Healthy discussions and strong connections between founders and their target customers are key to the success of emerging brands. Using the vast reach of online technology is significant in this mission, and this is where 1Q focuses its offers as a consumer engagement platform. Exploring this company even deeper, Elliot Begoun talks with Mike Murphy, Senior Vice President – Client Engagement, and Doug Danowski, Chief Revenue Officer. They explain how allowing founders answer questions from their potential clients can help boost their authority, build a network, and save resources on market research. They also tackle the most important areas startup businesses must concentrate on in order to thrive, from the constant desire to innovate to embracing the difficult yet rewarding daily grind.

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Listen to the podcast here

Bringing Emerging Brands Together At 1Q With Mike Murphy And Doug Danowski

I’m going to turn it over to Doug and Mike who are joining me from 1Q. Let them introduce themselves, tell you a little bit about 1Q and then we are going to dig in. The goal, of course, is to try to help all of you reading walk away with some thoughts, actions and ways that you can leverage new insights and ways to gain about your consumers, customers, etc. Doug, I’m going to turn it to you first and let you handle the introductions of the team.

I appreciate it. My name is Doug Danowski. I’m the Chief Revenue Officer for 1Q. I have been on board since 2020. I joined at an exciting time within the organization where we are doubling our revenues and expanding our reach and our brand across the US. I’m joined with Mike Murphy, who is our Senior Client Engagement Specialist. He heads up our strategic partnerships and strategic clients. We are both very excited to be here with you.

I’m glad to have you. Tell us a little bit about 1Q. Its origin, its purpose, etc., because it’s a unique platform.

First off, thank you for having us and everyone who’s reading abroad. We are a consumer engagement platform and we have been around now for a few years. It came out of our founders’ need of working in a large space with spending a ton of money on market research. In a previous life, he began to work a lot of market research and insights companies. He found some flaws in this space and the industry, how people were having to spend, reach consumers and the engagement process, what it cost, how long it took and the accuracy of the data. As he exited a previous organization, he began to think about how he could solve that problem and borne 1Q out of that. He spent the initial two years of the existing building the platform and our panel of consumers.

Now we’ve got 1.2 million members on our platform. These are consumers that are scattered across the United States and in every demographic imaginable. We allow our customers, our brands to tap those consumers on the shoulders and ask them a question. As Keith built out 1Q and began to get a few customers here and there, we knew we were onto something a few years ago when our customer base tripled and our consumer base almost quadrupled in one year.

It got a little fuzzy there beforehand but that was when we knew we had it. In 2020, with some of the brands that we penetrated and some of the growth we saw with our existing customers, we had our first million-dollar customer in one fiscal year. We have begun to see the signs and we are excited about the growth potential of 1Q. We think we deliver something unique for our customers. We think we deliver insights and research faster, better and cheaper than everybody else and most importantly, with extremely high data quality. We can talk a little about that as we get through here.

It’s important to us that we look at our customers and our members as the same status. What we mean by that is we feel there was a flaw in the industry with how data is gathered and the compensation for members who are giving their insights so we pay all of our members for every response they give us. They get cold, hard cash the minute they answer a response. We think that helps drive quick responses, accurate responses and they feel like they are delivering value for our customers.

One of the biggest challenges that the founders, who read about the show, have had in the past has been the access to this data, being able to find a way to ask consumers, get consumer perception and insights and so forth. I’m a growth hacker. The way we have always approached it in the past is by experimentation and then measuring the results of that experimentation and coming back. I’m excited about the fact that we can be validating some of the hypotheses in those experiments as you are conducting them instead of waiting for all the results and then having to try to glean the insights out of the higher-level data. Tell me how a young emerging brand can best engage in 1Q.

I will take the first half and then I will flip it over to Mike. What’s interesting about what we have done is the business model we have built as a no contracts model, no minimum purchase, so you are not having to sign up for a huge upfront cost, a big capital expenditure. It is built as a DIY tool, do-it-yourself. We’ve got staff on hand to help those entrepreneurs that maybe aren’t as well versed in the research space. We can help design and implement research studies and get the data. We are designed as a do-it-yourself product. We let our customers interact with their consumers for as little as $1. There is no minimum. There’s no upfront cost. It’s allowing those brands to launch surveys very quickly and get the results back in 10 or 15 minutes. Mike, do you want to touch on that as well a little bit?

No. I think you hit on those things, Doug. I will pull a voiceover to add something. That’s the key, as you mentioned, is DIY. We started as a DIY platform, Elliot. What’s interesting is I have been on board now for years and a lot of people prefer to do DIT, Do-It-Together but there are a lot of folks that come into our platform and don’t even bother calling us and go right into the platform, do their own thing. To Doug’s point, we are very affordable and very flexible. We don’t ask for contracts. We don’t ask for license agreements. We have enough proof in the pudding, if you will, the value of our service that you can come in and do business as you want and we have people do it every way.

