Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
Why the Smartest Brands Don’t Chase Customers Anymore| Jon Davids
13 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why should brands stop chasing customers?
Stop renting attention and start owning the demand by building a movement that turns customers into a cult-like community. In this episode, I sat down with marketing visionary John Davids to break down the movement formula and how you can stop playing the messy math game of paid ads.
It's time to discover your marketing superpowers and build a brand so magnetic that getting customers finally feels like magic. Right about now.
Learning how to hijack attention is something I figured out pretty young, but really figuring out how to monetize it and turn it into money and sales and dollars and sustainably do that, that took a bit longer. But you got to start with step one. You got to get attention if you want to get anywhere.
This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month, taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. Yo, what's up, guys? It's Ryan Offord. I'm your host.
Welcome to Right About Now. Hey, where we said we're always getting right, it's always about what works now. That's really the mantra for today. We got John Davids. He's the CEO of Influicity, and he is the writer and the author of Marketing Superpowers. What's up, John?
Ryan, it's awesome to be here, bro. I've been looking forward to this. Excited to talk to you.
Anyone that has superpowers or is writing about them as Superman, Batman growing up, I was pretty pumped. The biggest thing is you know how to grab attention, and that's the key today is grabbing attention, but you got a lot of substance behind it.
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Chapter 2: What is the difference between building an audience and a movement?
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You know that one shirt you keep grabbing without thinking about it because it just works for everything? That's Poncho Outdoors for me. I've been wearing their flannels and their denim shirts lately, and I don't say this often, these things surprised me. Most flannels I've owned feel stiff, bulky, just something that's not stylish.
Like you're either dressing for the outdoors or dinner, but never both. Poncho nailed that balance. They're soft, they stretch, they actually move with you. And then you notice the little things, the zip pocket, the magnetic closure, even the built-in lens cloth. It's clear someone actually thought this through. And the denim shirt, honestly, feels broken in from day one.
Clean southern look, a little stretch, super comfortable, and it's one of those pieces that works whether I'm traveling, in the studio recording, or having a night out with the family. They also stand behind their products. Free shipping, free returns, easy exchanges. Even months later if it's not your favorite. No hassle. So if you're looking for a true go-to shirt, check them out.
Go to ponchooutdoors.com backslash Ryan. Enter your email, and you'll get $10 off your first order, plus free shipping. That's ponchooutdoors.com slash Ryan. P-O-N-C-H-O outdoors.com slash Ryan. R-Y-A-N. And when they ask you how you heard about them, let them know right about now. sent you. Really respect a lot of what I see that you're doing and excited to kind of get behind all of it.
I appreciate that.
Learning how to hijack attention is something I figured out pretty young, but really figuring out how to monetize it and turn it into money and sales and dollars and sustainably do that. That took a bit longer, but you got to start with step one.
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Chapter 3: How does community connect content to commerce?
You got to get attention if you want to get anywhere.
Let's set the table, give a little bit of your brief background and who the hell you are.
I'm a kid that couldn't do too much but figured out how to get attention on the internet in college and was able to turn that into a $300,000 business. Short version is figured out BuzzFeed before BuzzFeed came along, figured out how to get people to read content on the internet. This is pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, pre-all that.
And I learned in the early 2000s, the big sites on the internet were MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. And I essentially made some content, did some deals so that I could provide them with their content. And in return, they gave me hyperlinks back to my site.
And just doing that, a whole lot of hustle and grind, I was able to build a business with a whole lot of advertising revenue, pulling in about $300,000 a year, paid for college and then some. And that was kind of my start of my entrepreneurial journey. What the hell does influicity mean?
It sounds like a cool word. There's influence in there and there's action.
What does it mean? You know how hard it is to come up with names, man. You want to get something that encapsulates everything. But yeah, it's a bit of influence, its own world. I came up with city. I think I actually sat down in the end and just wrote down a whole bunch of words, left side of the page, right side of the page. Our start was influencer marketing. So that was the inception of it.
And that's all we did for the first five years. It was a long time before we added any other services.
