The dangerous retail idea rarely arrives wearing a villain’s cape. It arrives in a tidy deck. The price change has a rationale. The display looks handsome. The promotion delighted everyone in the meeting. By the time it reaches five hundred stores, the idea has acquired budgets, deadlines and the peculiar immunity that comes from being somebody senior’s favorite. Morgan Davis has spent his career worrying about what happens next.
His answer is a small act of corporate humility: choose a group of stores, find credible controls, make the change in one group and let customers vote with their baskets. The result might validate the room. It might also save the company from the room. MarketDial, the Salt Lake City software company Davis co-founded and leads, exists to make that process practical for businesses whose customers still walk through doors.
Online commerce made experimentation feel ordinary. A website can send one visitor toward a blue button and another toward a green one, then count the clicks. A physical shop is a less obedient laboratory. Weather wanders in. Neighborhoods differ. Holidays disturb the numbers. A road closes, a rival opens, a local team wins. The product may be on the wrong shelf or absent entirely. Every store contains a small novel of confounding variables.
01 / The unfinished deckThe recommendation had no ending
Davis came to this problem through professions paid to have opinions. He studied business management, strategy and economics at Brigham Young University. His early work passed through product development at BrainStorm and analysis at the innovation consultancy Innosight. He spent time at Kickstart Seed Fund, first in a summer role and later as a senior associate. Then came Boston Consulting Group, where he worked as an associate in the firm’s consumer practice.
At BCG, his projects touched the practical machinery of commerce: go-to-market reorganizations for consumer-goods companies, pricing zones, private-equity work and retail transformations. The consulting method could be exacting, yet Davis later described an unresolved discomfort. A team might produce several well-reasoned recommendations, but the client still had to move from analysis to action without a reliable experiment in between. The deck concluded before reality offered its review.
That gap became the premise for MarketDial. Davis and Johnny Stoddard, a former McKinsey consultant with a background in data science, co-founded the business in 2015; MarketDial commonly lists 2016 as its founding year. Joseph Turner is also identified in company databases as a co-founder. Their proposal was easy to explain and hard to execute: bring the discipline of online A/B testing to stores, restaurants, grocers and other multi-location businesses without requiring every user to become a statistician.
The product would help select comparable control stores, design a statistically defensible trial and distinguish genuine lift from the ordinary wobble of commerce. A retailer could test a promotion, a product assortment, a labor practice, a new layout or a change in price. The software sat between raw transactional data and the expensive yes-or-no decision waiting upstairs.
02 / Failure foresightA disaster caught early is useful
Davis’s most revealing claim is not about the winners. In a 2019 interview, he said that around 15 percent of recommended changes in some testing programs proved disastrous. He regarded this as a success. An experiment had found the weak idea while it was still small enough to abandon. Retail rarely gives trophies for losses avoided, but the arithmetic is less sentimental. A poor decision multiplied across hundreds of locations can turn one executive hunch into a very large receipt.
MarketDial’s own testing material divides retailers into three rough groups. At one end are organizations that test effectively. At the other are companies making mostly gut-driven decisions. Between them sits a broad middle, running pilots in a few convenient stores near headquarters, perhaps without controls robust enough to support the conclusion. Davis has put only 5 percent in the first group, 30 percent in the last and 65 percent in that ambiguous middle.
The distinction matters because a pilot can become corporate theater. If the question is designed to confirm an answer, the numbers merely arrive as supporting actors. MarketDial’s writing urges exploratory questions that leave open the possibility of surprise. “What impact do changes in price have on the business?” is more useful than a prompt that already assumes higher prices will increase revenue. The wording is modest. The governance change is not. A genuine test gives evidence permission to embarrass the sponsor.
03 / Both sides of the pitchReading signal through the noise
His venture-capital years supplied another education in noisy evidence. In a 2021 conversation with Kickstart, Davis discussed the oddity of becoming a founder after evaluating founders. Knowing the language of investment could make the process easier, but it also encouraged over-reading. Entrepreneurs search a meeting for signs: the length of the conversation, the warmth of the follow-up, the introduction that did or did not arrive. Some are signal. Plenty are weather.
