Uncovering What Matters Most in a Digital Retail Experience for a Global QSR Brand

The Call

A category leading, global QSR brand wanted to strengthen their understanding of the category’s digital retail landscape and how key QSR brands performed at each touchpoint in a digital ordering and paying capacity. Furthermore, the QSR brand wanted to identify the functional benefits and features most important to consumers within digital experiences, measure their current performance on these criteria, and identify areas of opportunity for innovation in this competitive space.

Our Response

A multi-phased approach consisting of a secondary research review of the current competitive landscape, a series of ethnographic, qualitative explorations of consumers’ digital purchase journeys among top national QSR brands, a set of follow-up one-on-one interviews to dive deeper into the underlying digital journey, and finally a quantitative deep dive (complete with a key drivers and MaxDiff analysis) to verify and quantify the themes uncovered in the preceding research phases.

The Celebration

The holistic outcome of all phases of research painted a clear picture that while there were leaders on certain criteria among national QSR brands’ performance, there are more dimensions where no clear leader has emerged in digital ordering and payment across the category. Catapult was able to provide clear direction on how to improve our client’s digital ordering and payment capabilities and provide consumers with what they need to have a positive experience with the brand. This research was widely distributed and adopted with the client’s organization and plans to evolve the project into an ongoing tracker to monitor performance and gains from yearly investments by the brand.