The man to put you right about what customers actually want

WHEN Boots, Ocado, Klarna and Bloom & Wild want to know why a certain kind of person is not (yet) buying their toiletries, food, debt or flowers, they turn to a 2015 start-up founded by ex-McKinseyite Jeremy King.

- Lucy Tobin

 "I realised how incredibly difficult it was to get live, accurate, or customised data about what firms' potential customers actually wanted," he explains, and set up his Shoreditch firm, Attest, to do just that.

Now the consumer research firm helps customers concoct surveys in 90 seconds, which can then be put to specific subsets of its pool of 125 million people in 49 different countries and 70 languages.

"We help companies understand the customers they don't know and don't have yet," is how King puts it. "So how can a supermarket unlock the next stage of growth in customers it doesn't yet attract, or where should a tech start-up enter new countries, or test a retailer's new product idea, or businesses just finding out, 'why do people choose my competitors?" The entrepreneur came up with Attest after studying biology at university before a nine-year spell at McKinsey. "I was always surprised that businesses often don't make decisions with the same inputs and rigour as science demands," he explains. "I worked in over 25 countries and almost every sector. Every single company and every function had this problem that knowing your existing customers is easy, but knowing more about your target customers is very hard - yet very valuable.