So it's kind of influence. Influencer marketing is an interesting world. It's been around longer than you think, but it's evolved. It's definitely changed. What's your view just on influencer marketing and the evolution of it?
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Chapter 4: What is the 'Minimum Viable Concept' and why is it important?
They're seeing something totally different. So we're all in our own cultures and our own bubbles. And I think influence plays a big part of that because everybody can grab a mic and a camera. Most people aren't as good as they think they are. We can't all be Ryan. But if we can build something that people can watch online, All of a sudden, we can carve out our own 10,000 fans.
And now, again, we've splintered it again. That's how I think about it.
With TV declining, like linear TV, social media doing what it's done, it's been rising a long time, podcasting rising, all these mediums. It's almost becoming individual influencers or people are almost the TV stations of today. It's fascinating because it's almost like reality TV meets social media meets authority meets celebrity.
It's this combination of things that makes it the content entertainment that people want to watch or even education because even TV was used for education and entertainment. And now influencers are the new CBS, ABC, NBC. I don't know if you've ever thought about it like that.
Oh, man, you're reading my mind. Do you remember back when Ozzy Osbourne had a reality show? It was the OC and the Hills on MTV. And it was really a lot of MTV. And then it was Laguna Beach and I'm trying to Jersey Shore. And when this happened, and then years later, it was the Kardashians. But that was kind of the start in my mind of the modern influencer era.
where you really build networks around individuals, they become their own micro brands, and then they start building products and services and all kinds of stuff around themselves. And then it went from linear TV and cable to Instagram. And that I would say probably the first big piece of that was the Kardashians, Kim Kardashian, 300 million plus followers on Instagram.
It's been this slow burn, but it actually happened pretty quickly, just a couple decades.
What's been your experience now having the agency and working with more of the self-made influencers, I imagine, and the ones that do it? It seems like in a way, not everyone's good necessarily in front of the camera and the mic, but what's the balance between what's necessary to be an influencer? You've got micro influencers, you've got big influencers, all that.
It's hard for me to divide the line because people always go, should I just be an influencer? Does this enter into your foray much? You've got to have something to offer.
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Chapter 5: How can brands own customer demand instead of renting it?
The reason I talk so much about community and building customer communities is because that really is where you can connect content and commerce. So you can say down the line, maybe I want to start a brand for moms. I want to do a clothing brand for moms. I'm a young woman. That's my thing. The thing I would do on day one is start making content to serve that audience.
And then you'll monetize down the line. But just making content for the sake of it, because I want to be an influencer. Most of the time, that's a loser's game.
Yeah, that's the evolution right there. It's gotten a little better with people recognizing that just the sports cars and beach photos and all the aspirational content versus the meaningful, truly building a community. That's where you see the divide of the ironically the haves and the have nots.
Show me what's seemingly a well-made, thoughtful, yet underproduced video, and I'll show you who's probably making six figures versus the opposite of the beach photos and everything else, who's probably living the reverse lifestyle.
Some people are fooled by the term fake it till you make it. You could fake it for a very long time and never make it. If you have something to offer that's truly valuable, you can put it out there actually in pretty crummy form and people will jump to get it. I'll give you an example.
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Chapter 6: What strategies should brands implement to stay relevant in the next 10-20 years?
There's a guy I know on Wall Street. He has a hedge fund and he is an influencer. He can put content out on Twitter X, he can put content out on LinkedIn, and he will have people clamoring to see his content. And I'll tell you why, because what he's putting out is insanely valuable data, analytics, spreadsheets, formulas, financial models that are super valuable to his audience.
He doesn't have to get pretty and do his hair and turn on the camera like I do, because he's got something way more valuable to offer, which is a financial model that's super valuable to this audience. You got to think about connecting, again, content to commerce and think about how you get there logically. It takes more than just beach photos.
Do you think with most people or brands trying to build the movement and trying to get that universe, where does the pitfalls come? Maybe some of the things that holding people back or what's their biggest problem kind of getting to that stage?
