Status and Future of Marketing Analytics in the Food Industry

The digital era hit the food industry in a heavy way. What used to be an experience that consisted of trying some place you’ve never heard of has become a detailed investigative effort every time you want a chicken nugget. Now you can check reviews, ask friends and acquaintances for their opinions, photo journal your entire dining experience, gauge your daily calorie intake, and spew venom on Yelp about the shitty service/food/cocktails/selfie-unflattering-bathroom-lighting before you’ve even tipped the waitress. Here are three major ways the food industry is changing in the digital world, and what trends it’s heading for.

Word of Mouth: Social Media

The culinary world has always been akin to the fashion world. Restaurants gain and wane in popularity as trends do, with influencers and publications like Zagat directing the peaks and valleys. But something that could influence you more than an influencer? Someone you know, whose opinion you trust, making a recommendation of a great place to eat.

The digital era has taken this driving force and amplified it. Social media platforms give everyone a means of speaking directly to each other in detail, and in groups, about experiences they’ve had at various dining establishments. Beyond that, people can post whatever their thoughts are and effectively project their opinions out into the ether for anyone to pick up.

The prime example of this, of course, is Instagram. Not only is it the go-to platform for posting pictures of your dinner (or, god help you, brunch), but it has the advantage over platforms like Facebook in that it allows users to easily reach outside of their networks. Using tagging methods like hashtags allows anyone to find your posts as long as they’re searching for it - friended, followed, or not. For restaurants, this turns every customer into a potential free and potent advertisement.

Food critics are becoming necessary only for the kind of establishments that NBA players book months in advance. For everyone else, there’s everyone else.

Word of Mouth: Comments

Everyone knows that, for the most part, the collective comments sections of the internet make-up the real Dark Web. They’re vitriolic, unverifiable, and often downright nasty in both senses of the word.

But they’re also great for SEO. And they’re also the best way for website users to actively engage with an otherwise static webpage. And although they’re all strangers, a comments section is comprised of people who cared enough to come back and comment on a product or service that is currently in your headspace right at the consideration stage of the purchasing funnel.

This is how Yelp changed the game. Crowd-sourced comments and critiques of restaurants and individual dishes has become the vanguard of deciding what to get for dinner tonight. The advice of a close friend carries a ton of weight. The aggregated and averaged advice of 4,000 overly passionate strangers will do in a pinch.

Online Ordering

The most disruptive culinary innovations in recent years have been in online ordering. Restaurants that were already based mostly off of deliveries, like Domino’s, quickly adapted to have strong online presences. Customers could build online profiles to expedite checkout, take their time browsing menus and deals, and never have to engage with another person. Companies also started integrated marketing strategies. They started offering users low-priced items in between order pages. When you logged in, they would remind you of past orders, or recommend new ones based on your history.

But that’s old news at this point. The real innovation worth watching was started by companies like GrubHub. Now restaurants that have never delivered before and never had delivery fleets can deliver. Those wings you always stagger to get with your friends at 2 in the morning? Now you can order them slouched on a couch with Netflix on.

Taking that a step further is UberEats. Uber started as a ride hailing service that millennials adopted at an alarming rate, and it quickly became ubiquitous. My (unconfirmed, unresearched) guess is that Uber drivers were reporting a high volume of young drunk people getting rides from bars, to restaurants, to home. So Uber took the rides they were already providing, added a significant number of additional people who were already home, and slapped a delivery charge in the middle. And we’re all eating it up.

The Takeaway? We Aren’t Going Out Much Anymore.

What all of this seems to be leading to is dominance of preference given to ultimate personalization, over other considerations like the collective desire of a group. We ask our friends what they would recommend. We check reviews and offerings. We compare prices. We carefully select what we want. We order it directly to our homes. Then we eat it alone.