny to see the way that that all kind of shifts.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, no doubt.
Melina Palmer: yeah. And so as you think about, you know, the pre-shopping or things that happen, we, we all now know, like, well, that’s kind of everything that matters.
Devorah Rogers: Yes, everything. Everything.
Melina Palmer: Like, I guess there’s something that happens after, but you know, it’s, it, that’s just the path to the next path purchase in, in so many ways. Right.
The Importance of Asking the Right Questions
Melina Palmer: And so how have you like taken those learnings? Like, and some of the questions, I guess, like knowing whether you bring us into an idea with a, a different client that you’ve been working with over the years or kind of back to that, initial process. But there have, there has to be a lot of time allowed for asking those questions, right? For being thoughtful and you know, what ifs and whys and how might we’s, you know. So, have you always loved questions or did it just sort of come.
Devorah Rogers: You know, it’s, that’s a really good question. I have a 10 year old now who asks me so many questions because I like that. And I actually don’t think that I was quite at her level of questions. Like, you know, when she was like four, she was like, so how did Christianity spread across the globe? And I was like, we’re Jewish, I have no idea. Like, but so, I don’t know, maybe it was in me. I was a journalist though, though before. And so certainly journalists are curious, right? And you want to know why and how. And so I think I was drawn first to sort of what problem are we trying to solve? That, that just interests me. How do you, I don’t know, how do you solve problems? I’m, I’m a. I don’t know if you’ve ever done the, the Strength Finder exercise, but I’m a maximizer. And so I really love the idea of taking something that’s like okay and then maybe making it better, which is not great for personal relationships. If you try to go around saving everyone around you just as a side note, but is great in research because you’re like, okay, this is good, but like it’s not great yet. What would have made it great? and then I love telling stories, but I didn’t end up working in television or radio, which I started my career in. And so I feel like the two of those together have made, made me good at what I do.
Melina Palmer: Oh, yeah, for sure. And just that approach, like so few people spend enough time thinking about the problem. It’s something I talk about all the time.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: And so I know for my own clients and for people that I interview on the show, it just comes up all the time. And that’s where I tell people, you really should focus on spending time asking better questions because it’s way too easy to come up with the right answer to the wrong question. but I know that this then leads to, well, how do I know that I found the right question? How much time do I spend asking questions, how to section them, things like that. And so, you know, you and I have talked a little bit about kind of putting some of this together and you work with a lot of different clients and have over the years and helping to answer kind of the questions you can’t Google in that way for companies. Right. which is what most of businesses should be working on. Things that don’t have those real easy answers.
Segmentation and Defining Your Competition
Melina Palmer: Can you share a little bit about the types of questions that you’ve worked with some clients on and those results kind of like why they matter and then we’ll get into kind of the framework that you put together here.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, gosh, I mean truly, like I wish somebody at some point would like invite me to a party, serve me insanely good wine and then just ask me that question and then let me talk for like ten hours.
Melina Palmer: And go. You can, we’ll improvise your wine. You’re on.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, it’s the, it’s the rich. It’s the best part of what I get to do. Right. Somebody trusts me enough that they bring us a question that they cannot easily answer via Google or even ChatGPT, and they ask us to help them figure out how to, how to do that, like and to confirm it’s the right question.
Devorah Rogers: I’ll start with one that comes up again and again and again, which is segmentations. So clients do segmentations when they want to understand, you know, who their different audiences are and who they should pay attention to and who they can sort of deprioritize. You know, it’s essentially a mix of art and science, a lot of science, but the art really matters. And we come up with, you know, four, five, six, seven max. Like I tend not to do more than eight segments that, that just starts to be hard to keep track of. But you could, and we say, okay, we’re, you know, we ask these bipolar questions where we force people to make these trade offs that are hard. Like if I said to you, well, do you like reading or do you like, you know, taking walks like that might be hard if you like to do both. And you have to choose one. And and so it helps us force these, these sort of uncomfortable questions that allow us to get deep into the psychographics of people that we’re talking to. Okay, so that’s kind of how the segmentation works. But the issue with the segmentation is that you have to know what category you are studying. And to know what category you’re studying, you have to know what category you’re in, and you have to know who your competitors are. And that sounds super easy. You’re like, okay, well, we sell home improvement. We sell decking options like, you know, Fiberon, or Trex, whatever. so that’s. That’s what we do. And it’s like, well, okay, so are you competing with other decking companies or are you competing with other outdoors brands? Are you. What are you competing with? You know, brands that sell easy ways to make, indoor porches? I don’t know. We don’t know what you’re competing with. And it’s. If you make your category too small, then there’s not enough room for you to grow. If you make it too big, then you’re talking to everybody. And so segmentations are the one where. And we just had this with a client in the. In the greeting card space. And it would have been easy for them to say, well, we’ll just do a greeting card segmentation. And we did. But one thing that we looked out for was, what else is happening in the category? Do you send flowers instead of a card? Do you send a cake instead of. And so what is the real competition you’re up against? and another client we’re working with right now, it’s a gaming. A casino client. And I asked the CEO. We had a great chat. And I said, as part of stakeholder interviews, which we really always try to do before we do segmentations, because you just get so much clarity on what really needs to happen. And so I said, well, what category are you in? And he said, we’re not in the gaming category. We’re in the mid-tier entertainment category. We’re the place that if you can’t afford to take your family to Disneyland because it’s just too expensive, you could come and take one of your adult children to the casino to play some cards.
