The world of marketing has witnessed a plethora of changes over the past few years. Technological advancements along with with the changing market requirements have elevated the need for taking well-informed and data-based business decisions. Business analytics and data play a vital role in helping companies gain important business insights to make these decisions and deliver the expected solutions.
Established in 2012, Analytic Edge is a leading marketing analytics company with a vision of leveraging technology to make marketing analytics faster, more easily scalable and more transparent. Today, the company has around 120 employees and is working with multiple multinational clients which include well-known global brands like Coca-Cola, Colgate, and Mondelez International as well as digital native clients such as gaming and e-commerce companies across the globe. It is also a measurement partner for conglomerates like Google, Amazon, TikTok, and Meta.
Marching through the Early Challenges
Like every innovative startup, Analytic Edge also faced numerous challenges when it started. Since the company was early in the market, the market was not ready for its vision — which was to create automated, AI-powered SaaS platforms for companies to do their own analytics in-house. Traditionally, many companies have been outsourcing their work by letting vendors do their analytics for them.
With the right automation and extensive use of AI, Analytic Edge helps companies manage these long and complex processes in-house. The initial challenge for the company was that companies were not ready for such a service as they were not ready to manage this analytics in-house even with the aid of technology. This was the most significant challenge faced by the company.
Today, almost a decade after the inception of Analytic Edge, this challenge seems to have reduced and the market, particularly in the last one or two years, has shown that companies are now ready for its solutions. The company has witnessed increased adoption of its platforms and more clients are using its platforms to get faster and more cost-efficient marketing analytics on-demand.
Bouquet of Innovative Services
Analytic Edge offers a wide range of marketing and sales analytics services. One such service is marketing mix modeling, a statistical methodology to understand the effect and ROI of different marketing and non-marketing business drivers on Key Performance Indicators such as sales, revenue and margins. It also offers pricing and promotion analysis, a methodology to understand the effect of price changes and price elasticities, and to understand the effects of promotions on sales. It also helps optimize pricing and promotion decisions for companies.
The company also provides test-and-learn solutions that are experiencing a resurgence of late. This incorporates using test markets and test retail changes to check the effectiveness of different marketing tactics such as advertising or promotions in different markets. The other services include Integrated Business Planning, AI-based Dynamic Forecasting, Pricing & Promotion Strategy, Price Pack Architecture, Assortment Optimization, Revenue Growth Management, Customer Loyalty, Data Management Solutions, Data Visualization, Managed Solutions, and Analytics Academy.
Alongside these services, Analytic Edge provides platforms for clients who want these analytics services in-house. A majority of its clients want a combination of both services i.e. buying licenses to its analytics SaaS platforms and getting the advantage of a dedicated support team or a dedicated analytics team to support them using these platforms. The company offers automated, AI-powered marketing analytics platforms Demand DriversTM, SyntestTM, and PriceSenseTM rather than just providing services based on different methodologies, which sets it apart from the competition.
What makes Analytic Edge Unique?
Analytic Edge offers technology-enabled analytics solutions by seamlessly integrating technology, industry knowledge, and cutting – edge statistical techniques. Here are the factors that make these services unique.
- Deep Expertise: The management team has proven experience in marketing analytics with technical and business expertise.
- Speed to Insight: The company leverages a cloud-based automated technology platform for marketing analytics, which means shorter project timelines and speed to insight for the clients.
- Cost Efficiency: The productivity gains from its technology platform enable Analytic Edge to deliver marketing insights cost-efficiently, allowing clients to scale coverage of analytics.
- No Black Boxes: The company provides clients with full access to its cloud-based platform where statistical models and data transformation assumptions are open for inspection, discussion, and debate.
- Flexibility: The platform can be customized to adopt client preferred methodologies and best practices. It also has flexible engagement models—project based, resource-based, and subscription-based.
- Global Footprint: The company has a presence in all regions through its own offices and channel partners which enables it to provide client service support in a majority of markets.
- Ability to Scale Rapidly: Analytics Edge can scale rapidly as it leverages technology and has access to a large talent pool of analytics resources.
Analytics Edge offers its services across different industries such as automobiles, consumer goods, e-commerce, financial services, leisure and hospitality, pharmaceuticals, quick-serve restaurants, retail, and telecom.
Understanding the drivers of Consumer Behavior
“Analyzing and understanding the drivers of consumer’s purchase decisions is one of the most important aspects of marketing in any business.” Sebastien Jeanneret (Chief Marketing Officer and Managing Director, Europe of Analytic Edge) Analytics Edge specializes in delivering insights on the drivers of consumer purchase decisions such as advertising, promotions, and other marketing investments as well as the effect of external drivers such as competitive activity or the economy. Once these effects are measured and quantified, companies can optimize their marketing investments to achieve higher sales and profits.
As a result of the company’s customer satisfaction efforts, it often receives appreciation from its clients. “What you have built is a classic demonstration of converting a complex marketing mix model into a simple, dynamic, and forward-looking tool that acts as a lighthouse to guide planning versus being used as just a static scorecard to assess marketing investments,” says the Regional Director of Data Science and Innovation of a Multinational Beverage Company.
Fast, Cost-efficient, and Actionable Business Insights
Speed to insights plays a crucial role in marketing analytics. The faster companies get insights the faster they can adapt their strategies and tactics to changing market dynamics It would often take several months to get new insights. Automation increases speed to insight and allows brands to get ahead of the competition by adapting their strategies faster.
Furthermore, the insights also need to be actionable, so that they give businesses the ability to make decisions accordingly. Everything Analytic Edge does for its clients is fast, economical, and actionable. By doing so, it ensures that the clients using its platforms on their own or in combination with its services get fast, economical insights that help them optimize their marketing investments as well as pricing and promotions, helping them become more profitable.
Analytic Edge leverages technology to automate processes that were, and often still are, manual. Preparing a marketing mix model typically takes between 50 and 100 hours of work. However, the company reduces this time through technology and artificial intelligence. The updated time varies according to the clients and types of businesses, however, it can be reduced from 50- 100 hours to 5-15 hours. “That’s how we benefit the clients in that they get faster, cheaper, and more actionable insights,” says Sebastien.
Towards a Data-centric Future
Sebastien believes that the future of data science and marketing analytics is bright. Companies are investing increasing amounts in data and data science and data science is one of the fastest-growing industries around. More people are becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that the data companies have on the markets they are active in can be further leveraged in helping them understand their consumers.
Data will also help companies understand how their marketing activities impact the consumers and optimize their marketing investment. “So the outlook for data science and marketing analytics, particularly, is very positive. It has been growing and it will keep growing for the foreseeable future.” adds Sebastien.
Continuous Growth ahead
Analytic Edge has planned continuous growth for the years to come. It is developing and improving its platforms to make increasing use of artificial intelligence and make its platforms even more efficient and faster — offering more precise results to help its clients optimize their investments. The company also aims to make its clients increasingly profitable through fast, economical, and actionable insights.
Sebastien believes that the company will continue to grow. Analytic Edge plans to increasingly invest in the development of its platform and ease of use and intuitiveness of the platform so that its clients can become increasingly independent.
