On the menu: nostalgia. Fast-food chain listened to their customers’ cravings for past menu items.

Bringing back favorite menu items

Our client wanted to get inspiration for a “Throwback Menu” promotion by understanding which discontinued menu items would be popular to bring back. While they wanted to get top-of-mind responses, they also needed to understand how these top-of-mind responses ranked against three menu items that the client’s team was considering. Importantly, they wanted to understand how the choices under consideration worked for their most loyal customers. The specific research questions they wanted to answer were the following:

• Which old menu items are most popular?

• How do the 3 hypothesized choices compare to top-of-mind responses?

• How do these preferences vary based on the length of customer relationships?

Staying open to customers’ input

To analyze the feelings and desires of customers, we asked an AI Open-End™ question to identify the menu items respondents most remembered and wanted to bring back. In the mix with customers’ crowd-sourced favorites were our client’s incoming menu ideas which were evaluated together. This qualitative-quantitative strategy uncovered customers’ top-of-mind thoughts while measuring these responses and ranking them against each other.

Listening to results from customers leads to better decisions

From this research, our client’s product development team gained a more realistic understanding of their customer base’s wants and preferences. While we started the study with 3 strong menu item candidates, only one of these three proved to accurately reflect customers’ current tastes. This research assisted our client in a successful retro menu relaunch that better reflected the cravings of their customers for long-discontinued items.