Melina Palmer: M. Absolutely.
Melina Palmer: I am, so glad to hear this conversation. Right. And knowing that, so taking, like, some steps back to my previous life, where I was running, a marketing department for a financial institution, and people would be coming in and they’re, like, talking about my competition. And it’s like, it’s other credit unions and banks and like, that’s it. And when you’re thinking about auto loans, like, that’s all there is. Like, no, it’s not, right? Like, that’s obviously not just who the competition is. Like, I need to know what’s happening at the dealership, right? I need to know what’s going on at the, you know, now Carvana and all these other things. I need to know what’s happening with Uber. I need to know what’s going on in other public transit. Like, there are so many other things. And smart car, you know, with the rideshare type, whatever. Like, there are so many other things that people may do instead of buying a car. That’s important to know when you think about that, right? And if. If we’re not thinking about those things, like, you’re going to be left behind so many people that you get the blank stare of, what are you talking about? That doesn’t matter. Like, it’s super matters. it’s really important to know those things, right?
Beyond the Product: Understanding the “Job to Be Done”
Melina Palmer: And so as you were talking about the decking company, I’m also thinking like, okay, so decking has to do with am I going to have the party here or are we going to go somewhere else and just rent a space for the day? Because it’s too expensive to, like, I don’t feel like investing in that. And then I have to clean my house and I have all these other.
Devorah Rogers: Problems that come up 100%. It’s. What is the risk of getting it wrong? What’s at stake? In fact, early in my career, we use this example of a case, a cake mix case study. Okay, so cake mix is like a very. You know, it’s like 299. Like, this is not. Maybe less. It’s not expensive. It’s become essentially generally accepted that cake mix is as good or better than homemade cakes in many cases. Right. That they got it down. And so we. We did this study and we looked at it, and what we found is that people were doing a lot of research into cake mix. And it’s like, why would they. $1.99, $2.99, like, why? You know, and this is not a complex category. It’s not new. It’s been. I mean, maybe like 40 years ago, people would have been like, is it really good? But like, no question about that now, what we found is that it wasn’t the freaking cake mix. It was getting your kids party wrong. It was screwing up the cake at your kid’s fifth birthday party, which will never Happen again.
Melina Palmer: Right. And the cake is such a, like, ah, moment. Right. As you, like, bring in the cake. We’re already talking to my three year old about, you know, his birthday cake and what he wants. and his birthday is five months away.
Devorah Rogers: Coming out of ours. The cake was the dress.
Melina Palmer: Oh, I’ve seen that one. Do you have the one that, where you like, put all the, like this is where things like Instagram and Pinterest have ruined us all. Right. But like, you put the cellophane around and it’s filled with all this stuff and then you lift it and it changes the dress as the, like, the soft frosting, like, comes down. It’s full of glitter and stuff. you couldn’t have known that. My favorite, my, like, I guess my guilty pleasure of things I like to watch on Instagram is like cake decorating videos. So that’s my favorite.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah. And that’s a great example too. Like, it’s not random that, like, that’s a hobby that you have. Right. And so if you’re going to make a decision around a cake for your kid, that’s an input right into how, like, you’re going to look at Instagram, you’re going to look at Pinterest, you’re not just doing all the other things. And so where you land is anyone’s guess.
