Ian Baer recently launched the company to help marketers succeed.
Marketing veteran Ian Baer has just launched a strategic consultancy, Sooth, to bridge the “human-data gap” in the communications industry.
The self-described “research nerd” said the context of founding Sooth lies within a market where data influences every aspect of life, Baer said, as a result, human connection is now a casualty.
“For marketers, it’s a unique problem as customers not only expect connection, but they also demand it – in fact, 75 percent of them abandoned brands for more personal experiences, better treatment or value,” Sooth said in a statement. “Brands are feeling it too, with nearly 40 percent ready to fire their agencies in 2023.”
Baer said, “I was shocked to read studies that show more than half of all marketing campaigns fail. It’s not surprising there are unhappy people working in the marketing business these days.”
Baer noted that only half of all marketing decisions are based on data, and then noted that “those that do, generally aren’t using the data well…brands are targeting consumers, but they are doing a poor job of connecting with people, even with the unprecedented amount of information available to do so. This is a curable communication gap, and the Sooth method solves for exactly that.”
The approach of Sooth is not in leveraging big data but good data. The company uses a proprietary methodology “to interpret consumer data and synthesize it into meaningful insights into the lives of each individual, segment and community, using AI couple with human intellect to truly understand people’s needs,” the company said, adding that “takes the deluge of data and makes it personal and human. So instead of communicating to a personality type or demographic, brands and agencies can enter a more authentic and human relationship with audience.”
Sooth said in the statement that values are at the core of its method.
“Building on a 2015 Harvard Business Review study that identified core universal values that connect customers to brand, Sooth overlays that data with more recent behavioral data from the Helixa database of over 200 million people. And because it’s powered by AI, sooth is kept accurate and up to date in real time.”