From The Apprentice to Insights Leader: How Devora Rogers Helps Brands Turn Data into Growth
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Show Notes:
In this Mission Matters episode, Adam Torres interviews Devora Rogers, Chief Strategy Officer at Alter Agents, about how brands can use consumer research to unlock growth and stay connected to their audiences. From her early career in media to leading insights at a top research firm, Rogers shares lessons on the power of data, the limits of AI, and how great storytelling drives brand impact.
About Alter Agents
Alter Agents is a full-service strategic market research consultancy reimagining research in an era of shifting decision making. Deep creative thinking and innovative solutions help Alter Agents’ clients understand consumer needs. The Alter Agents team believes that research must adapt to help brands overcome challenges brought by trends like shopper promiscuity and brand narcissism. The company’s immersive approach and unique methodology has helped brands such Snapchat, YouTube, Audacy, Viking Cruises, Pinterest, and more gain powerful, actionable insights.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest in the show, just head on over to mission matters.com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, today’s guest is Devora Rogers and she’s Chief Strategy Officer over at Alter Agents Devora, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me, Adam. All right, so we got a lot to talk about today. So I definitely wanna get into what you’re doing over at Alter Agents and really talking about, you know, research and how insights can unlock growth and drive consumer engagement. But I’m curious, before we get into that, how’d you get into this business?
Like, how’d you get into thinking about research and, and consumer engagement and brand? Like where, where’d all that begin for you? Yeah, I actually began on the content side working in radio and tv. I actually worked on The Apprentice of All Things, and that’s where I met my husband. We were working on that.
Stop. Come on. I don’t have an apprentice story for this show, and I’ve done over 6,000 interviews. Go into that one just a little bit. I won’t get too personal. Don’t worry. You met your husband on The Apprentice. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah, we were both working at night. He was an assistant editor and I was just, I had a lowly job.
I had just come back from Europe where I was doing journalism and I did my Fulbright and we were working in like the Brentwood area of Los Angeles on this show called The Apprentice. I was actually on the Martha Stewart one. He was on the, the Trump one. And because Martha Stewart did a, a little stint leading the Apprentice and, mm-hmm.
So yeah, that was how we met. And later when, Trump ran for president, we had a huge number of reporters. Calling my husband and asking if the stories were true. And at the time, he was bound by an NDA, so he couldn’t say anything. Later another producer came out and was basically like, yep, there’s not great stuff.
But once the NDA started, that was how I start. I, you know, so I started in storytelling, you know, I mean, I thought I was gonna make movies or films, you know, I worked for HGTV. and so I honestly didn’t even really know about research. It wasn’t on my radar at all. I was all about journalism and, writing and but it turns out there’s a lot of commonality between what I do today and what I did then.
Then I told stories for radio or tv. Hmm. Today I tell stories for brands. But it’s using the same techniques, right? It’s okay, let’s find information. Let’s figure out what the information tells us. Let’s make sense of it. Let’s put it together in a forum that, is compelling. And you know, instead of putting it on tv, we put it into, to PowerPoint or Google Decks now.
But, you know, I mean it’s, very satisfying because. I consult with some of the world’s biggest brands and like sometimes, you know, there’ll be a product or a service that’ll launch and I’ll be like, I, that was me. I did that. Or our team, you know, not to. Oh, that’s cool. Yeah. So I, just ate, I wanna, I wanna go.
I made the, No, continue. It just happens. What? Oh, I was just gonna say, how I moved from storytelling to research is mm-hmm. You know, I just had a boss who was like, we need to prove what we’re talking about. How are we gonna do that? Mm-hmm. And of course, research was the answer. And the next thing I knew I had become a little baby researcher.
And then over the years, I realize that this is more fun than marketing. So. let’s go further, like further down that road. So why does, so as, and I don’t know if you knew this intuitively in the beginning or like how that worked for you, but why, and I don’t wanna assume anybody listening knows, but why does research matter for brands?
Yeah, so there are brands that believe that, nope, we just, we go by our gut and we know instinctively what our consumer wants. We just know, and it’s true that some brands get really lucky early on, they just think we don’t need it. But I would say that’s relatively rare. You know, most brands, even if they have a kind of an easier than usual start, meaning they didn’t fold, they.