Melina Palmer: Yeah. And in this, you know, so the cake’s not just a cake. The right mix isn’t the only thing that matters. And you know, people are kind of swinging around and where you want the cake mix, but you’re gonna add in some of your, own spices or you’re gonna mix different things together. you know, try to be able to share those experiences too.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: so that is, and then that’s getting into this, you know, intrinsic motivation. We’ve got some hurting social proof instincts coming in of whether people are going to want to see it. What are people going to think of me? Am I a good, caring parent? Which is more than just like, well, this one’s 299 and this one’s 289. So which one should I get?
Devorah Rogers: Right, exactly.
Tailoring Research to Business Problems and Stakeholders
Melina Palmer: So now for this, client, let’s say, so we understand some of those things, that there’s more to it. The category is bigger than we thought. is this a point where people kind, of mentally shut down and try to run away?
Devorah Rogers: No, usually they’re really delighted. I actually had a client who they are one of the larger home builders in the country and their VP of insights. He. He. I got. I got like a cryptic email that was like, we want to talk to you. And so I figured that they were going to brief me on. We were going to do a call and I was going to get briefed on the RFP. Instead, they started the call and they were like, future of housing in America. Go. And I was like, wait, am I the RFP? Like, am I the proposal right now, live? And they were like, yeah, go. And, I mean, it was. It was great fun, but, you know, so how do you answer a question like that, right? You’ve got the CMO, you’ve got the VP of insights for this, you know, really amazing org that builds tons of homes. They have a really cool value proposal. it’s a little bit different than their competitors. How do I talk, to them about what questions we should ask with a question that large? So what I did on the spot was I said, okay, I said, let’s just for a moment play futurist. The world is changing. We’re in this. We’re still in. At the time, we were still in the COVID pandemic. People are moving. It looks like some people, although this has changed back again, but can work remotely. people are. Are having parents live longer, so they may need homes that are bigger. and so I just like, kind of went futurist and ide. And that’s. Ideation is also one of my top strengths. So I just like, kind of ideated with them. And I was like, okay, that’s all interesting, cool stuff, and it will impact your business and climate, et cetera. But, like, what problem are you trying to solve today? And they were again, very crypt. And they’re like, you know, like, do better marketing. And I was like, okay, so what we did is I just went through essentially a decision tree and I said, well, do you know who your audience is? No, not really. Okay. How. What research have you done before? Well, we’ve done some internal research among people we already have. And I said, oh, that’s interesting. So right now you’re not really talking to people you don’t have. So you’re limiting your growth because you’re only talking to people who. And honestly, the people that answer those surveys tend to be happier. So then you don’t hear from the people, because once people churned folks, they bail. They’re not interested in your freaking surveys, right? So you’re getting this very biased view of what’s happening from this very small audience. And so we. We confirmed that they needed a whole new research approach that they had only been talking to people that they already had. We confirmed that they had never done major qualitative work, so they didn’t even know, like, what questions to ask. And so I said, well, given we don’t know what we don’t know, we’ve got to start with a little bit of qual to just kind of wrap our arms around this audience, figure out what homeowners and realtors think of what’s occurring in the space. So we ended up going down that path first, had amazing conversations with folks, you know, both consumers and realtors. And then we ultimately did. We. We decided then to do a segmentation and, that loop that we did the segmentation and that revealed that there was a whole audience that they were not aware of, actually like two or three. and they began building their offering around that. And then we did message testing to verify and validate what, they should say to them. And so that was kind of the. The process that emerged from that first. And in the end, they didn’t actually want to do all of that innovative futurist research, but they wanted to know that I could think big enough that we could build towards that. And so that was. That was how that went.
Melina Palmer: I love that. And it’s so important to eat. Like you said, that’s a. That can be wasting time to be talking about something that’s way too far in the future if you’re not, if you just are going to kind of daydream about what’s out there. But if you know kind of the general direction that you want to be headed, right where you can say, well, we could go this way, this way, or this way. Like, what future would we like to be creating and how can we be shaping toward that thing? And that can help inform your messages in this, like, where you’re looking, looking to go and influence and a future.
Melina Palmer: You would like to see.
Melina Palmer: And. But if you don’t think about it and just are so myopic about how do we get more customers tomorrow, how do we make our marketing better, which is like, better than what? Better than everybody else? Better than what you’re doing today, like, there’s a whole bunch of. That’s, too vague what we’re trying to do. so. But having that idea and knowing you’re kind of on that same philosophical page in that space of creative thinking is pretty cool and a good way to be vetting, you know, vendors and things. One of the things you and I had talked about that helped to decide how we were going to set up this conversation today. Was also looking at all the tools that marketers and insights teams and organizations in general really have at their disposal. Now as we start looking into, you know, should I be looking at, you know, implicit bias or should I be testing like it’s not just traditional qual and quant anymore. Right. So, we were talking a bit about different tools that you use and helping people to evaluate, you know, what they might need at various levels in their questioning process and what they could test. can you kind of, kick us off in that conversation?
