Getting closer to the customer opportunity
A fast-casual dining icon, our client has redefined modern, casual dining. They’re a brand that’s always pushing for ways to innovate, whether through flavours and recipes, or other revenue streams such as take-home and merch, and brand-building through partnerships.
Casual dining is a competitive category, and this is increasingly so, with more and more options to tempt customer appetites, and competition from quick service and full-service restaurants alike. Restaurants are facing an ongoing challenge balancing economic factors, customer experience, differentiation and elevated expectation; understanding these ever-evolving dynamics is essential to growing market share.
Staying ahead of customer needs in a crowded market
The client has a young target audience, comprised of people under 30s and families. They needed an always-on channel to understand where and how this target audience engage and how they make decisions about eating out. It was important to have a tool that could help them stay on top of fast-moving trends and moments, in a way that commissioning ad hoc research wouldn’t be able to keep pace with.
An Insight Community would be an important menu option in their suite of tools – a solution to help answer briefs from the strategic to the tactical, and provide ongoing customer closeness to fuel innovation.
With a small but mighty in-house insight team and interest in customer attitudes and experiences growing exponentially, it was essential that they found an Insight Community partner who could add value and capacity as demand for the Community grew.
Flexible insight support that scales
Flexibility was built in from the start, including in training and onboarding. Our modular Community training allowed their time-pressed team to select only the modules that mattered, whether that was survey scripting, crosstabs or Community management. This ensured targeted, relevant upskilling without unnecessary time investment.
With the Community now live, we act as an extension of their insight function, providing flexible support that scales as their capacity fluctuates.
This enables the team to shift seamlessly between DIY research and fully managed projects or tap into new methodologies when needed. In practice, this creates a powerful blend of speed and depth. For NPD, the Community allows the team to run early-stage development at pace – exploring territories, testing concepts and names, and evaluating partnership ideas using our quantitative toolkit. It’s a fast, low risk way to scope new opportunities. When qualitative depth is required – such as taste testing new recipes or refining branding – our experts step in to fill skill or capacity gaps. We help connect online and in-person approaches, from recruiting Community members for testing and moderating groups to capturing in-the-moment, in-restaurant experiences through Whycatcher, STRAT7’s WhatsApp based research tool.
An agile Insight Community that’s driving customer-centric change
By focusing training on exactly what the team needed, the client rapidly built a powerful in-house Insight Community capability. This didn’t just reduce external agency spend, it sparked a mindset shift. The team began confidently owning more of the insight workflow, dramatically increasing the volume of self-serve projects and delivering greater output without adding a single new headcount.
With us on hand as an expert partner, the team always have senior level guidance available when projects demand qualitative nuance, methodological innovation, input around emerging category trends or simply extra hands. Quality remains high, even as the pace of projects intensifies. The blend of hands-on and supported insight programmes make for a truly flexible insight tool. The client’s insight team can quickly explore opportunities in an agile, low-risk way. When a last-minute request comes in, they can set up a discussion, get it live and have conversations with target customers in under an hour.
The Community has reshaped how the business makes decisions. Early stage development has accelerated, enabling the team to explore new ideas, pressure test partnerships and evaluate concepts with speed and confidence. Stakeholders have noted the difference: briefs are answered faster, insight is richer, conversations with customers are happening within hours and decisions are grounded in real-time evidence.
This hybrid Community model, which empowers DIY agility while providing flexible expert support, delivers not just operational efficiency, but a step change in strategic capability.
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