The challenge
YO! brought sushi to the British high street, and the business has since grown well beyond the restaurant floor, reaching customers through delivery and retail too.
With that breadth comes complexity: three routes to the same consumer, each with its own occasions and expectations.
YO! were keen to update their understanding amongst key current and target audiences, with specific attention on three fronts: understanding the current customer experience; mapping visit occasions, need states, competitor consideration and YO!’s role in the repertoire; and exploring expectations of how YO! can engage new audiences through innovation whilst continuing to delight current customers. That last balance is the perennial challenge for a much-loved name: grow without losing what made people love you.
What we did
An online survey amongst restaurant, delivery and retail audiences, and agile listening groups amongst heavy and lapsed audiences.
How we did it
We took an integrated approach, with each method doing the job it does best.
The programme started with a comprehensive online survey across all three audiences: restaurant, delivery and retail. Covering every channel in one survey mattered, because consumers do not experience YO! in silos; the same person might pick up a retail pack on Tuesday and sit at the conveyor belt on Saturday, and understanding the whole repertoire means measuring it whole. The survey established the key dynamics and the perspectives of each specific audience, putting numbers behind occasions, need states and competitive standing.
The quantitative picture then told us exactly where to look closer. Emerging issues and opportunities were deep-dived through agile listening groups, deliberately structured around the two audiences that matter most to growth: heavy users, who reveal what the business must protect, and lapsed users, who reveal what it must fix. Few conversations are more commercially valuable than a lapsed customer explaining, in their own words, why they stopped coming.
What it delivered
The results helped shape immediate strategic direction, informing decisions across the marketing mix for the next twelve months, so the work converted into action on a clear commercial timetable rather than waiting on the shelf.
The value reached further than the first year. The insights created a foundation for longer-term strategy, and just as importantly, the programme demonstrated the power of customer insight to the wider business. That second outcome is easy to underrate. When a programme shows an organisation what insight can do, every future decision gets easier to ground in evidence, and the appetite for understanding consumers grows across the company.
Hospitality moves fast, audiences shift, and the gap between what a business believes about its customers and what is currently true can open quietly. Work like this closes that gap, and doing it for the name that changed how Britain eats sushi, across every channel where people now enjoy it, is exactly the sort of challenge that gets our insight team to the table early.
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