Strategic Research: What Problem Are You Solving?
Devorah Rogers: Yeah. So this is the conversation I have most frequently. I mean we have many, most of our clients return regularly so it changes over time. But for new clients, frequently the place we start is what’s, what business problem are you trying to solve? You know, and what, what are you going to do with this once you are done? Who’s going to use it? Is it marketing that’s going to use it? Is it product? I mean that right there, just who’s going to use it? Where do they sit in the org? Because what if it’s going to, if it’s going to the CEO very, different than what the chief product officer and his team or her team needs. Very different than what the marketing team needs. And so early on we want to understand, like, what are the, what’s the information going to do for your business? What do you hope? Like in an ideal world, I often will ask when we kick off calls with clients, either in the proposal process or once we’ve earned the project, like, what does success look like for you? What will need to be true? Like, what will be happening if I was a fly on the wall six months from now, what will be true? So we start there and that is often very illuminating. So a client came to us recently, we’re not yet working with them because they’re a little bit nervous about the tariffs. So they’re waiting to see what’s going to happen. But they acquired another business. They’re in the sort of home improvement adjacent space and they acquired another business and they, they don’t really know what to do with it, which happens more than you could imagine. Right. and so we said, actually you’re not ready for, for, you’re not ready for research. We need to do some digging first. We need to look at third party data. We need to, we do a process called muraling where we just look at everything we can get our hands on we tag things and we ultimately determine what, what does the, what is the market already saying about this category? And that then determines if it makes sense to go talk to consumers. so those are kind of the strategic, high level questions that we start. I often will ask clients too, like, how does your organization consume data? Do they like reports? Do they like visuals? Do they like neat, nice, neat five point bullets that are like, this is the tldr. so we usually start there and then, you know, and then there’s questions around context, like, well, have you done research before? Like a really, really important question is what are internal hypotheses? we’ll actually even do a hypothesis generation workshop when we do segmentations that we say, well, if, when we’re done with this, what do you think the different segments will be? Just, you know, and it’s really interesting because sometimes a brand will think that their segments are going to be all women. By the way, men are doing an increasing amount of housekeeping and child rearing. And so, you know, I, I go nuts when I hear a CPG brand refer to all of their consumers as she. I’m like, please let me die now. You know, so, you know, we’ll want to understand what, what, what do you kind of think is going on? and then, you know, and then we want to understand like, well, who are the stakeholders who are going to consume this research? Are they ornery? You know, what are their priorities? And we’ll sometimes do stakeholder interviews because you start to see very different things come out. And so, for example, we just did some stakeholder interviews for this casino that we’re working with. And you know, as you can imagine, the CEO and COO had a very different viewpoint than the shift bosses. You know, and the shift bosses didn’t want to say too much, but you know, they were like, it’s this, you know, you know, kind of under their breath. Right? So that tells me a lot. That tells me, okay, I’m getting insight into what’s, what’s happening. And then we got to go down the logistic path, like, okay, well, who’s your target audience? Because there are times where target audiences are very hard to reach. You know, if you’re just trying to sell consumers avocados, okay, fine. You know, especially in California, I mean, we eat, a lot of, Everyone eats avocados, basically, right? But if you’re selling, I don’t know, some random widget that goes into, you know, a door frame, you know, and we’ve done work like that. Who, who’s the audience and how do I find them? we, we’ve talked to construction workers who have, storage boxes in their truck. Right. So that’s very different from, you know, or, or, or advertisers who sell like something super. Like they have a very, very random piece of the pie in the advertising business. So we have to determine how hard is that audience to reach and can we reach them quantitatively? Meaning is there enough of them that we can get to that we could talk to a thousand? Cool. If not, we might have to do qualitative, we might have to find them through other means, and we can’t reach a thousand of them. So this then gets into like, okay, who’s the audience? How do we get to them? Because in research everything is based on how hard is it to reach the audience you want to reach? And how many of them are you going to be able to get to through traditional means? and do we need to establish quotas? Do we need a certain number of men and women? Do we need a certain number of managers versus, you know, executives? and so that all determines the mechanics that we ultimately deploy. Yes. In my, I have clients that come to me frequently and they’re like, we want to do quantitative research. We want, we want to interview 5,000 people. And you’re like, okay, please hold. I cannot reach 5,000 people that you want to talk to on the budget that you have. Yeah, and with the level of incidents that they are, it’s not happening. so sometimes those are hard conversations. we do, I mean, we can reach pretty niche groups, but sometimes you have to adjust your methodology, you know, and then it’s like, well, what’s the purpose for this? Like, are you trying to demonstrate that a campaign is working? Like that AR augmented reality should be part of your campaigns. Are you trying to grow your business? Are you trying to add a new segment? Are you trying to compete? What are you ultimately trying to do? And that, and then that’ll determine also the methodology. Because sometimes you do research not only for your own knowledge, but for theater.
