On the latest episode of the Change Agents podcast, Alter Agents Chief Strategy Officer Devora Rogers is joined by Brian Aucoin, a marketing consultant with over 25 years of experience across agencies and brands including Campbell’s Soup, Xbox, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Disney, Mattel, Moonbug and, most recently, Gooder. Brian shares the 2007 research insight that redirected a major restaurant chain’s entire media strategy, what building consumer segmentation from scratch taught him at a fast-growing D2C brand, why brands need to keep listening to their existing customers as dollars get tighter, and how he thinks brands should approach AI without losing the human edge that consumers still value.

Tell us a little about your background and career — you’ve worked at some amazing brands.

I’ve got over 25 years of experience now. I started my career in New York, working for a lot of agencies, which exposed me to a lot of big brands. I cut my teeth on CPG early in my career, worked on Campbell’s Soup for a number of years, worked on some quick service restaurants, Xbox, and then started working on entertainment accounts, which I really loved — Paramount, which moved me over to the West Coast, then Sony Pictures, and I built an agency for Disney. So I did a lot of work in entertainment.

Then I came to the end of my rope on agency and went client-side, and fell into kids and family — spent a lot of time at Mattel, spent some time launching Moonbug in the US, their go-to-market strategy. And most recently I did some work in the commerce space at Gooder, which is where I met you.

What is the insight in your career — one that came out of research, data, or talking to consumers — that changed everything?

So many come to mind, but one definitely stands out — we have to go back to 2007. I was working on Pizza Hut, and Domino’s had launched online ordering, so Pizza Hut wanted to follow. This was still a time in digital media when we were fighting for digital budgets — you were making the case against TV, print magazines, newspaper, radio, which was a hundred years old.

They ran a pilot program on their online ordering because they’d seen how Domino’s had rolled it out and it got very exciting. I’ll never forget the results of that pilot, because I was in the room with the executives when they presented it. We figured it would be less expensive to fulfill an order online — no one taking the order and passing it along — and that was true. But the insight nobody saw coming was that the average order size got bigger when people ordered online. It became more of an experience — people would throw in the breadsticks, add this, add that. The margin got a lot bigger, and it really kicked off a period where they started investing heavily in digital media.

Pizza Hut’s business is built on franchisee owners, and a lot of them are people who might live in Ohio and own a hundred Pizza Huts — very traditional, very much into TV spending. But that insight was the thing that really drove dollars to digital, which was exciting for us at the time. I was early in my career then, and it showed me how powerful data can be — if you get one of those insights, it can drive your strategy, something you can evangelize across an organization to really shape the direction of the brand.

Did you go in with a hypothesis that this would happen, or did the insight take you by surprise?

We knew there would be more efficiency in online ordering. And because Domino’s had rolled it out and seen a lot of excitement, we didn’t know exactly what it was doing for them, but we knew they were investing in it, so we figured there was something there. I was in digital media, I believed in it — I was in my 20s in New York, using digital media all the time, so I knew its power. But marrying that belief to digital ordering just made a lot of sense for the clients and marketers making the decisions. It was like, okay, now we can really put the pedal down, now that we know we can drive online ordering through digital media.

You recently worked at Gooder, the casual sunglasses brand — what did that experience, as a D2C and retail brand, teach you?

So much. I was there almost three years. It’s an active eyewear brand that had so much growth during COVID — I think of it as a $25 purchase that gave people a dopamine shot of “this will come to my door and I’ll feel good” during COVID. A lot of brands benefited from that period — they were growing 40 to 50% over COVID.

Coming out of COVID, when I joined in 2023, they were still growing, but by 10 to 15% — quite a difference. The question became, how do we get back to that meteoric growth? The first question I always ask is: who’s the consumer? That wasn’t a question they’d had to ask themselves yet, because they were just growing — the answer was basically, “people who buy sunglasses.” But to break through to that next level, once you’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit, you need a ladder to reach the next branch.

Consumer segmentation was the thing I pushed, and talking to research firms like yours was part of that. I love that as a marketer, because it lets me understand who our growth targets are versus our main target, and then build messaging for each of them, really understanding their consumer journey — I geek out on that stuff. That was one of the biggest things I brought to Gooder: investing in research to understand our consumers.

It even led to another research project when tariffs hit in around April 2025 — how do we talk to consumers about increasing our prices and have that transparent conversation with them? We went back to research — in-person studies, virtual studies — really trying to tell that story transparently and bring consumers along with us: here’s why we need to raise prices, we still care about you, we want to bring you the best product we can without cutting corners. Because we’d already invested in research the first time, it was easy to go back and say, let’s talk to consumers, see how they feel, and get messaging directly from them that we can use to connect with more consumers as we tell this story.

A lot of brands rode that same pandemic wave of unusually fast growth, and then felt the slowdown when it ended. What advice do you have for brands trying to figure out sustainable growth after a stretch of good luck?

So much of the work I do seems rudimentary, but it’s go back to the consumer — have conversations with them. Your existing customers are so important right now, because the account economy is crunched. You have to dig in with your existing consumers, understand them, see how you can bring more value to them, because you’re going to grow from your core.

