Vividly (formerly Cresicor), a trade promotion management software on G2, announced on August 16, 2022, that it had raised $18 million in funding in its Series A round. 645 Ventures and Vertex Ventures led the investment round, which also included existing investors Costanoa Partners and Torch Capital.

Vividly, a San Francisco-based start-up, is built for consumer-packaged goods (CPG) industries to manage trade spending and maximize ROI. It helps brands and retailers manage trade promotions, from campaign creation to deductions management and promotion measurement. 

CPG retailers struggle to manage trade spending

Trade is the heart of CPG companies. Trade spending is an investment that CPG brands and manufacturers make to increase the demand and visibility of their products. However, this investment isn’t cheap and doesn’t promise a guaranteed return without a successful trade spending strategy. A survey by Strategy& revealed that 85% of the CPG brands struggle with overspending and ineffective trade management. Ineffective trade spending across brands and channels sometimes becomes the retailer’s worst nightmare. 

Many retailers have avoided trade spending amidst the global economic slowdown. However, due to changing consumer trends and intense competition, it is inevitably a catalyst to growing sales and increasing profitability. As per a report by  ATKearney, return from trade spending contributes to almost 25-30% of a retailer’s annual gross revenue.

Founded in 2010, Vividly aims to leverage its trade promotion management software to enable a CPG brand to access unprecedented insight into trade and save time and money. It has three tiered emerging, growth, and scale solutions built to serve CPG brands with different trade promotion challenges.

Source: Vividly

The new funding round will help Vividly focus more on product development and strengthen its go-to-market team, which will ultimately help bring new CPG customers on board. 

Alexander Whatley, Vividly’s CEO and co-founder, says:

“We’ve added numerous new product modules to make Vividly even more valuable to brands and are very excited to use our new funding to continue to bring new brands onto our platform, and to build Vividly out into the operating system for CPG companies.”

According to Vividly, its revenue has grown over four times, and customers have doubled since the last seed funding round in September 2021. The company added that its customers have saved 90% of the time in the overall TPM process and seen a 20% increase in planning accuracy after using its trade promotion platform. Vividly's customer base includes CPG brands like Liquid Death, Bulletproof, Oatly, Vital Farms, etc.

Vividly and G2’s Trade Promotion Management category 

Vividly is in the High Performers quadrant in the G2 Grid® for the Trade Promotion Management category. The Trade Promotion Management category has 36 products in total, where Vividly has scored 9.4 on Ease of Use with a category average of 8.9 out of 10. Also, It has 14 reviews in total, where 84% of reviewers have given five stars, and 15% have rated four stars. It has secured an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5 stars, the highest among all other products in the category.

Overall, the trade promotion software has a total of 79 reviews from 36 products in the category, which is significantly low compared to other retail categories. Also, traffic to this category has been inconsistent over the past year. This signifies CPG and retail businesses are not actively implementing trade promotion software in their companies, as most do not like to invest in trade promotions for fear of low ROI.

However, as consumer behavior changes and offline stores seek new ways to improve in-store revenue, we can expect CPG and retail businesses to proactively think of creating trade promotions. This will accelerate the demand for trade promotion software, and more software vendors will compete in this category.

Edited by Shanti Nair