Manthan Accelerates Growth in Global CPG Market

Manthan, a provider of analytics solutions for retail and consumer product industries, is accelerating its growth in the consumer packaged goods (CPG) market worldwide. During the past year, the India-based company with U.S. headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz., has expanded its team, products and services to meet the growing demand from CPG companies to help them understand and activate the shopper’s journey.

According to Manthan estimates, by adopting advanced shopper analytics and activation strategies and solutions, CPG companies can boost their sales by double digits year over year, which, in a U.S. $2 trillion dollar CPG industry, would translate into new growth equal to the size of many major CPG manufacturers.

“The consumer products landscape has undergone a sea change in recent years, driven by rapidly emerging digital and mobile technologies, big shifts in shopper behaviors and demographics, and unprecedented macroeconomic challenges,” said Atul Jalan, CEO of Manthan. “The result is that CPG manufacturers now have to work harder than ever just to stay even, no less grow. We believe, however, that the CPG industry is poised to regain its competitive edge and ignite new levels of global growth.”

Manthan’s integrated analytics solutions were developed to give CPG manufacturers and their retail partners a competitive advantage in today’s historically challenging global consumer product marketplace.

“CPG companies increasingly are embracing powerful new ways to collect, analyze and action data that enable them to truly understand and activate the shopper’s journey,” added Jalan. “Using these advanced predictive analytics, CPG brands can now move quickly from data to insights to action. And that means more sales, healthier brands and more profitable CPG companies.”

To help manage and drive its CPG growth efforts, Manthan has expanded its CPG team, including the recent hiring of Kirk W. Wheeler as EVP and GM of Manthan’s global CPG practice. A veteran CPG industry executive with extensive experience in global brands, sales and marketing, and Big Data management, Wheeler will orchestrate Manthan’s global technology, services and human resources to create solutions that help CPG manufacturers to grow and win. Before joining Manthan, Wheeler held senior management positions at IRI, Cabela’s, Procter & Gamble, and Coca-Cola.

“There is a huge opportunity for CPG companies today to embrace a more comprehensive, holistic marketing approach that involves building a direct and robust relationship between their brands and the shopper,” said Wheeler. “This requires having a fully integrated activation strategy founded on actionable insights about the shopper’s needs, desires and behaviors. The old point-to-point strategy based on already outdated transactional data just won’t cut it in today’s highly dynamic and fiercely competitive consumer products marketplace.”

Manthan Launches CPG Analytics Suite

To help CPG companies develop and implement actionable insights, Manthan launched an exclusive CPG Analytics Solutions Suite focused on the three critical stages of understanding and activating the shopper’s journey:

• What You Sell: This involves using predictive brand analytics to measure brand health, growth and perceptions. By using both survey analytics and brand growth analytics, CPG manufacturers can better focus in on what shoppers are seeking to buy when they make their purchasing decisions.
• How You Sell: CPG companies can use advanced marketing analytics to analyze all aspects of how the brand interacts with the shopper. These predictive analytics maximize ROI on marketing and promotional spending by determining which messages and mediums resonate best with a specific shopper base, like tech-savvy Millennial consumers.
• Where You Sell: Predictive channel analytics solutions enable CPG marketers to convert the “what” and “how” insights into actual sales. The solutions were designed to help retailers and CPG manufacturers alike understand the total shopper journey.

Manthan also makes sure that these actionable insights are delivered to the front-line CPG brand teams that need them most, when they need them, via practical, easy-to-use platforms such as tablets and even smartphones.

“Today, there is a growing strategic imperative for CPG companies to mine real-time insights out of the full spectrum of Big Ddata generated daily by the shopper’s journey,” noted Jalan. “This includes massive amounts of unstructured data -- including social media data -- that are hard to collect, manage and extract insights from. It really is all about having a focused strategy and applying powerful predictive analytics to the total shopper journey. The resulting insights will empower CPG manufacturers to activate the entire shopper journey, which in turn drives incremental sales and revenue growth and ultimately profits.”