The other thing I would mention is we are an email and a phone call away. As an example, if you think about the TIG brands and companies we have already spoken to or trying to help, Spencer Sisters, my friends Alan and the team that we are trying to get a distribution in the US and helping ways as the US expands. With Unite and Claire, we are trying to help with a pitch to Sam’s as she has important things coming up. We have talked to WashBar, Otto’s Naturals, and Snooze. We are very easy to work with. We are very flexible and you can get in. The other thing to keep in mind, as Doug mentioned, we have only been around some years, so we are also an emerging brand as well. We understand what you are going through. We live that life as well.

First of all, it’s a way to work in all those shout-outs to the brands. Thanks for that. I’m sure each of them are sending your 1Q buck for doing it. Let’s talk a little bit. This is such an important platform and I’m not saying that to plug 1Q. I know a lot of entrepreneurs go to bed regularly with things rattling around in their head like, “I wonder what our customers are thinking. I wonder what our shoppers are thinking. I wish I could figure this out. I wish I knew this. I wonder if the price point is too high. I’m wondering if they are finding us on the shelf.” As statistically significant as they want to make that answer be, they can do it within the constraints of their budget.

If they want to have a high level, “I’m going to ask ten people that question,” they can do ten people. If they want to get a random sample of 1,000 people, they could do 1,000 people. It’s in their control. The thing that concerns me and this is what you have seen in terms of best practice, is that this is only as good as the thoughtfulness of the questions that you are asking. You can almost lead yourself to the answer you want if you don’t frame the question appropriately. What entrepreneurs need is the answers that they need to hear, not necessarily the ones they want to hear. What have you seen are best practices and ways for entrepreneurs to think that through, resources that you offer or you can point people to think through how to ask the right things?

Mike, why don’t you start with that?

I will be glad to take that. First of all, we didn’t mention that one of the things we are proud of is what we call a platform we have called Smart. We mean that several ways but one of which is what we call census-based research, the platform works on your behalf. You have a lot of people over the years that spend so much time figuring out, “Who do I want to target?” When the data comes back, “I’ve got to spend all this time sifting through it.” We bring those things back, make it simple, census-based significant data. We give you an error range associated if you want to do the thumb in the air on 100 or 10, as you have mentioned or down the road you want to throw it out to 1,000 or 2,000 or whatever because you are getting ready to make line decision a much different, the platform works on your behalf. That’s one piece.

The other piece is the backgrounds of the people like myself. I didn’t introduce myself but my background, I started my career at Mondelēz. I spent twenty years combined between Nielsen and IRI, then 1Q. People like myself, the frontline and the client engagement folks, along with our execution team come from this research world. For example, the head of our execution team comes from the innovation group at Nielsen, which was bases. They are experts in laying out things the right way.

That’s typically where even if people do DIY with us there, even the world’s biggest brand names that you have heard of that we have worked with every day and I work with every day, they still tend to ping us and say, “Listen, getting ready to do this weekend. Can you take a quick look at what I’m doing? Does it meet the sniff test? By the way, do you have any guidance on whether how you want to do it differently or when I might kick things off this weekend to get the exact response?” We are here to consult and do things together. Quite honestly, we prefer it that way when people reach out to us as opposed to just do their thing without even talking to us.

One of the best practices would be to leverage and to take advantage of the bench strength and the team at 1Q.

No doubt about it. The one other thing I would mention is that we can’t call ourselves a full-service provider but at the same time, we get asked all the time, “Can you do some survey design work on the front end or analytics work on the back end?” The answer is most likely yes if we have the bandwidth or we might pull in a partner to help us, so we definitely can help in those areas.

One of the questions that came through on our community was, “What are some non-traditional ways or creative ways that you are seeing brands use 1Q either to get data and push discovery?”

I can share a couple of stories even from this week, we’ve got a new brand here in Atlanta of a group that’s building out swimming lessons. It’s a huge cost failure model in terms of it’s about $4 million to put a location to a shopping center to build a swimming pool and a shopping center. Some of the ways they were looking to utilize us are they were concerned about competition, pricing and how far people would drive to get to a location. They utilized our solution in a couple of ways. One, they use the open-ended questions to find out how much someone would be willing to pay for a swim lesson and what was the number one reason why they would pay that amount?

