How Dan works
The Proof
The Proof is the testing stage. Before you spend money telling the market your story, or send a communication to a hundred thousand customers, you find out whether it lands. Dan tests propositions, messages and customer communications against the people who have to understand them, and reports what they actually took away rather than what you hoped they would.
Why test a proposition at all?
Most companies write their story, agree it internally, and find out it was unclear from the win rate eighteen months later. Testing moves that discovery to before the spend. It is cheaper to find out that your category name means nothing to a buyer in a fortnight than in a financial year.
What gets tested
- Propositions and positioning. Does the story make sense to someone who does not work for you, and does it make them want the meeting?
- Sales messages and pitch decks. Which version gets further, and which line loses the room.
- Customer communications. Letters, emails, statements and notices, tested for whether the customer understood what they had to do.
- Websites and campaign copy. What a real buyer takes from a page in the eleven seconds they give it.
How the testing works
- We agree what the communication has to achieve, and what a reader must come away knowing.
- We build the audience: real buyers and customers, a synthetic population modelled on your actual customer base, or both.
- Each reader answers the same fixed set of questions in their own words. They are never shown the answers you were hoping for.
- You get the result by segment, the specific words and figures that failed, and a rewrite to retest.
What is Consumer Duty communications testing?
Under the FCA's Consumer Duty, financial services firms have to show that their customers understood the communications they were sent and could act on them. Sending the letter is not evidence. Testing it is.
Most firms buy this as face-to-face panel research: around thirty people, once a year, at a price that means most communications go out untested. Dan's approach runs a far larger population, modelled on the firm's own customer base, so communications can be tested routinely rather than annually, with a human panel validating the result.
Why does vulnerability matter so much here?
Because the Consumer Duty test is not the average customer, it is the worst-served one. A communication that ninety-two per cent of people understand has still failed if the other eight per cent are the customers who most needed it. Every test reports the worst-served group alongside the headline number, and runs a second time with vulnerable customers deliberately oversampled.
In wealth and asset management, vulnerability rarely looks like financial hardship. It looks like cognitive decline, advanced age, bereavement, acting under a power of attorney, serious illness, inherited wealth with no experience behind it, or a layout that a customer's eyesight can no longer read.
Is this a compliance sign-off?
No, and it is important that it is not. This is testing and analysis. It is not regulatory advice, it is not a compliance opinion, and no report will tell you that a communication passes. You get the reading. What you conclude from it, and what you do next, stays yours.
Who buys The Proof?
Two groups. B2B companies about to invest behind a new proposition, who would rather know now. And regulated firms — asset managers, wealth managers, platforms, life and pensions providers — whose compliance, product and customer teams have to evidence consumer understanding.
Does it have to follow the other stages?
No. The Proof is bought on its own, fixed price and fixed scope, on a communication you already have. Clients who have been through The Mirror and The Message tend to test what came out of them, but there is no requirement to.