Every once in a while, you have time to reflect. I was recently asked to describe Resonate’s evolution, and it’s simply impossible for me not to look back and think about how far we’ve come. And yet in doing so, perhaps what struck me the most was that, since our founding, the fundamental mission of Resonate has not changed—or even wavered.
Resonate was started with one simple but powerful idea: understanding people. From Day 1, we’ve been on a quest to understand people at a deeper level than any other company in the marketplace. A lot of companies today talk about being “customer centric.” But at Resonate, we talk about being “people centric.” Because we believe that marketers need to understand their audiences beyond their relationships with their products. Marketers need to understand the true human element—the why behind what people do in the online and offline worlds.
Customers are important. Understanding who these human beings truly are is key to a company’s future success. Here at Resonate, we believed that when we typed the first keystroke of the Resonate business plan, and we believe it still in 2018.
That said, while the fundamental premise behind Resonate has not wavered, our capabilities have evolved significantly. As technology has progressed, marketers’ need to understand consumers hasn’t changed. But what did change was the speed with which they must be able to gain that understanding and put it into action. That speed has greatly accelerated. Our platform developments have recognized and evolved with that need.
We knew our unique take on consumer intelligence would be valuable. But we didn’t realize just how far the value could extend. At our outset, we thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could use these deep consumer insights to help marketers communicate better?” And so that’s what we did. We focused on creating the inputs to shape a deep consumer understanding, hiring the brightest minds in research, data science and engineering and building a technology platform that would allow marketers to better execute their marketing campaigns around a unique understanding of their audiences.
But something happened that surprised us. We started receiving inbound requests from leading brand executives who wanted our understanding of their customers, prospects and competitors’ customers. But they didn’t just want it for advertising. They wanted it for product development, brand development, product marketing, for deeper strategy—to use it in a way that would shape their very businesses and customer interactions. And so the Resonate platform evolved well beyond one designed for media execution.
Many companies today are racing to distance themselves from the “ad tech” bucket to serve the broader “martech” bucket. Candidly, we didn’t and still don’t worry about what bucket we fit in. The foundation on which we have built our company is simply this: understanding people. We take that understanding, and we make it easy for marketers to use, which in turn drives better decisions and greater success for our customers. As far as we’re concerned, the market can discuss buckets all it wants. We’re just going to spend our time working maniacally to help our customers succeed. The complexity of what it means to be human can’t fit in a bucket, and correspondingly neither can Resonate. And that’s just fine with us.
Going forward, we know that continual evolution and innovation are necessary to continue to meet the needs of our clients. But one thing is certain: As much as our data and technology may evolve over time, we’ll always be driven by that same idea that drove us from the start: understanding people better.
Read the Forrester report The Future of Marketing Insights to learn how organizations are transforming by leveraging insights.