Devorah Rogers: Right. In your organization, maybe people don’t believe something or they have hard firm beliefs that something is true. And somebody’s like, I don’t think that’s true, but I gotta show them. and so then you might want to do focus groups where you have videos, or you might want to do ethnographies where you’re filming them in their homes. You know, so it really depends what’s at stake for the team that ultimately needs this research.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely.
Storytelling and Unexpected Insights in Research
Melina Palmer: And so just for that, the theater or the pageantry piece of it.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: I think that’s where a lot of that storytelling comes in and remembering that the truth is not enough. and what is true anyway in so many cases here. But to say like, so many things can be true at the same time and because of confirmation bias and trying to go in and say you’re wrong and I’m wrong. Right. And you better get on board with that, like, that is just never going to work. That’s a really, really hard sell to make. And even just sharing the, those stories with the customer, facing interviews, if you don’t lay the right groundwork before that, people are going to pick up on that key insight that matters that I spoke with someone recently who was talking about, you know, this terrible experience that happened where there were a bunch of people who were stuck on a cruise ship and then the. It was like stuck in a port and they couldn’t, or they couldn’t get off the ship for months or something and people weren’t listening. And then after, you know, of course that the cruise company gave them all in, like, sorry that this happened to you. Here’s 20% off your next cruise with us.
Devorah Rogers: So bad.
Melina Palmer: Something along those lines. Ah, like not even free or like anything else. Right.
Melina Palmer: And people saying like, they weren’t listening and I was complaining about this or.
Melina Palmer: That and it was, you know, unpleasant things in the, coming up through the floor. I mean, very horrible experience in this. And the, the executive team is hearing this and like, I can’t believe anyone would do that to their customers. Of course we would listen to our people. And then, and then the executive showed their client feedback of like, I just wish they would listen because I’ve been trying to say this and then it’s like again and again and then they get it.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: Because you started with this potentially unrelated, like unrelated story, but you can find the thread to help make the case to then get people to say, okay, it’s time, like, let’s make that change. So, I think just that understanding, like you said, what you’re going to use it for and why it would matter. But if you don’t know that, what you might need to be convincing someone of when you go gather the research and who would matter and what they care about, then you just might have lost an opportunity to make the case to do any of the real work. Yeah, that matters.
Devorah Rogers: I’ll give you an example. Brady the Gun Safety Org, they Reached out to us a couple years ago and we did a comprehensive study. The initial goal of the study was they wanted to know if take actions, not sides was an effective tagline. But they also understood that this was a unique opportunity to maybe get some other insights, kind of get a, a better sense of gun owners in particular. And so one thing that was unique was we had more. It was basically a gun owner study. Not sort of half, and half it was really focused around gun owners. And then the non-gun owners were just to give us kind of some context. And so we did this assignment where we had these sample copy. But unexpectedly something really crazy happened in the data where every time we had the word responsible it was featured in one of the concepts. But we had also used it elsewhere like several times during the survey. Not intentionally. And every time the word responsible was used, gun owners and non-gun owners had 80 to 95% agreement. And so what it, we later wrote a whole paper about it. because when Uvalde happened Brady was like we can’t focus on this right now. But they let us, along with the Gun Safety Alliance publish the paper. And what we, you know what is so neat is when a client is willing, when you uncover something you weren’t expecting, especially in this case, this related to public health and safety. Right. They let us run with it and really share this unexpected finding. And I do think it’s important for clients to recognize that anytime you do research you are talking to humans. We work, you know, very hard to talk to real authentic humans and you don’t know what you’re going to find. You just, you just don’t know. And it’s why I’m so anti synthetic data because all that can do is repeat something that’s already been established and maybe something that’s likely to be said. But humans surprise you. And that’s why research is so amazing. Because they do and say things that you might, might never ever expect. Did we expect that we were going to have 95% of gun owners tell us that gun safety is the responsibility of gun owners? We didn’t think we were going to see that. And so you want to be ready to find out things that you, you know, didn’t expect. And, and that I think that’s, that’s a sign of a really good client when they’re like oh, I wasn’t expecting this, but this is really cool.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, that is, and, and being, being open to asking those big types of questions. And so it’s, but it’s a Mix of. I think that often, like, what I hear from clients is it’s like, too vague, too big of like, we need more clients, we need this thing to be more effective. but it’s. It’s just not a narrowed enough question of what it is that they’re trying to find an answer to. That it can be very difficult to run a test for.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Advice for New CMOs: Prioritizing Research and Impact