Yeah. Still have to answer questions and understand their consumers in ways that your gut just can’t ultimately, in the long term, be effective enough at discerning. Mm-hmm. And so what research allows us to do is it allows us to stay connected to the people buying the product. It doesn’t matter if they’re consumers, it doesn’t matter if they’re B2B buyers.
At the end of the day, they are somebody who’s making a decision, right? And they have an opportunity cost. It’s their time, it’s their money, it’s, other things that they’re not gonna do. And the ability to apply research ensures that the products and services and marketing and messaging that they’re developing are going to have an impact.
And so. I obviously wouldn’t be in this business if I didn’t. I wasn’t a believer. Yeah. But it’s not uncommon that I connect with brands who haven’t done research and sometimes they get far down the path. I mean, the one that I’ll share, I haven’t shared this widely, but mm-hmm. I think I can now. a couple of years ago, Quie came to us.
Does that ring a bell? That name? Oh yeah, it does. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right. So they were, I haven’t heard in a while though, but yeah, yeah. Right, right. Exactly. So they were supposed to be the future of, television, right. That you could watch on your phone and it was mm-hmm. You know, intentionally shorter clips that fit together into a longer thing so you could have these bite-sized moments and they spent mm-hmm.
I wanna say $2 billion. I don’t know. maybe I’m getting my zeros wrong, but it was an insane amount of money. Yeah. And they didn’t research it first to find, and so by the time they came to us, Oh really? The pandemic. Yeah. And so, we did the work and found like, Ooh, there’s gonna be a.
Consumer audience for this is gonna be challenging and mm-hmm. It, you know, it turns out it was like Midwestern moms that really liked the product, hard to build a major product on, as wonderful as Midwestern moms are, on that. Mm-hmm. You really need a broader audience and like spending that kind of money too.
I know what it says about. Yeah, I don’t know what it says about moms. It was like moms watching it in the like laundry room or the bathroom and they’re trying to get like seven minutes to themselves. But that’s an example, you know, a scenario where the brand just didn’t. Put in the work in advance to really ascertain is this going to work?
And sometimes brands get farther down, you know the line, and they, they do bring products to market that are successful and then things falter and they don’t know why. In some cases, you don’t know why you’re growing and how do you know what to keep doing if you don’t even know why you’re growing? Wow. that’s a really good case study. And I guess let’s assume, or let’s just say some people are gonna listen to us and watch this and like, yeah, we, we know this, but like how does the brand get more engaged in research, especially if they haven’t done, gone down that path in the past?
Like where, where do they begin? Yeah. Such a good question. I think for a lot, and I know that’s not a one size fits all, obviously, depends on the size of the company, depends on where I get that’s not one size, but how should they at least be thinking like framework? I don’t know.
Yeah, no, I think it’s good. I think the first thing is to just know, okay, there are very large successful companies that have made a very regular, consistent practice of talking to consumers. So the first thing is just to know that and then go, okay, well. Why. Okay, so now I know that exists. What does that mean and what would that look like?
And then it’s starting to say, okay, well, what I think that, it’s what things do we not know about our consumer or our audience? And just, just start kind of doing the looking right. What do we wish we knew? once you kind of have a sense of where your gaps are, then it becomes very easy because then it’s like, well, okay, I’d like to know the answer to why people are buying or not buying, or I would like to know if they would like these new products that I’m thinking about bringing to market.
And then the question starts to answer itself. Then it’s like, okay, so do you need, quantitative level research where you can prove, you know, out the differences on a quantitative level? Usually that’s done through online research. Or is it I need to get to know my customer better and I need to ask them a bunch of questions and just have like an hour with them, you know?
And that, would be qualitative research. And so it’s just kind of beginning to look what is missing about what we know and what would it take for us to. Answer those questions and then that’s where it becomes not hard. You know, people can look on chat g bt for like, well, who should I talk to?
Mm-hmm. They can call, you know, there’s many companies that do it. There’s individual moderators that that can go and talk to people. There’s companies like ours, there’s larger companies, but the first thing is just kind of. Evaluating what’s missing in our understanding , so I wanna go further about, you mentioned AI chat, GPT, like where does that play a role? In this whole thing? Yeah, because I shaking up many markets. I’m curious what it’s doing kind of in your neck of the woods.
It’s shaking up research quite a lot, although I think right now it’s just people trying to make money. Mm-hmm. You know, chat, GBT, ai, large language models have, I think a role to play in many different parts of our lives. But I think the important thing to recognize is that they’re not the same as doing research with consumers.