The hypothesis going in was they are going to be price-conscious shoppers. They want to get a good value for the swim lesson. What they found out at the end of the study was what people cared about was safety. Again, it’s common sense but the entrepreneur was more focused on how much was going to be spent on the lesson and the real value was like, “As long as they are certified, they are going to be a safe environment for my children, they are well-experienced in working with kids and can make my kids better, I will pay any price.” That open-endedness allowed them to see data points they may not have seen any other way. It’s something unique and different how they use that.

If you look at our platform on any given month in the month of November to December, pretty much every Super Bowl ad that ran this year was tested out on the 1Q platform. If you look at everything from testing, advertising, prints and packaging to smaller brands that are looking for shopper insights and brand tracking, we are giving our customers the ability to tap into those types of resources and not have to break the bank. Mike hit the nail on the head. A lot of our customers are starting with small studies. It could be 100 or 200 data points. I want to send a survey out to 100 people and ask them 2 or 3 questions.

As they began to look at those data points and filter everything out, we give them the ability to recontact those individuals. We have upwards of a 95% recontact rate in 2 or 3 weeks. Ask a few questions, get some data points, step back, think through the next steps, maybe look at a segmented population of that study and go ask follow-up questions. It has become a way for folks to use us in a non-traditional format to continue to follow up and build a useful customized panel for themselves to have access to whenever they need to.

Elliot, I would add what’s interesting about the team here at 1Q is that we get copied. If I’m assigned to a client, as well as my execution team partners are assigned to a client, we see all the aspirates as they come through, any type of requests that comes through and I’m blown away. We learn from our clients all the time, over the years we have been in existence. We have evolved and created options in our platform based on the unique nature, which people are using. I will give two quick examples. We initially started as more of quant-type research and then opened up on more of the qual-side and we get recognized now for that, by saying, being able to ask people that answered a certain way and do more why and digging on why.

One of the things that spun out of that is the fact that now people realize they can use our platform to target people and then ask them if they would like to be part of a separate study outside of 1Q but they are leveraging our platform, they go off and they own focus group work every day. We have watched that spin so much that like Doug and I are talking to, all of the sudden, one of the big things that we think is an opportunity is clinical trial research recruiting and in that space. That whole thing has this clinical trial research opportunity has been spun out of something that happened years ago. There are clients created on this unique piece and I will throw another one out to you are the big client, consumer goods client, everybody has heard of.

Years ago, they wanted to create their own website and we have people that use our platform to drive people to their sites all the time, as they are doing education and whatever. They figured out that they could use the 1Q platform because people have mobile phones in their hands, as they were developing those, they were developing a unique platform for hair and scalp. They asked people, will you take a picture of the top of your head and then answer a series of questions. We are like, “This is weird. This violates PII.” It wasn’t but we were learning all the time about our creative clients. We have world-class brands we work with that are doing unbelievable research that simply makes us that much better when we see that type of stuff that comes through.

One of the things I want to delve into a little bit is how to leverage 1Q to drive discovery and trial because one of the challenges pre-pandemic for a lot of brands was, “How do I drive trial? How do I get specific, get consumers’ and shoppers’ eyes on my product?” One of the things that I feel amiss is that entrepreneurs are innovative. They tend to be innovative around product and so forth but for whatever reason, many of them check that innovation at the door when it comes to driving discovery and they follow the route, habitual behaviors to do it. There are two questions around discovery. One is to explain to me how a brand can curate the people, customers and shoppers that they want to engage through the platform. Secondly, share some best practices on how they have leveraged the platform to drive engagement, either on a shelf or need to see on their website, etc.

I can take the first part of that. With our capabilities, we have an app that our consumers download onto their phones. They permit us to track their habits and where they go. Our geo-fencing and geo-targeting capabilities can give you insights into where people have been in the past, where they are right now or where they will be in the future. What I mean by that, you can go through and say, “Let’s do a study to everybody who has been to Target in the last 30 days or I want to ping everybody who’s sitting in a Walmart now and ask them to go take a picture of my brand on the shelf.” We’ve got young brands that don’t have the resources to go out there and pay to have a quality check on all their products, how they are being stocked or are they getting this shelf space they are asking for? They do have capabilities. It’s very expensive.

We let some young brands here on 500 locations, go out and send folks into the store. As the consumer walked into their store, their phone danged, “You’ve got a new question.” The question just asked them simply to walk to the chip aisle and take a picture of that new brand sitting on the shelf. Allow our customer to see that it was stocked the right way, things were done properly and it was there for the liking. They can do follow-up questions and then ask those folks if they wanted to try the brand out and maybe even push a coupon.

