The Challenge
Five Guys had experienced years of rapid expansion on a wave of high-end burger chains. Their spartan stores, commitment to premium ingredients regardless of price, and a simple menu all served to reinforce perceptions of quality. With no more room to grow by adding stores within the US, they turned to advertising to generate incremental sales from existing stores
The Work
Five Guys' commitment to quality wouldn't stop with their national campaign. We embarked on a robust customer-centricity exercise, built to capture insights and apply them on a rolling cadence for continuous optimization.
Beginning with the academic work on the psychology of eating, our behavioral strategy team developed a set of hypotheses that we would then refine through Jobs To Be Done interviews and biometric testing. These tools and frameworks gave us a comprehensive view of the forces at play when consumers consider, and ultimately commit to eating at the QSR.
Those insights also guided an extensive creative tagging approach that generated additional performance data, informing both creative and audience strategies and allowing the team to optimize audience and creative against the client's KPIs.
New, behaviorally defined audiences were identified and tested against more traditional audience strategies. Creative strategies were designed with testing in mind, building on a list of behavior and element tags. With audiences and creative concepts mapped, we were able to build a structure for continuous optimization. When a concept worked particularly well or particularly poorly, we were able to identify the specific elements down to variations in the visual elements, the behavioral trigger used in the copy, or the concept that drove the audience segment's creation.
The Strategy
The culmination of our research was a comprehensive and agile behavior change strategy. Audience targeting and creative strategy would be driven by the concepts derived from our research into the psychology of eating and the insights derived from our Jobs To Be Done interviews. And once implemented, those campaign elements would be tracked in detail, including behavioral intent and tagging visual elements, and optimized against a range of KPIs. Performance data would be measured against those KPIs so that we could measure the impacts of each element on the campaign.
This level of granularity would then allow the team to optimize the campaign in real time, adjusting budgets, audiences, and creative in response to performance data. The campaign wouldn't be limited to knowing if something was working or not, but specifically why.
The Results
The results of our work were a comprehensive behavior change strategy that was built for advertising platforms, but would be extendable to promotion and pricing strategy, real-estate planning, and product planning.
The impact of the campaign was dramatic and immediate. The campaign's target audiences increased effectiveness, with the behaviorally defined audiences coming in 60% more effective than the standard audiences. Creative that was designed to target the contexts and emotions discovered in our research led to dramatic increases in online sales and foot traffic but also increased more revenue-centric metrics like basket size and per-ticket revenue.
- A system of continuous optimization tracking against KPIs.
- Foot traffic increased 22%.
- Online sales up 40%.
- Return on Ad Spend up 24%.
- Behavior-based audiences were 60% more effective.