The biggest thing I see, Ryan, constantly is there's two things you got to talk about. There's the how and the why. And people get them reversed. You see, the why is why somebody needs to solve this problem. If you want to go to the gym and lose weight and get a six pack, your why is because I want to get a six pack. That's why I'm going to the gym.
But if I'm the person who owns the gym, who's trying to sell you a membership, and all I'm talking about is, hey, I have a gym, buy a membership, here are my hours, check out the equipment. All you're talking about is the how. And again, you as the business owner or maybe as the marketing person think, oh, but that's what I'm trying to sell. It's a gym. And no, no, no, you're not.
You're trying to sell the why. The why is because you desperately want to lose weight so you can play with your kids, so you can run up the stairs, so you can live to be 85 years old and be healthy and happy. Figuring out what is the why, that's the customer's why, And what is the how? And that's my product. But always start with the why and go on with it for as long as you can.
You'll notice, man, one thing, for example, in my content, I talk about a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, on Instagram. I'm always talking about the why. I'm always talking about what's of interest to you as the reader. I don't talk about myself at all. Or if I do, it's like in the PS of what I'm writing. Focusing on the why and then getting to the how only when they're ready to take out their wallet.
You get your unifying message. You get your social proof. You have all the content. You're doing these things. But is one way or another, is it pay to play? Or can these things really happen organically?
They can happen organically. I'll give you my diatribe on that. Do you know the story of Liquid Death at all? Liquid Death, it's tall boy cans of water. Looks like it was designed in a tattoo parlor. I say it's Dasani meets Post Malone. That's kind of what it looks like. Before that brand ever started, before that product was ever built, there was no... no canned water at the time.
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Chapter 7: Why are many influencers struggling despite having large followings?
when those numbers fluctuate a little bit, guess what? Their cogs fall out of whack. Their CAC is off. They're playing this CAC LTV, the messy math game, all the acronym salad you got to deal with. Yes, it's great to rent demand sometimes. I call that rented demand. But at a certain point, you've got to own the demand too.
And going back to your example of Crumble Cookies, urgency, scarcity, FOMO, limited time offers. Another big one is rituals. They build this habit of we're going to drop cookies on this day, They're going to show up on TikTok this day, come into the store on this day. All those things are what makes for a brand that people are obsessed with.
I do always think, though, on the own side, some of the decisions have to be made with keeping up with that community delivering. Because email is certainly the channel. You want that first party data. You want to be able to have that direct communication. Are you a proponent of building these internal walled gardens? How else are we keeping that community intact beyond email?
There's different levels. So there's definitely the rented landscape, totally rented, which is I'm going to buy space on Google to get in front of your eyeballs. Then you have the next level down, which is the social media platforms, which are not owned by you, but at least you have organic access to them and you've got to still play by the algorithm.
And then at the very bottom, you've got things like email. You've also got podcasts and SMS, I would say, texting people's phone numbers online. Ultimately, you want to get as close to first party data as you possibly can. I want to have an un-intermediated relationship with you if you're my customer. That comes down to phone and email.
But regardless, if you have touch points that are out there and if you're doing as you scale, if you're doing a lot of stuff, you start with Instagram, then you expand to TikTok and YouTube and X and podcast and video. If you have enough touch points, you can be present in people's lives and part of their daily habits, even if they never subscribe or listen. I do a podcast. You do a podcast.
You do an amazing podcast. And I'm sure you have people come up to you on the street, Ryan, or maybe email you and say, hey, I've been listening to you for six months, man. And you don't know this person's name. There's no indication that they have any relationship, but they are tuning in. So just because you don't see them doesn't mean that people aren't there.
any final counsel, any final tips, tricks, things that you're seeing on your radar or things that you want to convey to our audience?
I would just say that people, wherever they are in their business journey, whether you're an entrepreneur, you're a professional marketer, a CMO, a CEO, you need to think about some of the stuff I talk about in Marketing Superpowers, not because it's a certain way to market or not because it's like, oh, if you're talking to this kind of customer, I need to build a community or I need to build a movement.
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