Melina Palmer: So if we had, let’s say there’s a new CMO who’s put into a position, and they’re told you’ve got six or 12 months, maybe they’re lucky, they’ve got two years or something to prove, to prove their worth right. Within the organization. What’s the advice, for that CMO that’s trying to, like in this way. Well, responsible is in my brain now because of what we were just saying, but to like, be a good steward of the funds that they have, if they can only invest in one or two key projects that are going to be able to show that there’s value, to find an answer to something, to move the needle a little bit, you know, knowing that it will vary from industry and whatnot. But, you know, what sort of advice might you give to them if they can invest in, like, one type of research, one sort of project, you know, what. What would they look at?
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, it’s a great question. The first thing I would ask is like, are you on the same page as the CEO in terms of where you want to take the company and what you want to do? Because that is really critical. Because if the CEO has an idea where they’re like, I don’t really believe in marketing, I believe in brand, then the marketer, the CMO, is a little bit, already kind of on a back foot. Right. And so then the CMO might need to prove. I just need to prove that there’s ROI behind this. And so that’s a very specific type of research, right? Like, okay, we’re investing, our brand is going up, right? It’s like, you know, brand tracking and brand lift research. And you, you might just need that if you have a skeptical CEO or a skeptical team, ideally the CEO and the CMO. Ideally, let’s just say the CEO is like, I trust you. You’re amazing. Here’s. Let’s just say they give you 150k because I feel like I need a number to work with. Okay. And there isn’t a lot of research or the research that’s been done just feels like, you know, it’s like, not great, you know, and nobody’s inspired by it or it’s old. That’s very common.
Devorah Rogers: The first thing I would do is say what do you know about your, your customers and your category? And depending on how much they know and if they’ve done, if they haven’t done a segmentation, one of the first things many CMOs should do is have that segmentation because that, that helps them narrow against everything else that’s going to be in their remit. Who do you target? Where do you target? What are they interested in? What should you say? So the segmentation, I would say is one of the most foundational things that any CMO should do. And if you only have, it’s hard because segmentations can take four months. But what you can do, and this is what I would recommend is let’s say you have 150,000. Well, segmentation usually takes around 80 to 80. You know, you can do it a little bit cheaper than 80, it can cost a little bit closer to 100. But let’s just say for you know, our sake here that it’s 90k is going to be the segmentation. And but the organization’s like, I can’t wait for insights four months from now. And the organization’s like, then what I would say is start the work with qualitative, do mobile ethnographies, do in-depth interviews, do focus groups, whatever you can afford. And let’s say out of that 150, you’ve got 60k, which you can do like six focus groups for six for under 60k. You can talk to 35 consumers with mobile ethnographies. Do that, get some insights, start getting your organization ready and primed to really empathize and listen to consumers. That’s sort of your theater that sort of, you’re like, give them some red meat and, and prepare them and then say. So like you, you go in, you say, here’s the call. Which you know that can be done in four weeks, right? All right guys, here’s what we learned. Here’s what people are wanting, here’s some real videos. And so create that empathy. And then you enter late, leave early. So you leave them wanting more. And you say, now the next step we’re going to do is a segmentation. I’m going to talk to all of you guys or I’m going to have my research team talk to all of you guys so that we get all of your input. Don’t worry, it’ll be included and we’re going to quantify what we just saw. Here and then we’ll know which of these folks to go after. That’s if. If in, in most cases, I would say 75% of cases, new CMOs, that’s the right path for them.
Melina Palmer: Hm. And in that way, being able to show that you have some, you have some thoughtfulness.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: So we’ve got also a good pacing in this idea of. I think it’s pretty common, like you’re saying this idea that we have some qual to like open our brain a little bit and we’ve got the quant. Even though you started the one before you started the other, it doesn’t have to be shared in that way, but that’s just how those stack up.
