The Context

As one of the biggest fast-casual restaurant companies in the United States, our client was seeking the best way to optimize their pricing strategy in order to better serve key segments and markets. With the rising cost of meat and produce, alongside increasing minimum wages, this client knew they had to increase prices without sacrificing the value that their guests had come to know and love. A few key questions arose from the team:

1. Was there a physiological pricing barrier that consumers were not willing to cross?
2. How should the new pricing be benchmarked against key competitors?
3. How should pricing differ in markets where the minimum wage (and costs) were higher?

The Strop Solution

Strop Insights conducted an in-depth analysis of the client’s historical sales and transactions in order to gain insights into buying patterns and trends. This allowed Strop Insights to determine a pricing recommendation that could be used to benchmark against key competitors operating in the quick-service and fast-casual space nationwide. With this information, Strop Insights was now armed with the information needed to construct a set of “guidelines” that would be used to establish pricing in each market based on costs and competition.

Our Impact

The output of the project was a pricing strategy that was directly implemented within the hundreds of stores nationwide. Additionally, Strop Insights helped the client establish a “pricing guidebook” that would now act as a reference for future pricing increases.

The Context

A quick-service restaurant company wanted to fully understand consumer perceptions and preferences among its current menu items by measuring them across specific food attributes (i.e. sweetness and spiciness), and food perceptions (like quality, heartiness, and healthiness).

The Strop Solution

Strop developed a survey instrument evaluating a wide range of menu item characteristics, and personally distributed the surveys to in-store customers after their meal. Within a few days, Strop Insights had collected several hundred responses – allowing Strop Insights to deliver meaningful and actionable insights that focused on customer engagement and perceptions of each menu item.

Our Impact

Our research gave this quick-service restaurant a unique perspective into their customers’ minds – and identified several products that could be revisited – either by optimizing key product diagnostics or by communicating key attributes of products where there was a perceptual mis-alignment with the actual product.