Quick Pitch: Get paid to perform merchandise and display checks at stores.
Genius Idea: A real-time intelligence network for brands and retailers.
Brands spend hundreds of billions of dollars on trade marketing every year, much of it on in-store displays and promotions. But keeping track of those investments -- verifying, for instance, that a display is set up correctly, or shoppers are being properly prompted to redeem in-store coupons -- is difficult and costly.
Enter Quri, a crowdsourced intelligence system for brands and retailers that's launching nationwide Wednesday. Through Quri's iPhone app, Easyshift, companies can anonymously employ users to check up on stores where their merchandise is for sale.
A brand like L'Oreal, for instance, could offer someone $7 and 20 points to snap photos of a hair aisle display at a store that was repeatedly reporting poor sales. The company could ask the user to record how competitor brands were stocked and displayed, and snap photos of any special promotions or call-outs that might drive shoppers to one brand of dye over another. L'Oreal could do all of this without revealing its identity, although a savvy user may be able to figure it out.
Each task is called a "shift," and it rewards both dollars and points. Dollars can be redeemed the same day via PayPal. Points are used in a leaderboard system to encourage competition and can open up new and perhaps more lucrative kinds of shifts, co-founder and co-CEO John Mecklenburg tells Mashable. The points system is a way of identifying the most reliable and efficient users.
Quri also offers a dashboard for clients that enables them make sense of all the user-gathered data. A brand could drill down and identify trends by locality and retailer. A brand might discover that a certain product is frequently out of stock in one region, or that coupons tend to be redeemed at one retail chain over another, and use this data to identify problems and potential solutions.
The San Francisco-based startup raised $4.2 million in Series A funding from Catamount Ventures and Simon Equity Partners in December 2011. Quri now operates in the top 50 metropolitan markets nationwide.
Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, bowdenimages
Series Supported by Microsoft BizSpark
