Case Study: The Chicken Parm and the "Why"
- Onyx Optimization
- Jul 1, 2021
- 2 min read
If you asked yourself "Why do people support my business?", you might have a completely different answer than your customer does.
Through consulting hundreds of small businesses throughout the pandemic, I've seen firsthand the disconnect between an owner and their customer. Here's a quick case study to help you understand what I'm talking about:
In the summer of 2020, we worked with a small Italian restaurant. The owner had seen a drastic drop in business while neighbors were steadily increasing. The first question I asked the owner was "Why do your customers come here?" to which they replied, "We have the best chicken parm in the area".
We looked at their customer data and asked all their customers for a week to fill out a survey on why they would return and it turned out, the people consuming their chicken parm were mostly tourists who didn't return. The locals, however, a strong Italian community, always returned for their ravioli and ranked the personalities (the staff) as the reason they returned.
The owner was shocked to realize their ravioli dishes were the reason people were coming back, but once we knew the customers' "why", we shifted their marketing strategy from "Best Chicken Parm" to putting up signs advertising their ravioli as "Locally Beloved" and using social media to record some of the colorful interactions the staff had with patrons.
It worked, their sales increased by about 5% in the first month during the pandemic (Keep in mind indoor dining wasn't permitted and takeout was the norm). In March of 2021, we did a follow-up and their sales are through the roof.
Understanding your why is important and doing so requires you to dig deep and understand both the quantitative and qualitative data you have. In terms of the Italian Shop, it involved, looking at customer data and then conducting surveys.
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