The parallel with retail is neat enough to deserve suspicion, yet it holds. A good sales week can reflect the intervention or a dozen unrelated events. A cordial investor can be intrigued or simply cordial. In either setting, desire is quick to promote coincidence into proof. Davis’s career has occupied the space between a persuasive story and evidence sturdy enough to finance it.
MarketDial raised a $7.5 million Series A in September 2018. Crosslink Capital led the round, with Kickstart Seed Fund, Peterson Partners and Silicon Valley Bank participating. In November 2021, the company announced another growth investment led by Crosslink and Finistere Ventures, without disclosing the amount. Davis said the capital would fund the platform, data-science expertise and new capabilities. The former investor had crossed the table and learned to translate the product’s own ethic into a pitch: show the method, reduce uncertainty, earn the next step.
Look for the point where your former profession regularly hands customers an unfinished job. Davis did not discard the analytical habits of consulting. He turned the missing experiment after the recommendation into software.
04 / The company around the methodTesting culture begins with people
A platform devoted to experiments still needs ordinary human beings to use it. MarketDial’s material argues that a testing culture requires executive support, dedicated resources and a consistent process. Davis applies similarly practical language to hiring. When the company received consecutive Salt Lake Tribune Top Workplace recognition and Utah’s Best Benefits honor in 2023, he described benefits as both a recruiting tool and a condition for good work. The package included hybrid work, unlimited paid time off, employee stock options and shareable ski passes, the last item placing the office firmly against the Wasatch Range.
His public style can be blunter than the sober prose of a white paper. At a gathering between Utah technology leaders and state lawmakers, Davis spoke directly about policies that made recruitment harder for his company. The moment showed another version of the same instinct: name the variable, connect it to an operating result and tell the decision-maker what the data feels like on the ground.
MarketDial has promoted a “prove and improve” framework built on consistency, repeatability and generalizability. The phrase is slightly more generous than “test and learn.” A result should travel beyond the original stores, and the habit should outlive the analyst who ran it. The goal is a company in which experimentation is part of operations, not a special performance staged when leadership feels uncertain.
05 / The long testWhen the incumbent becomes the variable
MarketDial’s own endurance was tested outside the product. Applied Predictive Technologies, later owned by Mastercard, pursued trade-secret claims against the company, Davis and Stoddard in litigation that began in 2018. In 2024, the District of Utah entered judgment for the MarketDial defendants on those claims. The Federal Circuit affirmed that result on January 28, 2026. The ruling is a judgment; the stories each side tells about motive remain stories.
A month later, MarketDial opened a new case. On February 26, 2026, it filed a federal antitrust complaint against Applied Predictive Technologies and Mastercard. Davis announced the filing publicly and portrayed the earlier lawsuit as an effort by a larger incumbent to slow a lower-priced competitor. That is MarketDial’s allegation, not a decided fact. The antitrust docket was active in the months after filing, and its claims await the court’s examination.
There is an austere symmetry to the episode. Davis built a company around forcing confident claims through a test. Now his company has asked a court to test a claim about competition itself. Litigation is slower and less tidy than a controlled retail experiment. There is no clean set of stores, no eight-week readout and no cheerful bar chart waiting at the end. There is evidence, argument and time.
Through consulting, venture capital, fundraising and a decade of company building, Davis has kept returning to one unfashionable virtue: the willingness to be corrected before the mistake becomes expensive. Retail supplies the props, from endcaps to price tags, but the idea travels well. Strategy is an opinion about the future. Operations is where that opinion encounters customers.
The old retail instinct was to make the rollout decisive. MarketDial makes the decision earn its rollout. Somewhere between the pilot store and the control group, a polished idea loses its immunity. For Morgan Davis, that is where the useful work begins.