Consumer Picks is a guest-preference survey providing insight into how customers rate 139 restaurant chains on nine major attributes.
The survey is intended to help point brands in the right direction when it comes to satisfying guests.
To our knowledge, this is the only study of its type that is provided at no charge to the industry.
WD Partners and Nation’s Restaurant News, which collaborated on this study, intend to update it annually, creating a multiyear trend line for the industry and for each of the brands included in it.
Along with more familiar and established restaurant contenders, our survey includes a number of emerging chains, such as Five Guys Burgers and Fries, Zaxby’s, Rita’s, Potbelly Sandwich Shop, Cheddar’s Casual Café and Bonefish Grill.
The resulting survey data was interesting — and at times surprising. We chose to share in this report the top-two-box percentages, which is the typical benchmark for studies of this type. However, there are many ways to sort the data to gain other insights.
For example, certain brands are noted for particular strengths within various demographic categories in the section highlighting such findings. WD has done some research on Millennials over the past couple of years, so it was interesting to see which brands resonated with this age group, as well as which brands rated highly with Boomers and their older counterparts, referred to in this survey as Matures.
Looking at the data using only the top-box scores — or those derived from five-out-of-five ratings — also revealed some interesting insights. For example, Chick-fil-A, which took top honors in most, or seven, of the attribute scores in the top-two-box ratings, ranked first for all nine of the attributes in top-box scores and was the only chain in the survey to do so.
Cheddar’s had the highest score for Casual-Dining chains in Value, which is not a total surprise. When evaluating only top-box scores, however, Cheddar’s lead in the Value attribute became even larger.
As with all studies of this magnitude, some tough decisions had to be made. For example, two higher-end brands, Ruth’s Chris Steak House and McCormick & Schmick’s, made it into the survey from the relatively high number of consumers weighing in on their experiences there. We opted to include Ruth’s and McCormick in the Casual-Dining segment and in the Steak and Seafood subsets, respectively, rather than create a separate Fine-Dining group.
There are also always a few brands that do not neatly fall into one particular subcategory. However, if you’d like to construct a competitive set from more than one subcategory in the data, simply choose the brands from whichever segments you feel are most appropriate.
We also chose not have an attribute on Convenience. This attribute typically reflects — to some degree — the number of units in a brand. As a result, the largest chains in this survey, such as McDonald’s and Subway, lost some of their “advantage” over smaller chains with the elimination of this attribute.
In place of Convenience, we added two attributes that many executives will find extremely helpful in evaluating their brands: Likely to Recommend and Likely to Return. The differences in these ratings provide some interesting insights.
For example, McDonald’s did not rank particularly high in the Overall Scores for the Limited-Service Hamburger segment.
Again, this is both because of the loss of the Convenience attribute and what I believe is a tendency for consumers to underrate the brand in surveys of this type. But that lower ranking stands in sharp contrast to the chain’s strong rating in Likely to Return. Meanwhile, McDonald’s average unit sales and growth in same-store sales over the past eight years or so support the brand’s lure.
As I have often said, the best consumer-research instrument ever devised is still the cash register.
Dennis Lombardi is executive vice president of foodservice strategies of WD Partners in Dublin, Ohio. He can be reached at Dennis.Lombardi@WDPartners.com.
