Foodservice research can have many advantages for franchise businesses looking to grow their operations. Using tools like Brizo provides a board and diverse set of data for deeper foodservice market understanding and analysis. This data can help companies to prospect the foodservice market, improving their sales and marketing efforts. Additionally, it can streamline production innovation and help them expand their brand using foodservice market intelligence and data enrichment. Each of these benefits comes with an associated downside, however, leading to a complex evaluation of the pros and cons of foodservice research.
Whether you’re an established franchise looking to optimize your longstanding strategies, or a new business looking to break into the industry, it’s essential to approach foodservice research with a nuanced evaluation of the upsides and downsides. In this article, we’ll explore the variables you can assess when it comes to evaluating the pros and cons of foodservice research.
The Benefits of Foodservice Research
Using foodservice research, franchisors can gain valuable insights into local food trends and customer trends. Understanding these trends more fully and in-depth can significantly improve their sales and marketing efforts, helping them to increase the efficiency and success of their campaigns. Foodservice research can also help them to better differentiate their brand and product offerings on the market.
Additionally, foodservice research can help improve a franchise’s ability to monitor and track the success of their past marketing and experimental efforts. This data can give them an invaluable understanding into customer tastes and preferences as well. The insights from foodservice research can also help franchisors to figure out ways to retain their existing customer base while also marketing to new prospects.
The Downsides of Foodservice Research
One of the most significant downsides of foodservice research is the cost. Analyzing customer data can be an expensive process, and it can require businesses to take on additional staff members specifically to handle data analysis. It’s important to keep in mind that the cost of foodservice research is not just the monetary cost of data collection and analysis but also the cost of oversight, storage, and technical maintenance. These costs can quickly add up, particularly for smaller franchises that may not have the resources to offset the expenses.
The other downside to foodservice research is that it can be difficult to interpret data correctly. Analyzing customer behavior often requires a nuanced understanding of the data, which can be particularly challenging for inexperienced researchers or those without a data science background. Additionally, customer tastes and preferences are constantly evolving, meaning that the data collected can become obsolete relatively quickly. This can lead to inaccurate or untimely insights that can ultimately be detrimental to the success of a franchise’s operations.
Using Foodservice Research Effectively
Knowing the pros and cons of foodservice research is essential for making effective decisions and leveraging this type of research to the fullest. To ensure that you’re able to maximise the benefits of foodservice research, you should create a comprehensive plan of action prior to collecting and analyzing the data.
This plan should include which types of data you intend to collect, how you will store and monitor the data, and the resources you will allocate toward data analysis. Additionally, you should consider establishing a process for regularly evaluating the customer data so that it remains up-to-date and accurate. Finally, you should also consider hiring an experienced data scientist who can accurately interpret and leverage the insights from the customer data.
To conclude
Foodservice research can be a powerful tool for franchises to leverage in order to gain valuable insights into customer behavior and tastes. By understanding trends and preferences on the market, franchisors can significantly improve their sales and marketing efforts and gain a competitive edge on their competitors. Yet, foodservice research can be costly and difficult to interpret accurately, making it essential for franchisors to weigh the pros and cons of this type of research before taking action. By following the tips outlined in this article, you can more effectively use foodservice research to optimize your operations and increase your success.
