Matt Britton — Founder & CEO, Suzy
Matt talks to TheNextGag about getting Kevin Durant as an investor, taking the guesswork out of the business equation and why digital focus groups are the future.
Matt Britton is the Founder & CEO of Suzy, a consumer intelligence platform, in the USA.
Matt’s keen talent for connecting the dots between the consumer culture of today and the business/tech trends of tomorrow is what separates him and offers unparalleled value for his clients and investors.
Matt is recognized as America’s leading expert on the millennial generation — he literally wrote the book on it, authoring bestselling business title, YouthNation — and has consulted for over half of the Fortune 500.
His impressive and always-dynamic career took hold when he founded MRY (formerly Mr Youth), a digital and social media marketing services agency, in 2002. He grew MRY from a one-person startup to a global powerhouse with more than 500 employees, selling the company to LBi International (now part of Publicis Groupe) in 2011. Over the course of Matt’s 14-year tenure at MRY, he helped prominent Global corporations including Microsoft, Procter & Gamble, Ford Motors, Visa, and Google develop innovative strategies and successfully launch products aimed at the Millennial Generation.
Following MRY’s acquisition, Matt stayed on as Chairman and Founding partner, and in 2016, he used his vast speaking experience to join Summit Series as CEO. There, he helped to organize and run conferences geared toward young entrepreneurs, artists and activists.
Then, in 2017, Matt joined Crowdtap, an influencer marketing company he incubated and spun-off during his time at MRY, as CEO. In true entrepreneurial style, Matt saw how saturated the influencer space had become since founding Crowdtap, while also recognizing the need for more insight-driven decision making among brands.
The two realizations led Matt to a major business pivot and the creation of Suzy, a one-of-a-kind technology platform that harnesses collective insights from an owned and operated network of millions of consumers worldwide to deliver real-time intelligence.
Matt and his team are now bringing the voice of real consumers directly to brands at scale and at the speed of culture. Suzy helps companies like Netflix, Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Citibank, Verizon, Nintendo and Nestle, among others, validate critical assumptions so they can focus on creating compelling new products, developing effective marketing strategies, and validating direct offers that increase conversion, improve path-to-purchase and drive growth.
THENEXTGAG: WHY DID YOU DECIDED TO LAUNCH SUZY AT SXSW ON SUCH A BIG STAGE RATHER THAN DO A SOFT LAUNCH ?
MATT BRITTON: We actually did a soft launch in the fourth quarter last year.
Suzy itself came from another company called Crowdtap, and we pivoted the business model. So, there were some clients that were using the old platform in a way that was applicable to where we wanted to take it. So, we were slowly transitioning in terms of the brand and the data forms in Q4 of 2017.
And then we thought SXSW was a good time to come up because there is a lot of media, big brands, attention, partnership attention in Austin. I personally have a lot of experience doing events there over the last decade. And the timing just worked for us to launch the brand.
TNG: HOW WAS THE REACTION ?
MB: It was fantastic. We demoed the product over 150 times to brand marketers. We’ve had really great feedback. We built a lot of awareness and excitement over what we are trying to accomplish.
TNG: WERE YOU SURPRISED BY THAT KIND OF REACTION ?
MB: I wasn’t because we had shown it to so many clients over the months prior. And every time we’d showed a client, they were super excited about it. So I wasn’t surprised that we were able to get some great reaction in person. Obviously, it was humbling to see. And it was great. But it was something that we were expecting to be honest.
TNG: WHAT WOULD YOU SAY IS SUZY REPLACING RIGHT NOW IN THE MARKETER’S PLAYBOOK ?
MB: It basically helps them in their everyday decision-making. So, there are some decisions that marketers want to test via long-form research. But, there are very few decisions that they are actually able to invest in long-form research to test. Because A) it is costly B) they need to make decisions a lot quicker than traditional research can turn over for them.
About 99% of decisions that are made right now of businesses are made on assumptions. With one or two assumptions in isolation, you could probably get away with it. But as you are making more and more assumptions over time, the aggregate impact of those could be very costly for businesses.
What Suzy really does is allow for brands to test decisions on basically anything every step of the way. So by the time, they get to a big decision, they are pretty confident that they are either testing the right thing or they are moving forward within the right direction.
