Snapcart wins Campaign Innovate

Founded by CEO Reynazran Royono in March 2015, Indonesia-based Snapcart is designed to capture shopper information accurately and in real-time using a mobile app to drive purchase-based marketing automation and enable brands to directly engage shoppers in a targeted manner.

Having previously worked with P&G, Boston Consulting Group and Indonesia's largest classifieds site, berniaga.com, Reynazran quickly realised that there was an opportunity when it comes to offline purchases. 

"Offline shopping is still going to be the majority," he said. "But the problem is that it's very hard to track what's going on with shoppers. The idea behind Snapcart is to bridge that gap by crowdsourcing data through receipts, mining that data and sharing it with brands so they can use it to engage with shoppers." 

Snapcart is already working with several major brands in the P&G group, L'Oreal, Nestle and Unilever. At the time of of writing its contest application, Snapcart's app had more than 10,000 downloads with over 3,000 active users. In the past two months those numbers have grown to 100,000 and 30,000 respectively. 

The judging panel selected Snapcart out of the final four because they believe the startup fills a significant gap in the market. 

"Snapcart provides information to marketers that's not usually available and provides utility to consumers in an easy-to-use and interesting way," said Guy Hearn, chief innovatons officer for OMG Asia-Pacific. 

While shopper marketing isn't new, there has always been too much friction when it comes to data gathering, pointed out Ken Mandel, newly appointed head of global client relations at Starcom Mediavest Group. "Snapcart puts this effort on the individual consumers and then rewards them for this effort while they collect tons of very useful purchase and consumer-behaviour data. Many FMCG brands do not know who their end customers are because the retailers protect this information. But this solution builds a bridge between FMCG brands and the end consumer. It will also scale very well across the region if not globally and solves for a direct business need.”  

Snapcart's ability to mix rewards and new analytics channels for brands is a winning combination, added Tune Labs managing partner Arun Verma. "The ability to get granular on demand should improve supply imbalance, and the B2B approach to the revenue makes a clear path for the business."

Snapcart was closely followed by Runner-Up Grata, which aims to give businesses an integrated channel solution to answer incoming chats faster than a customer-service call. 

This article is part of the Campaign Innovate series, a collection of articles that examine the way innovation, startups and technology are affecting the advertising and marketing industry.

Campaign Asia-Pacific's Campaign Innovate competition, is an event that aims to provide a platform for Asia-Pacific's startups to pitch to some of the world's biggest brands. The winner was announced at the Marketing Innovation Summit.