Consumer Intelligence: Your Guide to Competitive Advantage
How Consumer Intelligence Solves Your Competitive Intelligence Questions
If you are already benchmarking your sales and traffic data, you should have a good idea of how you are doing compared to your segment and the industry as a whole. Combining this knowledge with consumer intelligence data allows you to drill down with more granularity into who, specifically, is outperforming you. Not only are you able to see who is outperforming your restaurants, but you will be able to track their performance over a specific period. This allows you to identify strategies they are implementing to drive sales and determine how to apply that knowledge to your planning.
Why You Need to Understand Your Customer Demographics and Your Competitors
In a world of personalization, psychographic data is what most businesses are after. But you still need to understand demographic data to inform strategy. How you market to a 35-year-old parent with an annual income over $160,000 will differ from how you market to a single, 24-year-old who is self-employed and makes around $50,000 per year.
This knowledge is made even more valuable when you have it for your competitors. For example, the demographic profile of Kroger, a grocery chain, skews toward lower-income shoppers while Trader Joe’s skews toward higher-income individuals. Armed with this information, Kroger can craft a strategy aimed at capturing consumers with higher incomes to target some of Trader Joe’s customers and increase market share.
Consumer Intelligence Gives You an Edge in Promotional Tracking
Of course, you can track the success of your promotions internally, but with consumer intelligence, you can see what types of customers responded most favorably to your campaigns. By comparing promotions over different periods and across multiple geographic regions, you can assess who found your promotions most appealing (or not) and shift strategy accordingly. You will also be able to see if you were able to pull customers away from competitors during a specific promotion. A seafood company, for example, may run a surf-n-turf promotion in hopes of stealing market share from steak restaurants. By first understanding the demographics of customers who dine at steak restaurants nearby, the seafood company can design a promotion aimed at targeting those consumers. Most importantly, they will be able to determine whether or not it worked by closely tracking spending behavior at the steak restaurants.
Learn More About Your Guests With Consumer Intelligence
Knowing the characteristics of your most frequent guests is extremely valuable to understanding loyalty. If you know that 20 percent of your customers drive 80 percent of sales, it would be helpful to compare your metric across different competitors to see if you are more dependent on heavy users than they are. For you and your competitors, you can look at the top 20 percent of customers and see their characteristics. Do more of them live in a certain state? Do you see higher loyalty in one market versus another that might have more one-time guests? This knowledge can help you frame your rewards or loyalty program and help you tailor your promotions strategy.
Consumer Intelligence Helps You Meet Your Market Share Goals
In an environment as competitive as the restaurant industry, gaining and maintaining market share is a critical success factor. Access to consumer intelligence data is key to making this happen. First, you will be able to identify your market share compared to direct competitors. This is especially helpful to view by time series (day, week, month, etc.), and determine if your market share is impacted differently during different periods. For example, you might see higher market share on weekends, but your competitor is greater on weekdays. Use this information to help grow your weekend traffic with a new promotion or menu item and track the results.