How this Indian startup is helping Coca-Cola and other Fortune 50 FMCG companies choose the best marketing channels
Bootstrapped Analytic Edge's technology platform is helping marquee companies optimise their marketing spend.
For a consumer goods company planning to launch a new product, the big question is to have the best marketing channel to give it optimal return on its investment.
“Companies spend around 10 percent of their revenues on marketing, but a majority of them do not measure how effective it is,” says Rahul Budhraja, Co-founder, Analytic Edge.
To fulfil this requirement with a technology platform where companies can have insights to optimise their marketing spend at the click of a button, Rahul Budhraja, Santosh Nair and Vijay Ramaswamy founded Analytic Edge in 2012. The Bengaluru-headquartered company says it currently provides solutions to global corporations and has a presence in 20 countries.
Some of Analytic Edge’s prominent clients include Coca-Cola and other Fortune 50 FMCG companies.
Rahul says, “We are providing insights to companies to determine the right marketing channel so that it drives more revenue for them.”
Analytic Edge - the beginning
Rahul, Santosh and Vijay started by providing analytics as a service to various corporations. This involved seeking data from a particular company and then crunching the entire information to provide insights. It was an expensive proposition and was not a very scalable model.
The founders come with similar educational backgrounds and a strong grounding in statistics. Rahul is an alumnus of Shri Ram College of Commerce, New Delhi, and holds an MS in statistics and financial engineering from the New York University. Santosh Nair is a PhD in applied economics and statistics and Vijay Ramaswamy is an MSc in statistics.
In 2015, Analytic Edge decided to focus on a technology platform where the data automatically gets picked up and insights are provided in a shorter duration. Rahul says they looked to operate as a plug and play model.
“Even if one can optimise the marketing spend by just one percent, the return on investment could be anywhere in the range of 150 to 200x,” says Rahul.
The founders also realised there were many companies that were providing analytics as a service, but there was a gap in terms of creating a technology platform or a product.
Rahul adds: “Our competitors focus on services and we are a technology product company.” There are many companies in India who provide technology platform based on analytics like Manthan Systems, Mu Sigma, Crayon Data, etc But there are very few in the space of marketing spend optimisation.
Shift to platform
According to Rahul, the question on their mind was, “Why don’t we build a product which can allow these companies to scale their marketing spend optimisation and also be like a do-it-yourself platform.”
“Our platform productises the entire process where it automatically ingests the data to come out with insights and one does not have licence for any third-party tools,” says Rahul. He adds that the platform is customised for marketing effectiveness.
“Clients do not have to be statisticians or data scientists to leverage our platform to measure their marketing effectiveness,” says Rahul.
The market and customers
According to Statista, the size of the predictive analytics market is estimated to be $5.1 billion in 2018 and is expected to touch $10.95 billion by 2022.
Analytic Edge has its core people strength in Bengaluru with a 50-member team and is present across the globe with its primary markets being the US and Europe. It is also present in the Middle East, Africa, China and Indonesia. Besides, it works with affiliates in eight other countries.
Rahul says, their customers are mostly large companies as there is greater awareness among them on the use of analytics. “For smaller companies, we have to first create awareness about the analytics product, and so we have not made a big push towards them,” he adds.
“Sales are not just driven by digital channels alone and there has to be a holistic solution,” he says. In terms of the business model, Analytic Edge operates as a pure licencing product or even as a pay per use model.
Future Plans
The bootstrapped company quadrupled its revenue last year and is now looking to raise funding to fast-track the product development process, further enhance the platform and invest in business development.
Analytic Edge says it has a two-year roadmap, where it plans to continuously enhance the technology platform. “We have to get to the point where the user need not know anything about statistical modelling and all the output is generated at just the press of a button,” says Rahul. Though the challenge always remains in getting the right talent.
The company is currently focused on the marketing spend optimisation and market mix modelling and plans to get into areas such as pricing analytics and digital analytics in the future.