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Drive growth in QSR with Decision Science.

An effective innovation is anything that turns decisions in your favor. We help researchers at quick-serve restaurants (QSR) deliver meaningful innovation across the guest lifecycle.

Mc Donalds logo
Client Subway
Client Panera
McCain
Client Pizza Hut Color

We help QSR brands understand how to drive change in their categories.

Menu Optimization

What is the impact of adding a new item to your menu? Or removing an item altogether? These are just two of the frequent questions we help our clients in QSR answer about their own portfolios. Tools like our Market Simulator dashboard and Virtual Menu simulator allow you to quickly understand the impact of these decisions.

Early-Stage Innovation Testing

Research teams at QSR companies need a way of standardizing their early-stage innovation testing while maintaining the agility and speed of modern SaaS software. Our proprietary Upsiide platform is used to screen and assess menu, campaign, and pack innovations. Our teams work with you to develop specific templates for your unique research needs.

Global Menu Design

You know that there is an opportunity to expand your menu offerings, but how do you ensure you're expanding in the right places or categories? And if you do figure that out, how can you develop the optimal new item(s)? We work with global restaurant clients to find white space and expand their menus through a mixture of qualitative and quantitative research.

How We Helped McDonald's Become Famous For Chicken

Based on our work together, McDonald's was able to identify short-term innovation opportunities and long-term innovation opportunities. Innovations were prioritized based on their consumer appeal, their fit with the McDonald’s brand and their ability to grow the McDonald’s customer base.  

Read the case study
Woman holding a chicken burger

Dig has become an invaluable partner across so many aspects of our business – and especially for our global team. We’ve work with Dig on some of our most pressing and strategic customer problems to solve and they truly partner in finding real, workable solutions that connect insight to strategy. Dig goes beyond giving us the data and even the “why,” they are our partners in the “so what” for our business.

Mc Donalds logo

Dana Grinshpan, Customer Experience Insights Manager

McDonald's

What We Bring to the Table

Two women at a self check out screen inside a fast food restaurant

FORESIGHT RESEARCH

Align your innovation pipeline with macro-trends.

Where is your category moving? And which trends are worth investing in? Our growing team of qualitative researchers bring technology tools, primary research, and secondary signals to guide your innovations in the right direction.

VIRTUAL MENU

Put your menu (innovations) to the test.

Dig Insights developed a proprietary tech solution called Virtual Menu, an interactive experience for a respondent that mimics the experience of ordering off the menu. Over several choice screens, respondents make purchasing decisions off your menu. Across those screens, we experiment with product availability / pack size / pack configuration / regular price / depth of discount.

Unlike a conventional conjoint, each item has an independent set of prices and discounts. This gives us total control over the experiment and the data modeling.

Upsiide Market Simulator

MARKET SIMULATOR

Pinpoint the impact of adding or removing menu items.

The Market Simulator dashboard on Upsiide lets your teams quickly and easily understand where your ideas source volume from, so that you can make educated decisions about what to add or remove from your menu.

Until we found Upsiide, we were struggling to get quality insights that we could trust, quickly and within budget. Upsiide lets us prioritize our ideas so we know that we're really putting only the best 10 into a deep dive. Upsiide helps us fine-tune our ideas, test them against each other, and ensure we truly focus and invest on the ones with the best potential. You can't put a price on that.

Client Pizza Hut Color

Brand Manager

Pizza Hut

Don't just take our word for it...

Check out our approach to research and analysis in action.

case studies

Decision Science focuses on understanding how people make decisions in the real world. Four core principals of Decision Science differentiate our work:

  1. Impulses drive decisions.

    In every category, gut reactions play a larger role in decisions than most research recognizes. We address this with agile surveys, mobile diaries to understand in-the-moment experiences, and a range of qualitative tools. Our proprietary technologies avoid asking planned behavior and instead use behavior in a gamified environment to forecast real-world behavior.

  2. Decisions occur in context.

    Every purchase decision involves trade-offs between competing offerings. Most research fails to reflect this, often assessing ideas in isolation from a competitive set. Dig Insights tests ideas in a competitive context, understanding the trade-offs that will affect performance in the real world.

  3. Attitudes don't predict decisions.

    Research typically evaluates innovations with questions like purchase intent, uniqueness, advantage, or value for money, etc. The assumption is that responses to these attitudinal questions predict behavior. This is a flawed assumption. Numerous validations across categories demonstrate the superior ability of our behavior-based methods to predict in-market performance. We ask attitudinal questions, but we use them to explain strong or weak performance and to highlight optimization opportunities, not to forecast behavior.

  4. Data does not mean decisions.

    Most companies have lots of data, but many struggle to translate that data into effective decisions. We understand how data translate into insights and how
    insights translate into powerful business decisions. We are extremely proud of our data visualization, analytics, and forecasting. These tools reveal patterns in the data that in turn reveal opportunities. We are equally proud of our consulting teams who ensure effective project execution and powerful interpretation of the results.