That’s something I always tell clients: you can’t just say, “we want to reach 18 to 34-year-olds,” without asking, are they already buying the product? Are they even interested in it? Does it appeal to them? You have to understand who your core consumers are — sometimes we call them super consumers — because those are your ride-or-dies. They’re with you, they understand your brand, they’ll evangelize it for you if you incentivize them. Any work I do with clients starts with the consumer: do we understand them, do we know how to talk to them, how do we talk to them better, how do we bring them a better offering?

That priority segment — the ride-or-dies — might only be 10 to 15% of the total audience if you’re lucky. Is that enough to build on?

Heavy users, the ones you’d call whales — sure, they might be 10 to 15%. But you can learn a lot from that 10 to 15%, and extrapolate out from there.

Not everyone listening is a dyed-in-the-wool researcher or marketer. How would you explain what a segmentation is, and why it matters, to someone who’s never encountered one?

It’s your starting point to understand how your consumers break down. They’re going to break down into different groups — it might be along demographic lines, but probably more often it’s psychographic: their interests, hobbies, activities. It’s the first thing you can do to really understand who your consumers are, so you can start to segment your messaging to reach them. No company has a single consumer who’s the same all the way through — we’re all individual, fragile snowflakes, and we need to be spoken to in different ways, with different needs and desires, even for the same product.

Segmentation is the starting point to understand how your consumer base breaks down, and then how that breaks down into your core target versus your opportunity targets. You grow from your core, but you also find those wings — an opportunity with, say, 35-to-44-year-olds who love pickleball. It can be that specific, or more general, but it’s that first step toward segmenting your messaging — there are many more steps as you start to micro-segment. I see it as the starting point for so many of my clients to understand who they’re trying to reach, what the messages are, and sometimes who the messengers are that can carry that message, which is sometimes even more important. It’s about engaging your audience in a way that makes your media more efficient, your creative more efficient, and builds that engine for the brand.

How should marketers and researchers be thinking about their work during this time of massive change?

Marketers get excited when there’s change and trends going on, because we can dig in — what’s changing, how is it affecting our key consumers? Again, it comes back to listening to your consumers. When dollars get tighter, there are also trends around community, around authenticity, as we live in an increasingly inauthentic world. I like to start with macro trends — what’s happening in the world that consumers are responding to — but then you also have to understand how your specific consumers are responding to it. People are calling this a K-shaped economy: if you’re a luxury brand, your consumers might keep spending and spending, whereas on the other side of that K, dollars are tighter and value matters more.

So it’s not just what’s going on, it’s how your consumers are responding to what’s going on — and that comes from listening to them, really digging in with your existing consumers, your ride-or-dies, and understanding what’s happening for them. Is there an open dialogue with your consumers? That’s really important right now — not just social listening online, but email, surveys, incentivizing them to tell you what’s going on in their lives, because they will. They have thoughts, and they’ll share them with you, and that helps you deliver for them in a better way.

You mentioned community as a trend. What does that word mean to you in the context of your work with brands?

Community is a big term. This was one of the macro trends my consultancy surfaced last year, and it’s continued into this year. I think we’re still in a post-COVID place where people are learning how to interact with each other again — coming out of our homes, joining different groups, having conversations in real life. We crave community as humans; we want our communities.

When I talk to brands about community, I talk about how a brand can be a platform to bring like-minded people together — that’s a great way for a brand to interact with consumers. We saw this really strongly at Gooder, where there was a community built around running, around active engagement and active sports. A brand can be a platform to bring people together to have conversations, and you don’t even have to sell anything in that instance — you just have to be the platform that brings like-minded people together. It’s something humans will always want to find, but it’s become something bigger right now because we’re still learning how to do it and finding new communities. It’s a really interesting trend to follow, and it’ll be interesting to see how it evolves into next year.

How do you see brands creating those kinds of real-world, community-building moments today?

Those monoculture events are so few and far between now, because we’re in a segmented world and everyone’s in their own pockets and bubbles. But when something like that does happen — a total eclipse, the World Cup, a real monoculture moment — that’s a big opportunity to build your platform, bring people together, and grow your community.

Before we let you go — how should brands be thinking, or not thinking, about AI?

AI has a brand problem, I always start there — there’s a lot of pushback against the idea of AI itself, and a lot of that comes from the top of organizations just pushing it down and saying, “learn how to use this,” without much more guidance than that.

When I talk about AI, I like to lay down some guardrails. On one side: anything that can be automated will be automated. We live in a capitalist society — if it can be automated, it’s going to be automated, so don’t spend your time pushing back on that. On the other side: consumers will ultimately decide how much human they want in any given experience. I use the example of driving cars — most of us are okay giving up driving, because we can do other things, watch a movie, have a conversation, read a book. But we also love NASCAR and F1, and we don’t want the human taken out of that experience. There are times we’re going to want a human in the experience.

Think about commerce, and when you want a person to talk to versus an agent — that’s there too. I think you all just did research highlighting that having a human in the experience can be a premium, something a brand can use as an advantage when talking to consumers: hey, we have humans you can deal with. So I lay down that spectrum — automation’s going to happen, but consumers are ultimately in charge of the decisions, because they have the dollars. The agents aren’t the end consumer. AI brings efficiency, there are tools to get smarter on the research side, the writing side, the delivery side, the analysis side — but laying down that spectrum makes it easier to help brands figure out where they want to live on it.