With that, it’s that geo-fencing and geo-targeting are allowing them to do that or quite simply, every time I walk into a Costco over the weekend, I know I’m going to be paid. They are going to be asking me to go try a sample or to go take a picture of consumer products. It’s using that type of technology to capture the consumer while they are onsite at a physical location. We have capabilities through a patented technology that allows us to upload in any location, as long as it got longitude latitude, we can upload those into our application. Those become part of your dynamic data points if you’ve got certain locations or regions that the entrepreneurs are trying to focus on.

We give them the capabilities to do that and put those data points of interest into our application, and then search within a 0.25 mile, 0.5 mile, 1 mile or 500 feet. Again, geo-fencing and geo-targeting capabilities to do that and then paying those consumers once we’ve got them on the hook with pushing promotional items, inviting them to come to try something out or as Mike pointed out earlier, taking through a different website and pushing them to a landing page that offers them up a buy one, get one free coupon or 20% off.

Mike, did you want to add anything there?

Doug hit most of those, Elliot. As I think about emerging brands and where we can help, Doug mentioned that this whole piece on geo-fencing, getting as close to that consumer, whether it’s looking at them demographically or looking at the fact that you are getting ready to go make a pitch to Sam’s and you would like to have some quick data on something tighter into Sam’s locations. I think that geo-fencing is key.

Doug mentioned it but there’s a little hidden secret in our platform that I mentioned to Doug when he first came on board in 2020, which is this ability to send promotional digital incentives to people on the fly as you have targeted them, whether they are inside a Walmart or wherever they may be. I will be honest and transparent and tell you that it’s not quite leveraged right now by our clients in a big way. We are trying to figure that out why isn’t it because you literally could send, if you are in distribution at 50 stores, anybody that walks in those doors of your given product, you could try to drive trial, by sending some incentives as people were at the shelf, etc.

That is there but I will tell you, we are trying to figure it out because not everybody is using it. One of the things is 1Q is about where should research be going as opposed to the fact that where has research been the last years? There are a lot of folks that are still caught in this thing out I used to do research a certain way years ago and I can’t get over the hump about doing research and then turn around and targeting someone in a marketing effort in and around the same stroke if that makes sense.

I think that’s the benefit of being an entrepreneur in an emerging brand is that you have a beginner’s mind. You don’t have that reluctance. You are willing to do whatever it takes to get that transaction. We talked a bit about discovery. Let’s talk about how a brand owner might leverage 1Q to differentiate or improve their presentation from a retail buyer to a category manager. What do you see and what are some of the ways that you can do that or can suggest to our entrepreneurs reading that they do it?

Mike, why don’t you take this one?

Let’s use Claire’s as an example. She has a big call coming up with Sam’s and, in that case, we are trying to do everything we could to provide her with insights were about her products but as tight to Sam’s consumers we could get it. in addition, we also used a feature of saying, “Why not get some pictures from 1Q members of the current set inside Sam’s stores, so that you could use those visitors also to say.” Where she goes with that? I don’t know but one of the biggest things is as tight as you can get to those retail consumers that you might be selling to as well as getting as tight dialed into the queue and what our names are all about, which is your one question away from your target audience. We came up with that. There’s a geo-fencing component but then there’s also about, “Is your target consumer women? Is it Hispanic males?” That ability to quickly get in and get tight feedback and even compare that to perhaps GP research to say, “What does the general population say versus this?” Within a couple of searches, you can’t be there.

Retailers and category managers are starved for this information, too. They want to know and they want to also understand that you are going to invest the time and effort to better understand their shoppers and what’s going on in their stores that you are going to be a value add as a vendor, not just as another product on the shelf or in the door. Let me ask a question that you may not be able to answer because it may not be something that you have discussed with entrepreneurs in the past. One of the biggest challenges in this space is raising capital. One of the keys is, “How do I sit in front of an investor and argue that I represent the best opportunity to put your money, the best place, the best path to monetization? How might somebody try to prepare to make a compelling investor pitch, leverage the 1Q platform to change that?

I’m actually in the process of doing that for 1Q. I’m working with our founder to raise capital for us and we are looking at a pretty large Series A coming into this year. We have talked to a lot of these investors and then began to talk about the platform that we have. It’s unique to be able to bring data points and data sets to them that they were not used to seeing. In the software SaaS space, they’ve got a very confined box with your customer acquisition costs, your LTV and do your ratios line up to their ratios and if so, then you are on board to play with them and if not, then they go onto the next one. I will share a story of a brand that we started working with here, an emerging brand.

