restaurants

Setting Insights Higher

A complete range of research solutions for the restaurant and hospitality industry.

Socratic delivers the insights essential for refining restaurant strategies and enhancing brand equity, offering distinctive approaches and a complete suite of research services.

New Menu Item Screening

Efficiently screen new menu items to identify those with high consumer interest, drive traffic, and minimize the impact on existing items.

  • Quick Turn Concept Testing Program for budget-friendly & fast turnaround testing (Reference) (Video)
  • Online Concept Dashboard to create institutional memory on concept testing and to build decision-making benchmarks (Video)
  • Socratic ProductExhibitorSM to help consumer visualize new menu items & offerings (Video)
menu screening
Menu Optimization

Menu Optimization

Utilizing concept testing and choice-based designs to pinpoint menu items with the greatest potential to drive incremental traffic, both as regular menu items and as part of seasonal or promotional offerings.

  • Socratic’s approach to concept testing gives flexibility to test almost any asset, concept, and visual (Reference) (Video)
  • Socratic Concept HighlighterSM to isolate concept drivers & barriers (Video)
  • Conjoint, Adaptive Conjoint, Discrete Choice to identify combinations of features & levels that optimize an offering (Reference)
  • TURF & Socratic NCURASM to identify the combination of menu items & ingredients that maximizes interest to the broadest audience (Video)
  • Multi-Response MaxDiff to prioritize lists of menu items & ingredients (Reference)

Menu and Menu Board Design

Assess menu and menu board designs aimed at enhancing upsell opportunities, cross-selling, and promoting high-margin items.

  • Menu-based conjoint & Socratic Configurator AnalysisSM to provide context, visualization, and interaction in a more natural choice-based exercise (Video)
  • 360⁰ environments as another option to provide context, visualization, and interaction (Video)
  • Experimental design & Socratic Concept HighlighterSM exercises to measure the impact of changes to interest and ordering preferences (Video)
Menu Board Optimization
Message Testing Restaurants

Messaging and Promotion Testing

Utilize concept testing to pinpoint promotions with the greatest potential to drive high traffic.

  • Quick Turn Concept Testing Program for budget-friendly & fast turnaround testing (Reference) (Video)
  • TURF & Socratic NCURASM to identify the combination of messages & promotional ideas that maximizes interest to the broadest audience (Video)
  • Multi-Response MaxDiff to prioritize lists of messages & promotional ideas (Reference)

Customer Experience

Customer experiences form the bedrock of brand perceptions, which, in turn, drive actionable results. At Socratic, we employ distinctive methods to elicit customer experience stories and leverage Advanced Text Science & Modeling to identify the brand experiences that most effectively cultivate positive brand moments.

  • Video & Audio capture within surveys to allow customers to more naturally tell stories about their brand experiences (Video)
  • Advanced Text Science that uses AI & machine-learning algorithms to:
    1. reveal dominant themes in unstructured, open-end datasets
    2. identify the relative importance of words and their strength of association based on language context.
  • Bayesian Driver Modeling to identify the words & phrases in brand stories that are tied to desired outcomes (e.g., top-of-mind visit intent, recommendations).
Lobster tank community

Customer Communities: Fostering Engagement and Insights

At Socratic, we recognize the paramount importance of actively engaging with your audience, harnessing their valuable insights, and forging stronger connections. To facilitate this, we specialize in crafting branded communities that serve as dynamic platforms for ongoing interaction and feedback. These communities are designed to provide both quantitative and qualitative insights, offering a multifaceted approach to understanding your customers' preferences, needs, and aspirations.

Vast Experience: Socratic has a rich history of crafting and nurturing customer communities, having developed over 300 custom panels and communities to date. This extensive experience underscores our expertise in facilitating meaningful interactions and driving actionable insights.

Tailored Features & Functionality: We understand that each client possesses unique requirements and objectives. Our in-house development team excels at customizing features and functionality to align with your specific needs. This ensures that your community serves as a bespoke platform tailored to extract the most relevant insights.

Scalability & Security: Our systems are designed to be scalable, effortlessly accommodating the growth and evolving needs of your customer community. Additionally, we adhere to the highest standards of security and reliability, a crucial factor especially when catering to our clients in the financial services sector.

Brand Health Tracking

Socratic introduces a unique and advanced approach to brand health evaluation and tracking. While traditional brand tracking programs provide a snapshot of the current marketplace and associated metrics, Socratic's methodology creates a dynamic strategy loop that informs positioning opportunities and long-term strategies.

With the Socratic Brand Power Rating™, we assess the overall strength of your brand in a competitive context (Reference). 

Using Socratic Brand Mapping, we gain insights into how your brand is perceived and its relative standing in comparison to competitors  (Video).

Through a combination of Advanced Text Science and Bayesian Driver Modeling, we gather qualitative-type feedback on brand perceptions and the most-desired benefits. Our advanced text analytics and modeling techniques uncover positioning opportunities by:

  • Identifying benefits that brands are currently overlooking.
  • Discovering the benefits that drive desired outcomes, such as top-of-mind visit intent and recommendations.
Darden Case Study Image 2

WE PARTNER WITH MANY LEADING RESTAURANT AND HOSPITALITY BRANDS

We are proud to be client-partners with many brands in the restaurant and hospitality industry. Socratic has been recognized as thought leaders and valued advisors in many of the industry sectors including:

Socratic Key Metrics

30
years of experience in the research marketing industry
172
companies and organizations worked with since 2010
13
research projects average per client
50%
of our clients are ranked in the Fortune 500

Relevant and Meaningful Research that Directly Influences Strategy.

Gain confidence in your decision making.
restaurant loyalty communities
case study

Darden Loyalty Communities

Learn how Socratic builds and manages loyalty communities for several of Darden’s leading restaurant brands to gain insights and conduct research.
Read
Chick-fil-A Storefront
CASE STUDY

Innovate Chick-fil-A's Menu

Using Socratic’s Configurator Analysis℠ Chick-fil-A identified variations on its chargrilled chicken sandwiches for menu optimization.
read

Ready for Exceptional Insights?

Connect with us today to uncover the powerful possibilities for your marketing strategies.

We’ll reach out promptly to explore your research needs.
Setting Insights Higher
Socratic Technologies is a research-based consultancy that drives strategy and lifts brands. We believe in delivering high-touch client experiences as a cornerstone to providing irreplaceable value.
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