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Darnel Moore, President and CEOIn an interview with CIO Applications, Darnel Moore, President & CEO of Distinct.ly Mktg, Inc., explains how their solution puts an ear to the market’s pulse to help clients understand their target audience and provide custom products/services.
It would be great if you could give our readers a brief overview of Distinct.ly Mktg, Inc.
Distinct.ly Mktg, Inc. helps you identify the audience and marketing channels unaffected by your business and connect them. Be it an SME or a large enterprise, everyone has trouble connecting the dots between the information they have and their understanding of their customers. We believe this is due to some inherent bias that crept up during the initial target audience analysis.
Our business is centered around cognitive bias and being able to help you understand biases of people, information systems in the way they were designed, and the prejudices with which you are looking at your business.
We reviewed and found that 98 percent of businesses in the United States are small businesses, of which 48 percent are businesses led by people of diverse ethnicities. That allows us to apply advanced technologies to analyze information to make a client’s marketing insights simple and more impactful.
If you had to talk about the recent pain points in the market, what would those be? Has the pandemic brought any new challenge to the market?
The pandemic made the world stop. It made businesses stop, made people stop, and examined what they are doing and who they are doing it for. It made us look in the mirror and re-evaluate our routines and disciplines. Be it outdated or mundane information systems or, companies had had the opportunity to slow down to re-examine the personal choices that they were making and how they converted to consumer decisions. Businesses are now hard-pinned to connect with the market and include customers in their decision-making. Consumers now demand that the companies be forthcoming to them on everything from the source of their materials to the kind of people they hire for the task.
Our business is centered around cognitive bias and being able to help you understand biases of people, the biases of your information systems in the way they were designed, and the biases with which you are looking at your business
How exactly does your solution help your clients?
Our solution is a combination of first, second, and third-party information. What we’ve done is democratize analytics. SME businesses have data, but they don’t know what’s next and how to apply it in the market effectively. That’s where Distict.ly comes in. We gather information from 80 plus different sources about a company’s product and target audience. The data includes facts and figures on everything from defense to weather bureau to share the correct insights with the clients. So, for example, based on weather patterns, we could tell a supermarket client to start doubling up their buys before the climate changes for the worst. We told them to tell their clients to buy their items now before the advent of unfavorable times. They took that message and delivered it with a level of kindness that the customers quickly adopted. As a re-sult, during the bad weather conditions, the client was able to gain good profits.
We also have our own pool of people that we survey. We ask them close to 240 questions on every possible topic. Then, using that data, we create the personality archetypes and qualities around people within the United States at the zip code level. We then use that data to help clients find the audience who would like to purchase their product.
What are the key factors that differentiate Distinct.ly from its peers in the market?
The significant factor differentiating us from our peers in the market is our ability to understand the bias in information, how it’s presented, and how the audience is targeted. Many large organizations don’t know much about their target audience and try to make intelligent guesses on the strategies to entice them towards their products. So they base their decisions primarily on what fits their preferred data model. However, they also need to consider what biases are programmed into the artificial intelligence based on such models.
One example of an unintentional bias entering a data model is the ‘Stop-and-Frisk’ practice that the NYPD implemented in 1998. Though the practice was introduced to stop crimes preemp-tively, the programmed model ended up correlating crime with specific groups of people over the others based on their population in particular neighborhoods. As a result, the practice was deemed unconstitutional and later abolished.
So, as you can see, we have a lot of work to do. We are taking the yeoman effort to make the invisible visible by removing bias from how people are looked at, how the information systems are designed, and the output that comes from this.
What are the future plans for your organization? Any expansion plans or new solutions you are trying to come up with?
Our next venture is a product dedicated to helping people understand their inherent biases and showing them ways to improve themselves. Distinct.ly came out of the notion that people can’t see people anymore and businesses can’t see people anymore. Our solution solved the former concern but not the latter part. We will now move to find ways to connect people better. In that pursuit, we aspire to launch Distinct.ly Me, a platform that incentivizes people to visit particular neighborhoods to better understand their residents. We believe this approach will help them become the best version of themselves.
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