Thick and thin
You might have noticed the recent return of a fast food trend: the meal deal. From Wendy’s $3 breakfast deal to Taco Bell’s $7 Luxe Cravings Box, operators are betting on bundles to re-light the fast food habit.
Why now? Well, according to USA Today, “McDonald’s, Burger King, Starbucks, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell all saw sale declines of more than 30% from July 2023 to July 2024.” Every big restaurant is running some kind of food bundle, a reaction to sales slumps resulting from prices slowly creeping up.
Beyond sales taking a hit, you can be sure each brand is closely monitoring consumer perception of value. According to Federal Reserve research, “Inflation perceptions have been coming down, but more slowly and from a higher level than actual inflation.”
That is, people think it’s worse than it is. That’s likely creating alarms in brand trackers and trend reports, and every brand is trying to put out the perception fire with bigger, cheapest, highest value bundle possible.
This isn’t a critique; if I were running a fast food brand I’d likely do the same thing to try to stop the sales from bleeding. And just because things aren’t as bad as they seem doesn’t mean they aren’t tough. But an entire category rolling out the same deal at the same time is a good example of a thin insight.
A thin insight comes from one or just a few sources put together. They’re the ones that tell us parents are busy, that we’re ever-connected but have never been more alone, and that things are getting so expensive. They’re a good place to start.
A deeper insight comes from looking at what happens when we put several layers together: survey and behavioral data, focus groups and social listening, segmentation and gen pop, macro trends and trending memes, site surveys and click analysis. They help us develop a map for where to go.
(Joe Burns’ post is excellent reference for how to think about deeper insight.)
When I was at Condé Nast we wrote about how to interpret what we see when we layer data:
We use every resource we can because, when put side-by-side, they help us uncover unexpected things. Layering of datasets allows us to see two powerful things: pockets and paradoxes. Pockets are those nuances that show us the why behind the what… Paradoxes highlight tensions that open up rich territory.
Sometimes it feels like we look for insights like we’re looking for new shoes: they exist somewhere, I just need to find them. Instead it’s more like finding love on Bumble: a piece of data (like a match) is a strong start, but it gets closer to insight (love) the more you think about what it means for the future you want.
Mark Pollard recently posted, “Unfortunately, the phrase ‘data-driven insight’ is often used when people want a statistic to prove the future.” We expect insightful thinking to do so much for us that it seems impossible that it’s just words we make up based on considering a bunch of layers of information at once.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