Devorah Rogers: Right.
Melina Palmer: and helping people to think big and then say, and don’t worry, we’re already working on how we’re going to be using this and maybe that gives you some sort of a Runway. So if we’ve invested all of our money in this way in, you know, who we’re talking to and kind of what they care about, then what’s the tangible thing of where we got some lift on an ad? Or like, how do we use that? and let’s say, well, we’ll start there, we’ll start with that. How do we use that? Maybe we got some more budget, if that’s required in this case. But like, you know, what’s that kind of. Or a company that has those things done.
Melina Palmer: Right.
Melina Palmer: So what comes next after that?
Devorah Rogers: Yeah, I never feel slimier as a researcher than when I’m presenting, you know, a big report that a client has spent a lot of money on. And I’m like, so next, I would recommend. And I always say it with a caveat, I’m like, I’m sorry, let me put on my car salesman hat for a second. Because you could get, I could get you these tinted windows. So in that scenario, ideally, you’ve. You do an activation session with all the teams. You get them excited because the first, like, it’s not worth spending any more money if you can’t get the team interested in this first 150k of data. And certainly the segmentation. Let’s say you don’t even do the qual. Let’s say you go right to the segmentation. You’ve got to get the team on board. Board with what it means. Because it’s going to. It should. If it’s good, it’ll inform messaging, it’ll inform who to focus on. So turns out we don’t need to go after 100 of the market. We need to go after 35%. These are the big time, you, know, kind of, evangelical, you know, sort of evangelists, you know, that are gonna just. They’re gonna do a lot of work on our behalf. We have to go after them, but they’re only 15%, so they’re not going to push our business forward. And then here’s this other segment, and we can find them in, in, in these places or in these stores or on these shows. And you, if you, ideally, if you already have done some creative, you know, you. You just run with that because at least you’re meeting them where they are. If you have the opportunity to do a little bit more creative message testing, like with that extra budget, that might be nice. but the big thing is just start meeting those people where they are. And based on what they need and what one segment need might be like, I just want to have confidence that this exercise bike is actually going to do it for me. Okay. This segment, and they live over here. We need to give them confidence. This segment wants to be celebrated, gamified, whatever. Fine, go do that. and so, you know, in an ideal world, after that segmentation, you might get another 120k over two years that you could continue qual. You could, do some A/B testing. You could. Then the nice thing about segmentation is it leaves you with an algorithm, a typing tool, and that goes into any future work. So research gets less expensive because now you can segment your audience in just like a 35, 40K if you have your own Qualtrics account. Less than that, you now have the ability to be like, I’m just going to run this really quick pulse survey. I’m going to just ask them, do they like this product? And I’ll be able to know which of my priority segments want what things done. So I would say to CMOs, make sure you get that typing tool and then make sure you give it a run, because otherwise you. You haven’t. You haven’t gotten the full value of the segmentation.
Melina Palmer: Perfect.
Neuro-Insight Tools and Future Research
Melina Palmer: And so kind of a last thing here as we go to, you know, close out our conversation for today, knowing we haven’t even, you know, touched on the 10 hours of time that we were having over this glass of wine. Right. We’ll do that next time.
Devorah Rogers: it’s neuroscience.
Melina Palmer: Right? That’s what I was gonna say. So as we have this neuroscience piece, and there are so many tools and things that are available, and different. Some of these things to be Looking at. Do you have some favorite types of tools, some things that maybe, you know, in the, like, don’t do this one yourself or whatever else. Just some of those tips for people.
