How Tropical Smoothie Uses Consumer Intelligence to Identify New Opportunities

To inform your restaurant strategy, you need to be able to interpret and even predict consumer behavior. Being able to recognize trends and shifts in consumer behavior and demand will help you optimize your decision-making. Fortunately, Black Box Consumer Intelligence™ helps brands do exactly that. Restaurants use Consumer Intelligence to really understand the behavior of their own guests, those of their competitors and consumers overall. Tropical Smoothie is one of those brands. Read on for a Q&A to learn how Tropical Smoothie uses Consumer Intelligence to drive decision-making for their brand.

What were some of the challenges you had prior to using Consumer Intelligence?

Prior to using consumer intelligence, it was difficult for the team to fully determine the consumer habits of our customers and who we were really competing with for share of occasions/wallet.

How did Consumer Intelligence help with these challenges?

Consumer intelligence allowed us to narrow our customer base beyond our qualitative research and help identify daypart/product development opportunities.

How are you using Consumer Intelligence?

We use it on a month-to-month basis to help us measure share growth relative to the competition, movement in customer demo and changes in frequency.

Is the dashboard easy to use?

Intuitive and easy to use.

Did you learn anything about your brand or competitors that surprised you? If so, what was it?

Where else our customers really shopped compared to the rest of the sample. Some of the brands where we saw cross-shop over-indexing drove strategic adjustments within the brand including marketing campaigns and product development.

What operational changes have you implemented resulting from insights you learned in Consumer Intelligence?

Seeing the impact on the return of first-time customers during busier periods for the brand caused us to stagger new customer geared offerings to ensure positive experiences.

What have you learned about your customers using Consumer Intelligence?

Initially, we found our customers were a little older and more affluent than our consumer research originally indicated. Having this knowledge has enabled us to further refine our projects.

What changes to your Tropical Rewards® program have been made from using Consumer Intelligence?

We noticed our biggest growth during COVID (outside of delivery) was from our most frequent customers, but they weren’t transacting with the rewards program the way that we expected. We made changes to the program to make it more attractive in response to the CI data.

How do you leverage Consumer Intelligence data with Financial Intelligence?

Marrying the two allows the team to determine why markets are underperforming or overperforming in real-time or with very little lag. We can see how the market is performing vs. competition and narrow in on a more specific group of competitors. It allows us to answer the “is it us or the market?” question quickly and efficiently.

With over one million filter combinations driven by transactions from 20 million debit and credit cards, there are a lot of different ways to apply consumer intelligence to your restaurant strategy. Download 6 Ways to Utilize Consumer Intelligence for some use cases.