Marketing and Product-Mix was not one-size fits all

Challenge

A quick-service operator with ten-plus locations had a point-of-sale system in every store and no way to compare them. Leadership could see how any one store was doing, but not how it was doing relative to the others.

Marketing was bought for the whole chain and spread evenly. That cash went out every month whether or not a given store was returning it, and there was no way to tell which stores were.

Approach

We pulled every store's transactions into one system, in one shape, so the locations could be compared like for like. Then we looked at traffic, product mix and marketing spend store by store instead of chain-wide.

Outcome

Marketing was working in some stores and not in others, and different kinds of marketing worked in different stores. Product mix followed the same pattern: what sold in one neighborhood sat in another.

The operator stopped spending uniformly and moved budget and menu decisions to what each location actually responded to. Same total spend, better return per store, and better profitability at each location.

What we learned

Averaged across a chain, effective and ineffective marketing look like one mediocre result. Comparison is what makes spend accountable, and comparison starts with the data being in one place.