Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Brand Loyalty Is Dying: Devora Rogers on Shopper Promiscuity and Modern Marketing

Episode Date: July 3, 2026

Ryan Alford talks with Devora Rogers, Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents, about how consumer decision-making has changed and why old marketing assumptions are not enough anymore. Devora explains ���shopper promiscuity,” the growing challenge of brand loyalty, and why consumers now use more sources of information before making purchase decisions. The episode explores the tension between brand building and performance marketing, including why brands can over-focus on bottom-of-funnel tactics while ignoring awareness, trust, and meaningful differentiation. Ryan and Devora also discuss brand narcissism, attribution myths, human research, podcasts, catalogs, and why marketers need to understand the full context behind a buying decision. Devora shares lessons from her work with Google’s Zero Moment of Truth research and explains why real people still reveal insights that AI-generated or synthetic respondents cannot. This is a practical episode for marketers, founders, and business leaders who want to understand why customers switch, what still influences buying behavior, and how brands can earn attention in a fragmented market. Topics Covered What shopper promiscuity means for brands Why brand loyalty is harder to earn today Brand building vs. performance marketing Why brand tracking can miss the bigger shopper story Attribution, attention, and why marketers still cannot measure everything Why real human research still matters The surprising influence of podcasts and catalogs Google’s Zero Moment of Truth and how buying behavior evolved Ryan Alford and Devora Rogers on the future of shopper behavior and brand strategy Links Right About Now https://www.ryanisright.com/ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/right-about-now-legendary-business-advice/id1346054199 https://open.spotify.com/show/0gy9HkTiwpAAgu1DFyIW9h Ryan Alford https://www.ryanalford.com/ https://www.instagram.com/ryanalford/ Devora Rogers / Alter Agents https://alteragents.com/ https://alteragents.com/who-we-are/devora-rogers-y/ https://alteragents.substack.com/

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No shortcuts. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to Write 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 than 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 DeVora. What's up, DeVora? 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 acting 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. would say judiciously and more and more we're moving to something we call mobile ethnographies. They've also been called self-pnographes, 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? What 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. That's the thing that just blows my mind with you doing what you do. I think about what I did years ago. The inputs felt complex, but they weren't. Now it's just like so many. 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 it. I came up in 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 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 with, though, like, I'm pretty great. Like, I'm an amazing chef. I'm really going to 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.

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 doesn't, it's narcissistic. Imagine Ryan, if you and I went out for like a little friend hanging. 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. Thank you.