The report:
https://www.gartner.com/doc/reprints...t=201027&st=sb
Plexure
Plexure is a Niche Player in its first year of inclusion in this Magic Quadrant. Its mobile marketing platform is mainly focused on helping marketers personalize engagements through mobile channels. Its operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be marketers in quick-service restaurants (QSR), and retail and grocery. Plexure expects to expand its AI-enabled capabilities to help marketers automate campaign management and measurement. The company’s QSR focus was boosted in 2019 when McDonald’s Corp. bought 9.9% of Plexure.
Strengths
Modular platform: Plexure’s highly modular platform is designed to enable marketing teams to utilize the platform’s core elements as needed, based on the team’s level of mobile marketing maturity. The modules operate on top of an AI/ML layer that enables longitudinal and real-time updates on attributes such as propensity to churn, product recommendations, RFM and pricing options.
Grocery, retail and QSR focus: Plexure is particularly well-suited for marketers in large, franchised retail and QSR organizations. The company’s investments in real-time capabilities and predictive analytics make it well-suited for high-volume, high-frequency campaigns, which are particularly valued by marketers in these verticals. According to Plexure executives, the company plans to expand into other verticals such as financial services.
Fraud detection: While all vendors evaluated in this Magic Quadrant have achieved SOC 2 compliance (a baseline requirement for any SaaS platform), Plexure incorporates a number of additional anti-fraud capabilities to detect fraudulent app registrations, loyalty point acquisitions or coupon-based offer redemption. These anti-fraud capabilities, including use of AI to detect fraudulent activity, are particularly important to high-frequency mobile campaigns that are a hallmark of QSR, grocery and specialty retail marketers.
Cautions
Mobile channel focus: Plexure is focused on supporting high-frequency engagements that typify the needs of QSR, grocery and specialty retail organizations (convenience stores in particular). Plexure is largely an app-centric mobile marketing platform, but supports mobile web and email via integrations. Prospective clients looking for more expansive mobile capabilities, particularly for mobile web, will need to ensure Plexure’s API support will enable preferred mobile web solutions.
Resources to match scale ambitions: Plexure manages a relatively large number of customers in dynamic markets (e.g., QSR and grocery). With its stated focus on enterprises with greater than $750 million in yearly revenue, Plexure’s customer success teams are small relative to other vendors evaluated in this research. Company execs noted that they are adding resources to these teams this year. Prospective enterprise clients will need to carefully examine Plexure’s business roadmap to ensure appropriate resources are available to service their needs.