A gentleman came over from a large distributor. He’s taking a chance on a new brand. He’s helping them get it going. It’s an entrepreneur mindset. He walked into a big meeting, as he began to wrap up this meeting, he’s quoting data points and quoting all the research he had done on the 1Q platform. I stopped him and said, “Where did you come up with the idea to go pull this data? We never see people do this. We never see people forethought, walk-in, do data, provide these insights prior to the meeting.” He’s like, “I came up with this new platform called 1Q. It was cheap, easy and here’s my data.” It was such a refreshing point that so many people in times of relying on consultancies that are so expensive, full-service ad firms that produce a great product at the end require a large investment on the front end. It’s that big scary black box that has always been coveted by the end-user that, “They know more than I do. I’m not capable enough to go do this, I’m not smart enough or I don’t have the insights to go do this.”

What we are trying to break down those barriers as 1Q is to tell those entrepreneurs and those brand managers, “You are capable. You do have the capabilities now with 1Q to tap into the consumer very quickly, affordably, it’s a fixed cost but more importantly, you are having the same access to consumers that some of the largest brands in America are using now.” It’s no different. To your point earlier, it’s all about the question and we can help with that. We can help construct the survey to get the most research and the most value-added. At the end of the day, this tool allows the same access to consumers that the big boys have. The veil of secrecy is now removed.

I would think two things. One is that every investor I know and being an investor as well as pretty, well-ingrained bullshit, especially for chief revenue officers. Doug, sorry but when the radar goes off the most, CRO walks in the room and he was like, “Get ready. Here’s a bunch of bullshit.”

Here comes the pitch.

In all seriousness, there are elements of every pitch in every conversation with an investor in which you are making assertions that are opening up the potential for the bullshit meter to redline. I would think that it, taking a few of those assertions and being able to put some data points around them, even if it’s a small number of data points to say, “We have talked to 100 customers. We talked to 100 shoppers and they reinforce this.” Also, It’s your ability as an entrepreneur to use data and leverage data. My admonition to everybody reading as an entrepreneur is that I want everybody to push innovation further into their businesses.

We stop often at product and brand. Maybe we add a little bit into marketing but we miss the ways that we can push innovation and show up differently in all of the various facets of our business, whether that’s described driving discovery, engaging with our shoppers, that’s changing the dialogue and the presentation to an investor. Innovation should be pervasive in an organization and what drives innovation is insight. It’s that simple. If you don’t know what’s broken or different, you can’t change it.

One point I will make on that with our open-ended questions, it’s sometimes shocking for our customers to believe they get so much information for a dollar. We have worked with and Mike mentioned, a major retail brand of shampoo and they were looking at a new line in the teen segment. They realized that the teenage boys with scalp issues aren’t telling them a whole lot of people that got scalp issues and the mom is buying the brand. There was a huge major disconnect. How can they go about connecting those gaps? They asked a general question out to teenage boys like, “What are some topics you can talk to your parents about?” They’ve got everything from such an answer of friends, drugs, alcohol, fear with grades and they were able to gather these open-ended paragraph-long responses and dive into the issue that was facing these kids.

I used that as an example because you are right there. There is a high altitude of a bullshit meter for these investors. When you can walk to the table with paragraphs of information from your consumers saying, “This is why I believe in the brand. This is why I trusted. This is why I buy it.” You can replicate that over and over again. It removes any air of BS and puts it right in front of that investor like, “This is the real deal going on in the marketplace. Let’s go ask him more people. Let’s ask him again right now.”

Also, it helps you uncover when your supposition is wrong before you go in there right away.

Elliot, by the way, if you don’t mind, I’m totally on board with you about, typically when I’m talking to all of my clients, I’m telling them, “Here’s the top ten most common use cases.” If you turn that table and say, “What are the top three for the emerging brands and how we help?” Innovation to me would be number one. There’s a term that I use here a lot that I wish I had patented but it’s called Test Early, Test Often. You can afford to Test Early, Test Often with 1Q. You are hearing that from a person like myself who spent years combined at Nielsen and IRI, where we were saying, “You need to do a Bases two for the next phase of your research and that might be a six-figure or more proposition.” By the way, you will have results in six months.

To come back to anybody on the phone here and say, “I can’t afford to do that yet. I’m in a dilemma because I can’t afford to fail like the P&G’s in the world do when they are throwing out ideas all the time. It becomes important but this whole thing of Test Early and Test Often is one thing and the affordability to do so. The other thing that’s unique about 1Q is this infinite recontact capability which is interesting because we have people that have reformulated products based on the fact that they initially found people. They’ve got them to try their product, they graded them a certain way, told them that these are the three things wrong, where they went back reformulated, then went back to those same people in our research and said, “Can we now mail this product to your house to try and then we will research you down the road?” We have had people reformulate. Again, it’s this Test Early, Test Often that I can afford to do so but also this idea of infinite recontacts, which is important through the process.

