Summary:
A leading QSR, alongside Eden Collective and Corner Table Creative, used Arima’s unlimited-use Marketing Mix Modeling platform to move beyond a national view and uncover key local differences across 13 markets. The insights , like Meta and OOH outperforming TikTok in several regions, helped tailor region-specific strategies and improve marketing effectiveness.
Challenge
Working with agency partners Eden Collective and Corner Table Creative, a leading QSR recognized the need to move beyond a national-only view of marketing performance. While their existing national Marketing Mix Model (MMM) provided broad insights, it failed to capture the local nuances driving customer behavior across regions. As the brand continued to expand, the team required a more flexible and granular approach to understand performance market by market.
The QSR faced three pressing challenges:
- Limited Local Visibility: The national MMM highlighted overall performance but missed regional differences in consumer behavior and campaign response.
- Inefficient Promotion Planning: Absent localized insights, campaign timing and offers weren’t always aligned with the needs of individual markets.
- Lack of Market Comparisons: There was no consistent way to evaluate markets side by side, making it difficult to optimize spend or uncover new growth opportunities.
Leadership wanted clear answers to two questions:
- How does customer behavior and related marketing performance vary across markets?
- Can localized insights drive more effective promotions while keeping the national strategy intact?
Solution
To solve this, Eden Collective and Corner Table Creative turned to Arima’s unlimited-use MMM. Unlike traditional MMM tools that restrict modeling to a singular national view, Arima’s platform enabled the team to build localized models alongside a national one — without added cost or complexity.
With this capability, they could compare performance across markets, identify regional nuances in customer behavior, and provide the QSR with a unified, data-backed framework for evaluating marketing effectiveness at both national and regional levels.
Result
Localized MMM uncovered performance patterns that were invisible at the national level. Among the 13 local markets measured, more than half showed notable differences in channel performance — particularly across social platforms and in the effectiveness of OOH. These findings reinforce the insight that a single national plan no longer aligns with the QSR’s unique market-level needs.
Comparing the national MMM analysis versus local, some significant differences emerge:
- While TikTok was the choice nationally, more than half of the markets revealed Meta as the better performer.
- The national analysis also obscured the critical impact of OOH — particularly in urban centers that attract a sizable and concentrated lunch and late-afternoon take-away audience.
Armed with these sharper insights, the QSR developed marketing strategies tailored to each region’s unique needs — enabling smarter campaign timing, more relevant offers, and more efficient use of spend, all while maintaining alignment with the bigger picture.
Arima’s unlimited flexibility meant Eden could create models for any market or scenario, giving their teams the agility to plan, test, and adapt with confidence.
With richer visibility into consumer behavior at both national and regional levels, the QSR has shifted from broad strokes to precise, data-driven strategies that drive smarter planning and more effective campaigns.
