Insight: So Many Consumers, Too Many Obvious Analytics?

By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS

I’ve got a consumer analytics tool for restaurants: it tells you when consumers visit the washroom while on your premises, how often they do that, which percentages are men, women or kids, whether they visit before eating, in the middle of eating or after eating, what they buy after visiting the washroom and whether the washroom visit influences their dining experience rating…

This may sound stupid but so far, with third generation analytics, there is no such thing as a ‘stupid consumer’ or ‘stupid metrics’ either. It is all about what you use the data for. The analytics frontier is much more than the apparent: it is around the identification of very non-obvious insights to bring transformational growth to your business, otherwise how would you differentiate if all your competitors are using the same obvious analytics tools that were erstwhile manually captured and called research but now digitally transformed and christened ‘analytics’ and ‘metrics’.

Customer satisfaction may not necessarily improve because you have superior metrics. Just wait till your customers visit your niche competitor and retake their metrics when they return…

Consumers have become amoebic in their emotional engagement with no objective basis for evaluating their behaviour let alone predicting it. Consumers have become evolutionary in their thinking. For example, will the presence of security guards or police at your business premises make consumers feel safe or unsafe? Read your own caveat to the same consumers who parked their vehicles at your heavily guarded premises shifting your liability and putting responsibility for theft on them for being your customers at the wrong time. What if your guards are thieves in uniform? And why are they there if not to make consumers feel safer but rather more insecure? So even consumer protection here could be a bad metric?

What if some of your consumers are also armed with powerful analytics tools using them to evaluate the number of washroom visits against menu items ordered and vehicle break-ins against particular guards on duty? Your customers would now collaborate on social networks [not necessarily your business page or micro-site] or even on a mobile app [which may be harder to monitor] to find out which security guard is on duty on any day and what’s on the ‘washroom’ menu. Now determining why your customers are changing their behavior will become a lifetime test for your business life cycle.

These kinds of highly engaged influencer-consumer super-advocates will be the outcome of your own creativity. Your business will definitely score high on customer engagement and other touchpoint metrics but not on the ‘so what?.’ Your customers are better informed on your business problems than you or your business itself and how are you going to grab this missing piece of the puzzle? Getting into the pitfall of revenue analytics and their associated yield management tactics will only bring your restaurant business’ analytic proposition back into the cycle: ‘all restaurant customers are hungry’. Valid but not true.

By jumping into to murky territory of bland restaurant promotional tactics, rebranding and menu reengineering, you will only be making a case for ‘creating convolution without value’...and marketers can do it very well.

Business and consumer analytics are now on an inevitable head-on conflict with consumer behaviour unless one of the players blinks in this game of analytics ‘chicken’.