One last thought and I will stop yapping but the other thing too, about what’s powerful is let’s say, you are in a buyer meeting with Sam’s that Claire has coming up and that buyer says, “I have a question. Can you answer it?” She could probably on the fly or right after that meeting going on, she might be able to answer that question as opposed to going back to a legacy approach research provider and getting an answer six months down the road and six figures later, whatever it may be.

Doug made the point earlier that research is not an option for any of the brands at this stage of the game. They have been doing it either somewhat blind or they have been doing it very informally and very inefficiently. What you just said, Mike is another way of phrasing this growth hack mentality. It makes an assumption, makes an assertion, and then go validate it. Go see if it’s true or not. I would love both of your comments on this. One of the challenges I think a lot of brands struggle with is message hierarchy. They try to be everything to everybody on tactics. Keto or paleo, we are organic, vegan, this or that and at the end of the day, it means nothing to the consumer. You’ve got a very short window of opportunity to capture who that consumer is and what they are looking for. By the way, I’m breaking my own rule because I hate the term consumer. I have been trying to adopt another contributor or something else but I’m not sold on that one either.

We will use it if you come up with it.

I think the consumer is too one-sided but I digress. That ability to adapt that mad scientist mentality where I’m constantly making assertions or assumptions and then trying to break them is so important to be able to be capital efficient and effective so that you fail quickly. You are wrong fast because there’s no way in my experience to not be wrong, not fail or miss. You are going to do that as an entrepreneur. If you are not doing that, you are not trying hard enough. You are not being creative or innovative enough but the faster you can realize, “I should have gone right and I went left.” The less existential the consequence of that right or left becomes. How do you recommend brands adopt that? Where do they go to build that process in their minds in terms of, “I’m going to consistently iterate and test and try?”

I would start with if you would think about the history of brands and we all can think of great brands that faded. They were well-established brands. Bill Gates’, “If you are not changing as fast internally as the environments changing externally, you are going to fail.” What I would challenge entrepreneurs with is a lot of value is access. Having access to that date and having to be affordable, 1Q offers. If you think about it in terms of 1Q, whether it’s a quarterly check or a monthly check that things are going and the assumptions you have made are still in line with the brand and the folks that you are targeting, you’ve got that capability now.

Even more importantly is once you do figure it out, you have cracked the code, your sales are expanding, your distribution is expanding, you are finally over that hump and you are going in the right direction is continue to use research on the backside to ensure that things aren’t changing? If you look at what’s happened in 2020, the playbook has been thrown out the window. The way we thought consumers bought, the way they buy now and what influences these purchase decisions are completely different. The people that are accepting that and recognizing that they’ve got to figure out how to understand how those changes have unfolded and what that means to the end-user, it’s going to continue to go down in the wrong direction. It’s using that research, having access to that research and then gut-checking yourself along the way. It doesn’t have to be a huge sample size. It could be 3 or 4 questions to 100 people just to make you feel that we are not missing the point here. We are still going in the right direction.

That’s all great advice. I want to circle back to a point that both of you have made a couple of times. We talked about message hierarchy and how to do it. A lot of times, what I will see people do is ask the question, rank which of these are important to you and you are limiting it but you both have made mention about the benefit of asking open-ended questions and just getting out of the way and being able to do that. Talk a little bit more about that either one of you.

First of all, I love to watch the innovation and concept work that goes on every day with my clients and again, I continue to learn as well. This whole thing of we were constantly doing aided versus unaided for clients, you mentioned, Elliott, that this is what every brand and company struggles with this. Let’s figure out what we would really do and what we would do well. Let’s start marketing our message around it. I work with some non-profits that feel like that they are getting blended in a seed, especially during the COVID war with everybody else. How do we get the message tighter to people and we are testing that non-stop? The other thing I would say is this whole thing of aided or unaided and ability, we could have separate sales going at the same time and see what your reaction gets back or your responses you get back.

The other thing I wanted to mention was that a lot of people assume that the 1Q platform and power users might be your marketing and sales contacts inside an organization. What’s interesting is I have people that R&D functions and product research people with inside an organization that might be doing research everywhere from ten years out to one month before launch. They were again using this iterative process but also using us to recontact people throughout that cycle and do it affordably. There are a lot we can share. If Doug answers a little bit different, I would have probably said if there’s someone that was looking for some advice on the best process or refining a process, I would say, “Let people like myself or someone on the 1Q team that has that background and sees a lot, let us sit down and collectively talk and say, ‘What’s your process now? Let us give some recommendations on where we can improve and do it affordably throughout that process. get a little data point here where you are a little bit blind.’” Again, not to rebuild. I tell people this all the time. Don’t redo what you have had in place because it’s working to some degree, you wouldn’t be where you are at now. However, is there a way you can enhance it and make it better with tools that are around now like 1Q that didn’t use to exist years ago?

