Marketing veteran Trevor Wolfe has always been drawn to measuring consumer behavior — primarily, how to determine the thoughts and actions behind decision-making processes. Asking consumers the right questions and then properly analyzing that data can make all the difference when improving products and brands.
One marketing information-gathering strategy that Wolfe identified as being particularly flawed was focus groups, where a lack of moderators and extroverts taking over the conversation led to compromised data collected during feedback sessions.
To help solve this problem, Wolfe founded a global marketing consultancy where he would connect in-house marketing and creative professionals at big brands to independent professionals in any country around the world to collect their feedback. The end goal was for the brand to consult information and feedback from those on the ground on whether a commercial or campaign would be successful in that specific country, and if not, how to fix it.
The consultancy now has clients in 25 countries in five continents, but the clients started asking for an in-house option as well.
“A lot of clients started giving us feedback about how they liked the way we got information from professionals on the ground and the way we ask questions by using others’ expertise,” says Wolfe. That led the founder to conceive of a technology platform that would allow clients to mirror the consultancy model, but within their own companies’ marketing teams. That’s how marketing startup BigTeam came about.
Thanks to the suggestion of advisors, Wolfe moved to Atlanta this past January from South Africa to immerse himself in the local MarTech community and gain access to Fortune 500 companies headquartered here. “We wanted to find a place that had three things: access to great, emerging talent in terms of engineering, product marketing and sales, access to clients nearby instead of across the world with the likes of Coca-Cola, Cox, and Porsche, and appreciation for the marketing/SaaS-based business models.”
BigTeam offers an AI-driven platform to acquire constructive feedback on your brand, marketing campaigns, product features and more. Once you upload the project in question, you can select one of the pre-loaded surveys or build your own. The platform then helps you identify a group of experts within your company that will provide helpful feedback, and sends the survey off.
When your colleagues have submitted the feedback, the platform creates a report with their thoughts — highlighting any issues within the campaign, as well as successful points. BigTeam also stores historical insights to prevent future changes due to employee turnover and shifting trends.
Wolfe explains that the platform uses employees to create innovation from within, and encourages engagement by tapping into the expertise of employees outside of the marketing department. In the case of startups, BigTeam allows small teams to get feedback from outside parties by helping corral relevant clients, advisors, contractors and more in a group.
“The feedback that [marketing professionals are looking for] is usually divided into two stages: early-stage idea for a marketing product or strategy that needs fresh eyes before production and the second stage, right before launch when companies need one last check to avoid any risks — as digital marketing teams are putting out more content quickly — or PR nightmares,” says Wolfe.
The company has also partnered with AI-driven IBM Watson to automate the analytics process and reduce the time needed to produce reports.
BigTeam is currently participating in the Coca-Cola BridgeCommunity commercialization program for startups to connect with more corporations, as well as raising a seed round to continue product development.
