Author: Asenka Developemt

As consumers shift their dining behaviors in the wake of the COVID crisis, restaurant brands able to capture and consolidate meal occasions among the most valuable customers will survive the crisis and be positioned to thrive on the other side. Rosemark has built a Quantitative Persona™ structure for the dining category that identifies the highest engaged and highest value dining consumers based on how their motivations and preferences drive their restaurant chain brand choice. Value is concentrated: Overall spending and digital ordering is highly concentrated within the target QP clusters These 2 target QP Clusters not only represent significant opportunity for restaurant brands due to their volume, but they have unique motivations and preferences that drive their outsize volume and digital ordering. Restaurant brands that can personalize their digital ordering experience and marketing communications to these target QPs to drive greater share of meal occasions and greater volume. The On-the-Go Convenience Seeker QP Cluster are the highest value consumers whose busy lifestyle and preference to eat out vs cooking at home drive their behavior of eating out nearly 40 times per month. They have a high preference for digital ordering and they spread their meal occasions across up to 14 different restaurants per month. The Social Restaurant Lover QP Cluster are the highest engaged dining consumers. They are actively engaged in loyalty programs and expect frequent updates from their favorite restaurants. They view dining out as an opportunity to socialize with co-workers, friends and family. Rosemark is partnering with leading marketing services and technology companies to implement QP-based personalization with their dining clients. We look forward to sharing more information on the Rosemark Dining Category Quantitative Persona Structure and identifying opportunities to apply the QP Method to other categories, please contact Rosemark for more details.

Over the last decade, digital marketers have allowed (and directly enabled) the digital behemoths to become the dominant point of access for consumers to connect to their brands. During the COVID crisis, this power has only intensified, as consumers now rely almost exclusively on these points of access and delivery to define nearly all of their shopping and buying behavior.  This leads brand marketers to ponder the ultimate nightmare:

Will the direct relationship between their brand and their consumers be another COVID casualty?

At Rosemark, we believe the answer must be an emphatic no!

The most powerful tools in marketers’ arsenals have always been those related to discovering deeper insights as to why consumers buy and translating that insight into more personally relevant products, messages and promotional offers. That’s why we at Rosemark have built a scalable method to segment consumers based on how their underlying motivations and preferences drive their brand choice and usage behaviors.  We call this method, Quantitative Personas^SM (QP).  We are leveraging this Intellectual Property as the centerpiece for the group of interrelated loyalty, e-commerce and analytics companies we are in the process of acquiring, in service of placing the control of the consumer relationship back in the hands of brand marketers.

An example of the power of Quantitative Personas is the dining category (quick serve restaurants, fast casual and casual dining), for which we recently completed building out a QP model.  This category has gone through a seismic shift as their front doors are closed and they must now serve all their customers through drive-up, curbside pickup and third-party delivery services. We identified the 2 QPs who represent 27% of consumers and 65% of the digital ordering volume before the COVID crisis.  These Personas have meaningfully different motivations to order out, preferences in loyalty programs and the role social media plays in their brand choice and decision to share positive experiences with their friends.  We believe the restaurant brands which convert these types of insights into personalized electronic ordering and loyalty programs will win a disproportionate share of these 2 dining QPs and in so doing will not only survive the COVID crisis but will thrive on the other side of it.