Storyscaping: Stop Creating Ads, Start Creating Worlds

CHAPTER 08

IN THEIR SHOES

Using Ethnography to Understand Consumer Engagement and Buying Insights

While most of the world was suffering some form of financial crisis, we were helping a fast casual restaurant chain to reposition its brand and reengage its consumer base. The financial crunch had a strong impact on people eating out, which made the pleasure of taking the family out for dinner limited to special occasions. The once affordable save-mom-from-cooking family outing became an indulgence. Outside of weekends when there was excess demand, the mid-week casual dining customers were staying at home. More than ever, the competition for restaurants was the supermarket (with huge marketing budgets), which promoted great-value family-friendly meal options for consumers to cook at home. As a result of these and many other factors, the way consumers considered and looked at the fast casual dining category had changed. We needed to effectively relearn how to market to a changed consumer dynamic. We needed to reenergize the Brand Purpose, enhance and connect the consumer experiences, freshen the brand story, and amplify the social conversation. All in service of increasing foot traffic and check size.

To Eat with You Is to Know You. Part of our challenge was to deeply understand consumers in this new dynamic: how they make dining decisions, how they feel about the experience, what ...