Doug, anything to add to Mike’s comments?

You hit it right on the head.

I’m a fan of open-ended and I am because you are not leading somebody to the conclusion that you want. You don’t run that risk and you also are inviting them in to say something, which is completely different. Mike, you mentioned engaging you and so forth. One of the questions that came up is census is primarily a do-it-yourself platform and you said that you would like to think of it as do-it-together. If someone wants to engage you or someone on the team for some help or some guidance, is that an additional expense? That’s the question.

Not right now by no means, especially if you would come to talk to people like myself in the client engagement functionality. It’s a very good question because that is my role. It’s to help my clients to be successful. The other thing too is if I have a new client that comes in that hasn’t spoken to me first and says, “Doug assigns it to me or whatever.” Whether they want to talk to me or not, I eventually going to reach out to them and say, “What are you trying to do and how can I help?” Now, if it evolves into a client sitting down and saying, “We don’t have a survey design function. Can you guys go off and design a survey for us over here?” we might say, “We could do that for you. Our professional services team, our execution team could provide you a professional services fee to do so if you don’t have that function or on the back end, if he wants to do additional analysis or whatever, we might need to pull in someone else and there might be a professional service fee there.” It’s not going to be some big of a deal and we will be upfront if that ever occurs. Most likely, you will never be going to get one from me for my consulting advice. It’s only with you go and say, “We want someone to execute everything for us and we don’t have an idea of what we are doing, which I don’t think you guys fall into that camp as my guess.

I would just piggyback on that. We recognize that a lot of people are starting to use tools like this in the past. I have never done something like this, so it is new, especially on the entrepreneur side. All of our new customers are hand-holding a bit of advice from folks like Mike, Lori or Dean, on our sale side. They were getting that pre-purchase advice and best practices and here’s how I would do it then they all come from that research and advertising background. Again, to the hand holding piece, we want our customers to come back. We want them to have a good experience, especially since this is the first time. Oftentimes what we are doing is that hand-holding at no additional costs or the initial process, get them launched, get them going.

Once the customer sees how easy it is to do, again, it’s that fear or that veil of how hard it is to get something like this done. They realize how easy it is and it can be done instantaneously. It doesn’t take a lot of prep work. It’s just common sense, get creative and then you will find that process through best practices. Once that first survey goes out, we generally see our customers come back with very little or no interaction with us. That reciprocates that point of getting over that hurdle of that first survey. Once it’s launched, it’s like, “It wasn’t that bad.”

I admire the level of attention that you are spending on these young emerging brands because I think you are looking and I’m not trying to put words into your mouth but you seemingly from the surface, have been looking at it as an LTV proposition. That we engage these brands when they are young and they are going to stay engaged through their life cycle and we are going to be building good loyal long-term customers because we are helping them by providing them insight, making them potentially more successful than their competitors and they are going to stick with us. It’s a win-win proposition so you are investing a bit in the front end on these smaller brands but they are going to be there with you in the long-term.

Elliot, I will add one other thing too about my background. When I was at IRI for years, I primarily worked on the P&G business and then I went to Nielsen for 12 or 13 years. One of the things that Nielsen kept asking me was, “Mike, do you want to go and take over this role on the P&G business or the Coca-Cola business.” I told them, “No, I want to be in this growing space.” We called it premier at the time. It was emerging brands that had done really well and started perhaps in the US and then expanding into other markets. One of the things I loved about it was less bureaucracy to get to the decision-makers and get the insights to the people and not have it filtered in such a way, so that was one thing. Also, to be quite honest, be part of something and watch it grow and knowing that you had a hand in that. To me, there are a lot of personal satisfaction there.

I certainly the same way. One more question and then I want to turn it back to you guys to provide the readers the opportunity if they want to engage and learn more about how to do so. My last question is more of a statement in which I would either like you to call bullshit on or to add color to and that is, all of this ability to collect data to get insights and learnings, it’s only as good as your plan to leverage it and to use it.

What I see too often is people who go out and get data as a form of reinforcement or for a sense of trying to drive some security or sense of awareness but they have no plan before taking action to it. My strong recommendation is that before you ever decide to engage with a platform such as 1Q or anything else, start with the end result in mind. What is it that you want to accomplish? It’s because you are going to wind up building a better tool to get you there if you know. If you can’t answer what it is that I want to accomplish then you are not ready for this. That’s a comment that I’m opening to you to either reinforce or challenge.

