How proquo ai Turns Marketing Art Into Science To Power Challenger Brands To Success

Nadim Sadek founded proquo ai after experiencing something of an epiphany following years of running some of the world’s most successful market research businesses. “I suddenly realised that much as it had helped me find some fame and fortune, I no longer believed the market research we ere providing was adding value to our clients’ businesses,” he recalls. “It was a painful moment.”

Sadek walked away from his job and spent some time out, including a stint on an island he’d bought off the west coast of Ireland, where he set about launching brands in the whisky and the music businesses. But eventually the lure of the industry in which he had made his name was too great – and Sadek hit on an idea he hoped would create value for clients in a new way.

Proquo ai was born in 2017 and offers businesses a way both to understand where their brands are succeeding or falling short, and to decide on how to make improvements. Unlike traditional market research, which is typically backward looking and focused on narrow parameters, proquo ai offers what it describes as “always-on brand management”. In practice, this means Sadek and his team are constantly surveying their consumer panels – the firm consults these panels every day on behalf of each of its clients – and providing advice on how to improve.

The approach is born out of a belief that in a world where consumer products are increasingly commoditised, it is people’s perceptions of brands that informs their purchasing choices. Two airlines offering flights to New York, say, essentially offer the same product, so it is their respective brand values that lead travellers to choose one or the other.

With a background in psychology, Sadek set out to understand the relationship that consumers have with brands. “Human beings both feel and think,” he explains. “It is our feelings that decide what brands we like or dislike, and we then rationalise that through our thinking.”

Accordingly, proquo ai has developed 16 specific drivers that determine brand success on the basis of those feelings and thoughts. These are at the heart of what the company seeks to assess in its continuous rounds of consumer research, generating a proquo ai score out of 100 that tells clients how they’re doing. “Until now, marketing has been an art – an iterative process of discovery about what works,” Sadek reflects. “We’re turning the art of marketing into the science of growth.”

It’s a bold claim, but Sadek argues the approach enables proquo ai to give its clients a precise, real-time assessment of how their brands are performing – and how any given initiative, from an advertising campaign to a post on social media, affects that performance. Crucially, the firms also uses artificial intelligence to understand how its 16 levers work in combination – and to exclude misleading outlying survey results – in order to offer targeted advice to clients on the actions they need to take to improve their brand value.

It’s an approach that is particularly well-suited to challenger brands seeking to disrupt established consumer markets. These businesses lack the resources to fund massive advertising campaigns or build huge distribution networks overnight, but a savvy and nimble approach to brand management can build momentum very quickly. The fact that proquo ai is built on a platform model, offering low-cost subscription plans on a monthly basis, is also well-suited to smaller clients testing the waters of what is possible for their brands.

The company points to the success of clients such as Pip & Nut, a challenger brand in the nut butter market, which has worked with proquo ai for several years and become a big player stocked in supermarkets across the country. Other clients include Harry’s, the disruptive shaving brand, and baby food business Little Freddie; both have made enormous strides into tough markets, taking share from well-resourced mutli-nationals.

There are potentially millions of brands in need of such support, but ultimately, Sadek’s ambitions go well beyond the challenger segment. “I think our approach will become the lingua franca of brand management,” he says. “When brand managers of the future go for their next job interview, they’ll be asked how they have improved their proquo ai score in their current role.”

The secret of the company’s success, agrees Jim Brennan, proquo ai’s managing director, lies in its reinvention of the traditional market research model. “Because we are always on, we can predict what pulling any single lever will do to all the other levers,” he says. “This is brand management not market research.”

The company hopes to work with challenger brands at each stage of their journey, he says, from analysing what is required to build a successful brand in a particular segment, to assessing client’s success on a daily basis in implementing and executing their plans, to suggesting what will work best next. “The crucial point is that we don’t just want to say ‘this is the lay of the land’,” Brennan adds. “We also want to explain ‘these are the key things you need to do to achieve your objective’.”