Mm-hmm. They could speculate. And say, so you could ask it, you know, why do my consumers buy X, Y, and Z? And it could, you know, give you some good guesses. The thing is, is that it will, you know, I don’t believe that it can. Today, and I, I don’t know, even in the future when it can do it a little bit better, if it can really mimic to the, to the same level, the just incredible diversity of humans that we get to talk to as researchers, you know?
Mm-hmm. And, and the way to think about it is a lot of brands, you know, have these sort of broad demos that they think about for their audience. They’re like, okay, I talked about Midwestern moms before. You know, like, okay, I’ve got Midwestern moms. I’ve got. You know, gen Z I’ve got, like, they, they have these, these kind of broad strokes, but it’s like, yeah, but mm-hmm.
What if those people stopped doing what you expected that they would do suddenly? How you really wanna be able to talk to them. And so there are some efforts in research to use what’s called quote unquote synthetic respondents. I, I say quote unquote. ’cause at the end of the day, synthetic is a nice word for fake.
You know, the idea is that they’re based off of real people, but real people surprise us all the time. I mean, we were in a focus group recently in a meet category, and the amount of conspiracy theories was incredible. I, you know, is that something that I would expect, that chat GPT could know would happen, you know, or that you would know to ask that question?
Yeah. And so that’s an example where, you know, it can, what’s really cool about chat GPT though, if for people that are trying to dip a toe into research is you could ask it more effectively than you could ask Google. Yeah, for sure. What types of consumer research should I consider? And it will come back with some great ideas and then that’s, I think, where folks should then use that list to engage, you know, a partner and to help it form their brief for those things.
Awesome. Yeah, I see that. And also when I, when I think about like the actual implementation of what you’re gonna use the research for, the hard part about this is in mind, this is my bias in my opinion. You’re not saying this If you agree, great, if but, and if, and if not, correct me. But the difference too is like just knowing the right questions to ask.
If you’re not a professional researcher, if you’re not in this lane, sure, it can give you a lot of even accurate information that may not matter to your situation. So like, what’s the, is Steven Covey or was it, who was it that said, you know, you can be climbing that ladder, but if the ladder’s on the wrong wall, then you’re getting up further on not solving what you’re actually looking to accomplish.
I’m paraphrasing, but like, how do you do that? Unless you’re in that business, you, you don’t, yeah. You, you guess still with more information and that could even lead you further away from actually what you’re looking to accomplish. It could be dangerous. Yeah. That’s. That’s a really good point. And there are a lot of DIY tools that brands can use now to do their own research.
But what you, the example that you brought up, or the anecdote that is exactly the problem. If you don’t understand principles of research, you could ask a question that leads the audience that biases them. You could be completely barking up the wrong tree, and that’s sometimes why we use qualitative research to step back and be like, okay, maybe there are questions we can’t even think of.
So before we get to quant and like, name these specific questions that you know, and it it, you know, it comes together like a test, right? And so you could imagine if a teacher’s asking the wrong questions in a test, there’s no way to assess what the kid is learning or the person’s learning the same way in research.
And so you really want to get some. Word at looking at like, and, and it’s not uncommon too that companies, smaller companies will say, well, we’re just gonna do our own focus groups. We don’t need to hire anybody. And that can get so dangerous, so fast, because the next thing you know, you’re, you know, you’ve brought all these people into a room and you may be biasing them, you may be mm-hmm.
You know, even turning them off to your brand. That’s something that brands don’t think about. Mm-hmm. Is that research is a reflection of your brand. And so, you know, you can. You can do harm if you’re not careful. Yeah. So, absolutely. Well, Devora, this has been great having you on the show today and learning more about your background and, and really what you’re doing over at Alter agents.
That being said, I know you have a lot more to offer if people are listening or watching this and if they want to connect and with you and your team, how do they do that? Yeah. Simply we go to alter agents.com. We have a lot of free thought leadership that we publish and we don’t require anything, but you know, your email to, send you that so you can sign up for that.
And we have several waves of consumer sentiment research we’ve published over the last few years. So all of that is there and available. And we also have a substack that you can find us where we publish there as well. Amazing. And for everybody that’s listening, just so you know, we’ll definitely put all that information into the show notes.
So you can just click on the, show notes and head right on over and speaking to the audience. If this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show each and every day, bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button. And Devora. Thanks again so much for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.