I would be glad to answer that. There’s a comment I heard many years ago from a guy I highly respected at P&G and his comment was, “Information without action is overhead.” I was going through the years of my career where all of a sudden, there’s a new data source that comes out. Years ago, with daily store-level data, everybody was enamored with it but at the end of the day, the only people that could act on that were Pepsi and Coke. The people that had people in the stores, it did you no good to make that investment upfront because you actually could not act on it nor can the retailer act on it. There’s one thing about your own organization and its ability to take action. If you are not going to be able to take action, be honest with yourself. There’s no reason to invest. It might be nice to know but if you can’t act on it, that’s one thing.

The other thing I would argue is if you are working with a retail partner and you are trying to get new distribution or whatever, if you know that they are not going to act on it, they might be demanding that you go ahead at Kroger that you have to buy 84.51 data. That’s one thing that Kroger might decide on that data if you brought it in or some type of data. If you know that buyer is not going to take action as well, there are a couple of different points to that action element, Elliot. It’s not only your own organization but whoever you are pitching that to can they act on it as well and it’s not you’ve got to ask yourself.

I would just follow up with you. I think setting yourself up for failure if you don’t have a plan, it’s great to reinforce your thoughts. Go do some quick research. If it tells you, “You are right,” you pat yourself on the back and you walk away and you were like, “Job’s done.” I think that’s where we start to see people fail. You’ve got this data now at your fingertips. You’ve got a tool that you’ve got access to. Once you do the outreach and you make the decision to move forward, I love the idea of backing in from the end result to how you get there. It’s like going to the gym. You are going to tell yourself you are going to lose weight. You are sitting on the couch on Saturday afternoon, eat a bowl of ice cream and you haven’t done any exercise for the day. It’s like, “I haven’t gone to the gym.”

I think if you are going to make that commitment, go do research, try to understand what the problem is and how to fix it. You’ve got to make that commitment to follow through. Each day, get better at your craft, become that entrepreneur that you have always wanted to be by trying new things, stubbing your toe, don’t have a fear of failure but just fail fast and recourse correct. If you keep that mentality, you continue to go upstream and you come out the other side.

If I’m reading, I want to learn more and get a sense of the platform and so forth, how would you direct those reading?

They can reach out to Mike. Mike is available at MikeM@1Q.com or they can go to the 1Q website and click on book a demo and we will set them up with one of our client engagement specialists. They will show them the platform and answer questions and do a deep dive into how we can help.

I would add, Elliot, I’m a simple email and phone call away so I’m more than happy to help.

We are going to push everyone to you, Mike. I was excited to have this conversation because again, anything that democratizes this business, the tides are changing. If you look at data, it’s source-dependent. These are the two data points that keep me up at night. It was an article I read in Forbes from 2009 to 2019, roughly $18 billion in market share has moved from the top 25 CPG companies to emerging brands. Over that same span, somewhere between 80% and 90% of CPG brands that have started had failed within two years. A lot of that has to do with the fact that there has been a dissymmetry in resource availability.

One of those places has been in insights and the ability to get an understanding of what consumer perception is and what’s going on and to drive awareness and all of those things. Tools like 1Q excite the hell out of me because it begins to democratize the playing field. Ultimately, it’s the innovators and entrepreneurs who are reading here now. They are the change agents. They are the ones that are bringing the products to market that are improving human health and planet health and all of those other things. It’s great what you are doing.

I wanted to take a minute to call that out and to say I appreciate tools like this being made available and accessible to brands at an early stage regardless of budget. I appreciate the fact that you are spending as much time as you are with our constituency and trying to get them in and seeing the long-term potential of them because we certainly feel that they have it. Thanks so much for joining. Appreciate it very much. We will see you all next time.

Thank you, Elliot.

Important Links

• 1Q

• Doug Danowski – LinkedIn

• Mike Murphy – LinkedIn

• MikeM@1Q.com

• Forbes – Article

About Mike Murphy

Proven sales & marketing executive with global consulting expertise. Team leader focused on continuous improvement that consistently exceeds corporate goals. Brings enthusiasm, new ideas & consultative sales approach to companies in need of growing existing & new markets. Strengths include:

• P&L Optimization
• Building C-level relationships
• Go-To-Market Strategy & Execution
• Team Leadership
• Marketing ROI
• Turning data into actionable insights to drive business outcomes

About Doug Danowski

Cultivates outstanding team cultures rallied around business objectives with rock-bottom turnover and expectational performance▸▸

Leveraging strong experience in both large- and medium-sized organizations as well as cold startups ▸▸

KEY AREAS OF EXPERIENCE

▸ Turning Around Struggling Operations

▸ Driving Rapid Growth

▸ Deploying Industry-Leading Growth Best Practices

▸ Leveraging Cutting-Edge IT Software & Services

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