The Meatball Shop Uses Customer Data to Align Each Restaurant to Its Local Clientele

Since first opening their doors in Manhattan’s Lower East Side in 2010, The Meatball Shop has launched a total of six eateries across New York City, one of the world’s most competitive markets. This growth is impressive considering they don’t do any sort of traditional marketing.

The Meatball Shop has instead built its brand recognition via hyper-targeted, customer-focused approaches. Their goal is to create experiences that consistently delight each customer with the hope that they become loyal patrons and passionate brand evangelists.  The idea is to spark a viral movement that drives traffic and revenues for each location.

To create these targeted strategies, customer data is extremely valuable to The Meatball Shop’s management team – and a key element they were missing. They needed to be able to understand their customers on a deeper level, to analyze and empirically validate how that varied by location and by individual customer segment within each location. For example, were patrons at each site tourists or locals? How old were they? What do they enjoy doing?

Without this data, accurately managing each location was extremely difficult, and the team risked missing opportunities for continued growth.

Tranzlogic Provides Critical Customer Insights

The management team of The Meatball Shop turned to Tranzlogic to gather the vital customer data that would help them to glean critical insights into each customer segment at each restaurant location.

They implemented a range of Tranzlogic solutions to obtain the most comprehensive perspective possible. After a short learning curve, they were thrilled with how quickly they became adept at reading and interpreting the new wealth of data at their fingertips.

Almost immediately, several things emerged that the team could take action on right away. For instance, in addition to learning where their customers live, they were able to understand the key demographics about the customers at each site, including age, income, marital status and if they had children. The management team was also able to dig deep into the specific preferences, attitudes and lifestyle activities of each customer segment, as well as understand how that information varied over time and across each location.

This insight into not only their customers but all of the households in each market has enabled The Meatball Shop to start making decisions, taking actions and managing each segment in every location differently. As a result, they have been able to hyper-localize each store by adhering to the unique tastes and preferences of each neighborhood and implementing creative promotional campaigns.

Insights Into Action

Creative Strategies for Happier Customers

The Meatball Shop identified that one of their locations had a high proportion of patrons who lived within walking distance. The bulk of these local patrons belonged to a segment identified as “Bars and Beers” – a younger, relatively affluent group with an average age of 29, no children, earned an average income of $100,000 and were more likely to order alcoholic drinks with dinner.

To better appeal to these customers, The Meatball Shop decided to implement a Happy Hour at this location. The promotion was a measurable success. Not only did sales from that target segment increase, so did frequency of customer visits, as well as the number of new customers.

Armed with these accurate, actionable customer insights, The Meatball Shop is making similarly targeted, non-traditional marketing decisions across all six of their neighborhood restaurants. Additionally, the team is now positioned to form new, strategic partnerships that will allow them to orient their brand in a way that coincides with the lifestyles and preferences of each of their customer segments.

Thanks to Tranzlogic, these fast, intuitive and highly profitable wins have set the stage for even better customer experiences that delight their guests and drive loyalty among their fans – all without relying on traditional, interruptive marketing. Simply by gaining a better sense of precisely who their customers are, business for The Meatball Shop is better than ever.