What Suzy does is serve as a crystal ball.
TNG: HOW DO YOU SEE IT USED RIGHT NOW BY MARKETERS ?
MB: There are really three main use cases.
One of which is research and development teams. They are used in innovation. Companies that have departments to push out new products and services into the development pipeline. They have found to be really interesting because what Suzy does is serve as a crystal ball for them. It tells marketers what consumers want in the future versus what they’ve been doing in the past. And companies who are trying to work towards the future of new products, they need to understand where things are going.
Two is insights, traditional insights departments, consumer insights departments within large organizations. They have research tools to help uncover insights. But what they don’t have are research tools that can do it as quickly. When they get asked by their colleagues “Are our consumers using Snapchat now more than a month ago ?”. They can find that our pretty easily. Or “What did they think of the awards show last night ?” They can find that our pretty easily because we have that speed.
And then third is brand marketers who are using it to test creative, creative concepts, copy, imagery, positioning, packaging ..
Those are really the three types of customers.
TNG: HOW DO YOU CHARGE ? IS IT A MONTHLY BASIS ?
MB: It is an annual licence, and some partners sign on for 2–3 years at a time.
TNG: SO THEY CAN USE IT AS MUCH AS THEY CAN ?
MB: Well, they are different licence tiers. And each licence tier come with a certain set of actions.
TNG: WHO IS IT MOST SUITED FOR ? THE CMO-LEVEL ? THE DIRECTOR-LEVEL ? THE BRAND MANAGER LEVEL ?
MB: It is not really for CMOs. I mean, CMOs could use it and some do. But most CMOs are much more focused on the high level vision. This is really for the people that have their creative reports with the CMO, like recommandations. And then can do so with confidence.
If a client walks in and say “This red shirt is going to be the next thing.” How do you know that ? And what assumptions led you to doing so ? You look at how marketers judge agency ideas. Sometimes, an agency would come to pitch an idea and the agency didn’t test that. They just think that for whatever reason it’s a good idea. And then the marketer subjectively may or may not like it. But there is usually no data behind it like if the agency asked consumers “Is it going to be effective ? Is that what you want ?” And the brand checks with their consumers to basically validate whatever assumptions is. And usually, the answer is no. And that’s really what we want to do.
Obviously, there is always going to be room for too many interpretations and gut instinct … But, we are just providing another seat at the table in the form of a million consumers aggregated into one. It just creates another decision making variable to the equation.
I love the software business model as it is a true meritocracy. If you have a great product, it rises to the top.
TNG: IN A FEW MONTHS, IT WILL BE ONE YEAR SINCE YOU PIVOTED. HOW WILL YOU EVALUATE SUCCESS FOR THAT FIRST YEAR ?
MB: I think it has been a wild ride. Lots of ups, lots of downs. It’s the first time I have been running an adtech company. My background is in the agency world. I started and built an agency over fifteen years, which was acquired by the Publicis Groupe.
I love the software business model as it is a true meritocracy. In that if you have a great product, it rises to the top. While often in the agency world, it is who is golfing buddy with the CMO and often the best work never gets made. You are really controlling your own destiny.
I think, for us, challenges have been recruiting engineering and specialized talent that can really help really realize our ambitions in terms of where we want to go with the product. And, obviously, communicating the breakthrough, finding use cases, making sure our customers are happy …
But overall we are very excited about where we are and we are feeling that we are just getting started.
TNG: ABOUT THE PRODUCT, DO YOU PLAN OF MAKING CHANGES ? DO YOU HAVE A LONG ROADMAP OF THINGS THAT YOU WANT TO IMPLEMENT ?
MB: Yes. There are a lot of things we are going to be doing.
First of all, on the consumer side — the people who are answering our questions — we are launching a mobile app in the beginning of July. So, they can deliver answers to us much more easily.
Our future roadmap includes targeting users by location. So we can ask people who visited Starbucks in the last 24 hours a question for example. Leveraging new actions like voice. Asking people to speak into their phones and send a voice-based file versus just typing in terms of other responses. And there are also many blockchain applications that we think make sense for the company in the future.
But first, we just want to rely on our business model like it is right now and see how the blockchain plays out a little bit more before we dive in.
Founder & CEO
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