Attest, a leading consumer research platform, launches a campaign urging brands to finally remove guesswork from their marketing playbook for good.

To support the campaign launch, Attest is a brand campaign video to showcase the dangers facing brands who rely on instinct instead of data when making high-stakes decisions.

The supporting research, conducted on Attest’s own platform, reveals that brand loyalty is something they can no longer rely on to save misfiring campaigns.

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The data finds:

• 8 in ten (88%) Americans say they are now willing to try different products and services due to price increases caused by inflation.

• In fact, the vast majority of people (at 80%) feel that brands are involved in “greedflation” (i.e. using inflation as an excuse to hike prices).

I want to report a brand crime! Bringing the Guesswork Crime Lab video to life

To bring Attest’s campaign fully to life – with a dose of well-intentioned humor – Attest CEO and founder Jeremy King donned a lab coat to walk us through the Guesswork Crime Lab, where the most salacious brand crimes are investigated for their lack of consumer forethought.

The campaign is rooted in reality as Jeremy started his career as a scientist focused on behavior, genetics and ecology, long before he founded Attest in 2015. With this background, he relies on empiricism, exploring hypotheses, uncovering paradigms and using data to make decisions. When he moved to the world of business, he was shocked by how little a role hard data played in critical business decisions and the messes left behind by decisions devoid of research.

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The fictional environment will be instantly recognizable to marketers the world over who have been forced to rely solely on gut instinct.

“In my early days as a scientist, I learned why guesswork is practically illegal in that world,” said Jeremy King, CEO and Founder of Attest. “Personal bias can derail even the greatest of experiments, resulting in massive, costly mistakes.”

“Yet, when I was just starting to dream up the idea for Attest, I was shocked to see that businesses often don’t make decisions with the same inputs and rigor as science demands. It happens constantly in the business world – even though the stakes are just as high. Major decisions unbacked by data are being made based on nothing more than gut instinct – which ends up having fatal consequences.”

“This campaign, albeit playful in tone, touches upon a very serious problem in business today. Whether a brand is handling the backlash from a high-profile controversy, adjusting prices due to inflation or strategizing on how best to reach their next wave of growth, you can easily trace the biggest PR, advertising and product disasters back to one simple fact: instead of doing their research, brands made big calls based on guesswork.”

“At Attest, we believe access to great research creates an unfair advantage, and it’s an advantage we want more people to have. With this campaign, we hope to remove the word ‘guesswork’ from marketers’ vocabulary once and for all.”

The price paid by brands for marketing missteps & controversy.

Attest is a platform that exists to put quality insights into more people’s hands by making it less of a big deal to conduct regular research. And with this campaign, Attest wants brands to avoid the disasters Jeremy mentions and stay out of the spotlight for all the wrong reasons.

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To do this, the research also delved into consumers’ views on marketing missteps and high-profile controversies:

• An accusation of racism when a brand is involved in a controversy is the top issue that concerns the public (at 42%). This is followed by accusations of discrimination (based on people with disabilities, religion, and sexual orientation) and poor treatment of employees (both at 35%).

• A majority of Americans want brands to fess up when they’ve messed up – 55% want a brand involved in a high-profile controversy to provide full transparency and steps on how they will fix it. Meanwhile, 42% will be happy with the issuance of a public apology and 26% are much less patient and will boycott/stop buying a brand’s products and services “immediately” due to a controversy.

• While social media plays a key role for 15% of consumers, who will either unfollow a brand or publish public posts disapproving of a company involved in a controversy.

To view Attest’s other brand video on Guesswork Industries, where employees rely on some interesting methods to figure out what their consumers want, click here.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in London and New York, Attest is a consumer research platform that makes doing regular research less of a big deal. Attest’s easy-to-use, self-serve dashboard is coupled with on-demand research expertise.

Some of the notable brands leveraging continuous insights to harness the ever-changing consumer landscape include Unilever, Santander, Walgreens/Boots, Klarna, Brew Dr. Kombucha, Trustpilot, JCDecaux among many others. To date, Attest has raised >$100 million in venture capital with backing from investors such as Kismet, Schroders, and NEA.