SnackMagic’s CPGpulse platform ‘democratizes’ consumer, competitive data to fit emerging brands’ needs, budgets

20-Apr-2022 - Last updated on 20-Apr-2022 at 17:58 GMT

Source: CPGpulse

Entrepreneurs at startups and emerging brands often innovate and build their businesses based on their intuition or anecdotal feedback from loved ones and early adopters, but as they scale so do their need for detailed data and analysis -- not just about their product but also the broader competitive landscape.

Unfortunately, this need often outpaces emerging brands’ budgets and analytic skills – leaving many to attempt crossing the chasm with little more than a hunch, which the founder of the product discovery and analytics platforms SnackMagic and Snack Drop notes, doesn’t always cut it.

That is why SnackMagic is powering a new – affordable – insights platform: CPGpulse, which pulls data from its gifting and sampling platforms to provide companies at a fraction of the price compared to other data analytics services detailed brand data, including product performance and rankings across the competitive landscape, unfiltered consumer feedback and more that will help them shape their distribution, marketing and overall business strategies.

“Our whole MO is helping emerging challenger brands” make informed strategic decisions to scale their business and succeed, and CPGpulse is the next logical step in a suite of tools SnackMagic has developed since the pandemic began, SnackMagic CEO and founder Shaunak Amin told FoodNavigator-USA.

He explained that the idea for CPGpulse came to him when brands using Snack Drop to sample and test products with consumers began asking for additional data about who was buying, rating and rebuying their products from the platform so that they could better understand what was and wasn’t working about their products and how best to position their brand and products to retailers or investors.

“We were getting a lot of requests for data. And we have all this first-party data. And so we thought, how can we package it in a way that is very, very accessible to all brands – big and small – so that data is very, very insightful” and actionable, Amin said.

The result is CPGpulse, which he said is perfect for “quick experimentation and innovation” as it allows brands of all sizes to track and measure consumer response to products, it also allows brands and investors to explore emerging trends and track the evolution of categories, their products’ performance and the progress of other key players with which they might want to partner or acquire.

‘We really wanted to democratize analytics’

Recognizing that not all startups or emerging brands have the resources or experience to analyze the type of data CPGpulse provides, the service also helps companies create business decks with comparative analysis that they can tailor to show retailers, buyers, investors or others, Amin said.

Currently, CPG companies can explore CPGpulse for free while it is undergoing beta testing through the end of the month. Starting in May, companies can subscribe to different tiers of services – all which Amin says are affordable.

The first tier, which details trends and rankings, will remain free and allow subscribers to filter data by current and future trends, rankings across categories, brands, products, ingredients, dietary preferences, seasonal shifts, taste profiles and more.

The second tier gives subscribers a deeper dive into their own brand and product analytics for $200 per month. This service allows them to see how products are selling, who is buying the product, where the products are going, ratings and reviews.

The third tier, for $400 a month, gives users a complete competitive analysis of their products versus other brands in the segment, including how much and how fast their product sells compared to others, historical data, and other information that can be customized into interactive charts.

The fourth tier provides brands access to easy-to-understand analysis of their SnackMagic sales, including where they are winning, areas to improve, competitors’ performance, growth areas and more. They also have an option to work with a data scientist for custom reports, which depending on the level of engagement can range from $2,000 to $10,000. The rate is set either monthly or based on a specific project.

The trade off for the low prices is that much of data provided and tracked for each company is visible to other subscribers. However, Amin said that if a company wanted to test a product or conduct research privately, it could do so as part of the fourth tier or as a special project.

“We really wanted to democratize analytics and data in the CPG space ... and we saw that a lot of our competitors were either cost prohibitive or they were just untenable for smaller brands who didn’t have access to somebody on their team wo was really analytics focused. So, we built CPGpulse with that in mind and making it accessible to brands of all sizes, but also detailed enough that if you’re an investor or you’re a category buyer who is familiar with these tools, you can come in and collect all the information you’d want,” Amin said.