In this Q&A, DTC Daily speaks to Nadim Sadek, CEO of online brand management platform, proquoᵃⁱ. Nadim outlines how proquoᵃⁱ's daily brand guidance is helping DTCs grow, how the company justifies its place in DTCs’ budgets, and reveals that to manage your brand, you must manage its relationship with people.

DTC Daily: Can you quickly explain what proquoᵃⁱ does?

Nadim Sadek: proquoᵃⁱ is a Brand Management Platform that helps small and medium sized DTC businesses get bigger, faster. We made the company to help DTCs and other SMEs win in today’s world, where people have endless amounts of brands to choose from. 

We’ve proven that brands grow when they maximise the strength of their relationship with people. So, we’ve created a Relationship Management Platform which shows you how people feel and think about your brand each day, relative to your competition and relative to your category.

And, as our name suggests, proquoᵃⁱ  has a powerful AI engine which looks at your brand and tells you what you should do to consistently grow. 

What sort of data can proquoᵃⁱ tap into for brand management?

We understand the state of a brand by triangulating what people think and feel about it, how it performs in market and how the world around the brand affects it.

To do that, we rely on three types of data:

Sentiment data: We  understand both peoples’ conscious and subconscious feelings and thoughts. We splice that together with social listening to form a complete picture of how people fundamentally feel about their relationship with a brand, its competition and the category it operates in. Our platform is always on - we speak to 200 people on the first day and on average 25 people each and every day thereafter. So you get a constant stream of people’s feelings and thoughts across your brand, your competition and your category.

Commercial data: We encourage our customers to upload their commercial data in proquoᵃⁱ . This can include just about anything, like sales, market share, rate of sale, distribution, campaign spend and more. The more information you share with proquoᵃⁱ, the better our AI understands how changes in your brand’s sentiment data affects your commercial results. 

External events data: This is data like weather, news, sporting events and more. All of which we know can realistically have a direct impact on the way a brand performs. We ingest this into our platform too. 

With these three pieces of data, we can tell you where you stand, where you’re going and what you need to do next to maximise your brand’s success. Put simply, to get bigger, faster.

Why is brand management so important for DTC brands? 

Today anything and everything is a brand. Any idea can be brought to reality. It’s never been more accessible. Consequently, people have never had more brands to choose from. 

So, in today’s world, the most important thing to manage for a brand is the relationship people have with it. proquoᵃⁱ  is the only brand management platform set up to understand how people relate to brands while helping optimise those relationships.

In the DTC world, managing relationships with people is paramount. But a lot of people miss the main point - our relationships are driven by fundamental human conditions. 

Nadim Sadek, CEO, proquoᵃⁱ

At proquoᵃⁱ , we’ve proven there are numerous drivers which people use to relate to each other and to relate to brands. They include things like: do you find the other party attractive? Aspirational? Empathetic? Do you find it honest? Are they transparent? Do they have integrity? There are 16 of these! 

For brands in the DTC space, brand management is relationship management. And what’s so great about the proquoᵃⁱ framework is that it centres around maximising your relationship with people. You get that right, you grow. 

What differences do you see in the utility large brands currently get, compared to what smaller brands and SMEs will get with proquoᵃⁱ ? 

The real difference is in hunger. Smaller brands, and a lot of brands in the DTC space, have a great hunger to succeed. Large brands – I’m not saying they’re complacent – but they have such a momentum. They know they can roll from one week to the next and survive. The smaller ones really need to run every day in order to survive and I think the utility that the proquoᵃⁱ platform provides is much greater to DTC and smaller brands in general. 

We’re providing something that’s never been available before in terms of technology, in terms of our Relationship Framework and in terms of our pricing. 

For always-on brand guidance, our products start at just £500 per month ($600 per month for US brands). We’ve tried to make it a no-brainer for the hungry, scaling, SME brands. 

Why is proquoᵃⁱ a good fit for DTC brands? 

Whenever you’re running a business, creating, managing & optimising a brand is a huge part of it. You need to understand whether the money you’re investing in it is worth its weight. 

proquoᵃⁱ allows you to understand the everyday moods of your marketplace. What your competitors are doing. Whether what you’re doing is positively impacting your brand as much as it could or should be. 

We essentially make sure the hard work you’re doing works the hardest for you. And we make sure the investments you’re making in your brand are driving growth. proquoᵃⁱ provides immediate value to anyone hoping to make a brand the centre part of their business.

We also understand that DTCs are often on tight budgets, and want proof of concept before investing. With this in mind, we are offering brands a 30 day free trial with proquoᵃⁱ , so we can prove our value. That’s available at www.proquoai.com. 

What does the future hold for proquoᵃⁱ? 

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.