Devorah Rogers: Yeah. So first my. My red flags. The things I don’t do. I was a kid with epilepsy. I do not put EEGs, on consumers. Won’t do it. Made that promise at 10 years old, not doing it. I do not put consumers in MRIs. It’s not a pleasant experience for anybody who’s done it. I’m not doing it. It’s expensive and it’s. I can’t work with that. So those two out automatically. We, do some eye tracking. Eye tracking can be good, but it generally tells you what you might have guessed. That everyone’s looking at the big glitter thing on the right look. They’re looking at the big thing that everyone’s looking at. We, are playing with a little facial coding. But typically, we have been very hesitant around facial coding because, honestly, there’s not as much proof as I would like that facial coding actually is linked to any kind of future action. and so we wrote in our book Influencing Shopper Decisions, a, whole chapter on neuroscience. And in that, we talk about why we’re not fans of facial coding. GSR is another one. Galvanic skin response. I understand why clients use it, but I find it not reliable. and I find it. It doesn’t give me confidence when I look at the data, I’m like, I don’t know what this means. Whereas what we love is variable heart rate. We, use a company called Immersion. There are others. and variable heart rate now has been proven to be tied to oxytocin production in the body, which means our brain is basically going, this is cool. I want this. More of this, please. Right? Like, my oxytocin goes up when I see the Eiffel Tower. Right? So I want more. I want to go back. Right. and that’s what you want to create as a brand with your message and your brand and your experiences. This is cool. More, please. And so we can measure that. We can measure it in grocery stores, we can measure it at events, we can measure it online. We can measure it through mobile phones. and. And that gets really fun. And you can combine it with qual and quant. And we’re doing it for a health care, pharma company right now in, the rare disease category. And it’s just so powerful to have five different types of creative and have Brains choose unstated the one they want. It’s great. It’s great.
Melina Palmer: Love it.
Melina Palmer: And shout out to Paul, Zak and team, as he’s been a guest on the show before, talking, a little bit about immersion.
Melina Palmer: So, there’s, you know, more to that.
Melina Palmer: So perfect.
Conclusion and Recommendations
Melina Palmer: Well, as we go to wrap up the conversation, knowing, as we’ve already said, we’ve got so much, you know, this. I feel like this won’t be the last conversation we have here on the show, but as we go to wrap it up, any last thoughts? And as well, for people that are excited to be, you know, learning more about you, to follow you and your work, connect, you know, what, what’s the best path for that?
Devorah Rogers: Well, they can visit alteragents.com, they can check out our book, which is anywhere books are sold, by Kogan Page Influencing Shopper Decisions. But generally, I think the key is really, reading and learning more. You don’t have to be like a PhD to understand research. You do not. and there are people like Paul Zak, there are people like, like, Daniel Pink, right, who write these books that help us begin to understand the connections between choices that people make. And I would say just start there, Listen to a few podcasts like this, and then, you know, if you don’t have any budget, just start going into stores or start having conversations with consumers, any which way you can. And you don’t need to be a scientist. You can just start, start somewhere and then over time, get your team on board to be like, we need to pay real qualified folks. And then you call me or, you know, call somebody else. But, but, but do it right.
Melina Palmer: Perfect. Well, great advice, of course, to make sure that we’re, learning the right things, taking some time to get curious, to explore, to be thoughtful. That’s what we’re all about here at the Brainy Business. So love that.
Melina Palmer: And thank you again so much for joining me on the show. It was delightful to chat with you today.
Devorah Rogers: Thank you, Melina. So great to be with you.
Devorah Rogers’ Insights and Future Outlook
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Devorah Rogers for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, I really enjoyed talking through the different questions that you could ask and Devorah’s thoughts on what a new CMO should do as they look to prove their worth quickly in an organization which, like it or not, is very common in this role. I also really love talking about the way to consider the competition and how it’s so much bigger than what most people realize or like to think, which like it or not, is very common in this role. And I really appreciate her insights on how she has determined what type of studies that she and her team like to use and knowing that there are so many different ways to be testing safely and and in interesting and impactful ways that can help you to unlock what’s going on in those consumer minds.
Melina Palmer: To be able to see what they.
Melina Palmer: Can’t really tell you what they can’t say. with all sorts of different things.
Melina Palmer: We have lots of stuff at the.
Melina Palmer: Human Behavior Lab and I’ve featured so many different things across the show and so really appreciate her sharing a little bit of the insights of what they do at Alter Agents. I also really love talking about the way to consider consider the competition and how it is so much bigger than what most people realize or like to think. But once you start to look at your competitors in a new way, it can open up new opportunities to message and think about why your brand matters for your ideal customers. A deck isn’t just a deck. Maybe it’s the place of your retirement party. A box of cake mix isn’t just a few bucks of basic ingredients. It’s the centerpiece of your child’s birthday. What might you unlock if you think about your business, customers and competition in new ways? How might it change your approach as you look to test out new ads, copy products, services and more? Come share it with me on social media. You’ll find me as the brainy biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy as well, well as links to my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Devorah and myself, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at, thebrainybusiness.com/517. And thank you again to Devorah Rogers for joining me on the show today.
Melina Palmer: It was a delight to chat with.
Melina Palmer: And learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another brainy episode of The Brainy Business Podcast.
Melina Palmer: It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Melina Palmer: You don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
