How a Franchised National QSR Used Arima’s Location Intelligence Tool to Identify High-Potential Restaurant Locations
The Challenge
A national quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain had ambitious expansion plans, with the goal of opening 40 new franchised locations over the next three years. While the brand had enjoyed strong growth, selecting new restaurant sites had become increasingly complex.
Traditional site selection relies heavily on demographics, traffic counts, commercial real estate availability, and local market knowledge. Although these factors remain important, they often fail to answer critical questions:
- Where do our ideal customers actually spend their time?
- Which neighborhoods have unmet demand for our brand?
- Which competitor locations are vulnerable?
- How do consumers move throughout the day?
- Which proposed locations are likely to generate incremental sales versus cannibalizing existing restaurants?
With each new restaurant representing a multi-million-dollar investment, the company wanted an enhanced data-driven approach to expansion.
The Solution
The QSR’s analysts leveraged the Location Intelligence tool on Arima’s Marketing Intelligence platform and Arima’s proprietary Synthetic Society™.
Unlike traditional site selection tools that rely primarily on chunky census demographic data, Arima’s Synthetic Society™ combines individual level demographic, behavioral, psychographic, mobility, retail visitation, media consumption, and purchase behavior into a unified view of consumers at granular levels of geography.
Using the platform, and armed with its highest-value customer profiles, the client was able to:
- Map where those customers live, work, and travel
- Identify underserved trade areas
- Analyze competitor visitation patterns
- Evaluate hundreds of potential retail locations
- Forecast expected customer volumes before committing to a lease
The Analysis
Analysts created a scoring algorithm which evaluated every potential market using multiple dimensions, including:
- Population growth
- Household composition
- Income levels
- Lifestyle and dining preferences
- Daytime versus evening populations
- Commuting patterns
- Shopping behaviours
- Proximity to complementary retailers
- Competitive restaurant density
- Consumer mobility patterns
- Distance from existing company locations
Rather than simply identifying areas with the highest population density, the platform highlighted locations where the brand’s target audience naturally congregated throughout the day.
The analysis revealed several surprising insights:
- Some suburban growth areas with moderate populations significantly outperformed dense urban neighbourhoods because residents matched the brand’s core customer profile.
- Several highly visible retail corridors were already oversaturated with competing QSR brands.
- Emerging mixed-use developments offered strong long-term growth despite lower current traffic volumes.
- Certain proposed locations would likely divert customers from nearby restaurants rather than generate new business.
Decision Making
The scoring algorithm was used to create a ranking app to easily summarize the potential of sites based on expected opportunity.
Decision-makers were able to:
- Quickly compare multiple expansion scenarios
- Prioritize investments based on projected demand
- Evaluate sensitivity to future population growth
- Present objective recommendations to executive leadership
The platform also allowed regional managers to visualize customer catchment areas and compare them against existing restaurant performance.
The Results
Within the first phase of expansion, the organization selected 15 priority locations using insights generated by Arima’s Location Intelligence tool.
Compared with historical expansion performance:
- Increased first year customer traffic
- Improved first year sales per new restaurant
- Reduced market overlap with existing locations
- Site evaluation timelines were shortened from several weeks to just a few days
Perhaps most importantly, executive leadership gained greater confidence that expansion decisions were based on objective consumer behavior rather than intuition alone.
Why Using Arima Is Different
Traditional location analysis often answers “Who lives here?”
Arima answers “Who actually comes here, what do they do, where else do they go, and are they likely to become your customers?”
Because Arima’s Synthetic Society™ models real-world consumer behavior at an individual level (while preserving privacy), organizations gain a far richer understanding of market opportunity than demographic data alone can provide.
The result is more confident investment decisions, reduced expansion risk, and greater long-term return on capital.
Business Impact
For any organization operating brick and mortar locations, choosing the right location is one of the most important strategic decisions to make.
By combining behavioral analytics, mobility insights, consumer preferences, and predictive modelling, Arima’s tools enable any organization operating brick and mortar to move beyond traditional site selection and make expansion decisions based on how people actually live, work, shop, and dine.
For this client, the outcome was a faster, more data-driven expansion strategy that positioned every new restaurant for stronger long-term success.
