Interview: Nadim Sadek CEO proquoᵃⁱ
proquoᵃ ͥ is a Brand Management Platform that helps small and medium sized retail businesses get bigger, faster. Nadim Sadek, CEO of online Brand Management Platform, proquoᵃ ͥ , invites The Retail Bulletin readers to experience it for themselves, FREE for 30 days.
What does your company do? / What is your USP?
proquoᵃⁱ is a Brand Management Platform that helps small and medium sized retail businesses get bigger, faster.
We’ve proven that brands grow when they maximise the strength of their relationship with people. So our new Brand Management Platform talks to people daily, gathering their feelings & thoughts about your brand’s relationship strength. Relative to your competition. Relative to your category.
And, as our name suggests, proquoᵃⁱ has a powerful AI Engine which looks at your brand and tells you, based on how people are feeling and thinking, what you should do to consistently grow.
In short – we’re a Brand Management Platform that makes retail brands bigger, faster. Our AI becomes your brand’s AI.
What’s special about the platform and your approach?
Our company has been around for over 7 years. And in that time, we’ve proven with over 600 brands in 60 countries that our framework enables brand growth.
proquoᵃ ͥ ’s framework maximises the Relationship your brand has with people. We’ve identified that there are 16 Drivers of a brand’s relationship with people – in fact, they’re the same drivers which describe people’s relationships with each other.
And over time, we’ve proven that brands grow when they excel on our 16 Drivers.
Today, our larger clients include everyone from household Consumer Goods brands, to Airline companies and Video Streaming brands. They’re all growing their brands through our 16 Drivers.
Today, proquoᵃ ͥ ’s online platform enables any brand, no matter the size, to get an always on understanding of what consumers feel & think about their brand, competition and category daily. All for just £500 per month.
Because it’s new, we’re even encouraging brands to try us for 30 days, absolutely free, through www.proquoai.com.
How does a product/service implementation actually look like and how do you measure success?
proquoᵃ ͥ was developed to be immediately intuitive – literally a cinch to use – with no user training required.
If you’re a brand on proquoᵃ ͥ , we speak daily to people about your brand, your competition and your category. On Day 1 we speak to 200 people and each day thereafter we speak to an average of 25 more. So you get a constant, growing stream of sentiment through time. This allows you to see the instant impact your daily decisions have on the people around you.
In fact, before proquoᵃ ͥ , Brand Guidance used to be totally backwards looking. You’d look at single points in time and compare whether or not you’d be making a difference. Often, because it was so slow, the data once presented was irrelevant. With proquoᵃ ͥ , we’re always on so you have a forward looking, predictive view of your performance.
All of the data we capture is made accessible on our platform. Brands with access to proquoᵃ ͥ can see where their brand stands each day and are told exactly what they need to do to make it bigger, faster.
How are retailers using your systems to gain competitive advantage and what does best practice look like?
For retailers, we’re providing 24/7 access, for the first time, to what consumers feel and think about their brands.
The way we capture our data is the best out there. We ask people first for their subconscious gut feelings and second for their conscious thoughts. Getting sentiment in this manner is how the human mind works. We emulate that to make the gathering of our data the best there is.
Retailers using proquoᵃ ͥ get a leg up on the competition because our 16 Drivers keep eyes specifically on a brand’s Relationship strength. And for retail brands, relationships are everything. Retailers are selling more than products – they’re selling experiences.
Creating strong ties with your consumers means persuading them as well as seducing them towards choosing you. Half of our 16 Drivers help measure a brand’s Seduction – its pull into the brand – or into the store. The other half measure its Persuasion – more simply, how it is perceived to activate and appear.
We’re the only Brand Guidance platform out there that looks at brands in this way – through relationships – which are deep and complex.
What advantage does it add?
Knowing daily where your brand stands, and what you need to do to grow, is a massive advantage to anyone. Because we are always on, people using proquoᵃ ͥ are able to see the instant impact of their daily decisions on their brand.
You’re able to make your hard work, work harder – by doing more of the stuff that is strengthening your brand-to-consumer relationship the best.
Our platform is predictive – which means it can tell you where you are today and where you’ll be in the future all by triangulating your current position versus your competition, within your category. We look at the trends in your data to show you where your brand is heading based on the daily decisions you’re making.
It’s no coincidence our platform is extremely popular for the small and medium sized business world. It is only £500 per month, so we’re opening the Brand Management doors to everyone out there who may be interested in growing their brand.
What challenges and opportunities do you see in UK retail for 2019 / What challenges are retailers facing in 2019?
In today’s world – literally anything and everything is a brand. There have never been so many brands out there to choose from. Because of this, brands are starting to experience functional parity and really, competitive convergence.
If a shopper doesn’t like the ambiance of your store, they can easily head to one of the other hundred out there.
Because of this convergence, it’s now the ‘brand’ which is critical to drive its power of seduction and persuasion with people.
In fact, it has never been easier to create a brand, nor a supply chain with distribution network to people. With the onslaught of eCommerce and DTC having a store front is not necessarily an advantage.
Creating the experience of your brand, and developing its relationship with people, is.
How will you address these challenges and turn them into successes?
Aside from the fact that we have built a product with zero barrier to entry as you can try it completely free for 30 days, we are the only Brand Management platform out there which gathers real people’s feelings and thoughts daily, on relationships.
We are making this data accessible, intuitive, and immediately actionable for brands of any size and any scale out there. We are making the ability to grow your brand possible.
What is on the horizon for you as a company?
My firm conviction is that we’re at the start of a revolution with proquoᵃⁱ. Never before has there been the bringing together of deep scientific insight and how brands succeed via the development of technology. The kind of technology which understands how to make scientific insight available to everyone at a mass scale via new business models. We’ve made Brand Guidance entirely affordable to any and all businesses, and we’ve proven we increase brand success – whether that be greater loyalty, propensity to purchase, engagement on social media or in other places.
Our company is really the bringing together of the whole business with strategic guidance about what a brand should do to succeed and how to go about doing it. And it’s only going to get bigger and bigger through the addition of more and more features and functions. Predictive Brand Guidance is just the beginning.
There has never been such an accessible, actionable, and immediately impactful way of working with brands. And we’re only getting started. We’re seriously on the cusp of a major game-changer which will open up a new world of Brand Management.
Bio of Nadim:
Nadim Sadek is multiple Founder and CEO, currently of proquoᵃ ͥ , and previously of Mobius award-winning, whiskey-to-music brand, Inish Turk Beg and Sadek Wynberg Research, the world’s largest qual agency. He also served as Global CEO of Millward Brown’s qual network, and Worldwide Commercial and Strategy Director of Research International. He studied Pure Psychology and Mental & Moral Science at Trinity College, Dublin. Nadim is focused on integrating insight into true brand-value growth and created proquoᵃ ͥ ’s intellectual property that enables brands to build ever-stronger relationships and drive true commercial benefits. Nadim also serves as Artist Manager for Shaefri and Executive Producer of Boss Bikes Club.
