Jersey Mike’s is homing in on the neighborhood—technically, all of the neighborhoods—that it serves. The New Jersey–based sub shop has teamed up Local ID to boost its local-store marketing (LSM) efforts. Other quick serves like Pinkberry, Rubio’s Coastal Mexican Grill, and Pizza Studio have also engaged Local ID’s services for the same purpose.
For large brands with a number of company and franchise stores across the country, imbuing its ads and marketing campaigns with local flavor can prove a challenging task. Local ID founder and CEO Alex Nocifera compares the traditional LSM to air traffic control, in which a single manager is responsible for several geographic areas. Compounding this juggling act is the sheer amount of information being broadcast across multiple platforms to consumers, who, as a result, have less attention to give to each message.
“If you’re a brand, if you’re Jersey Mike’s, how do you elevate above that attention-span noise? And our belief is context. Local context.” Nocifera says. “We just felt we could arm them with more efficient ways to activate and record what they do.”
When doing LSM research prior to launching Local ID, Nocifera found that many operators searched “contextual opportunities,” such as concerts, sporting events, or even forecasts for foul weather, through a basic Google search and then tracked their efforts in an Excel spreadsheet. Through Local ID, marketing managers can log into a system, see their geographic area of responsibility and all the corresponding events, forecasts, and more for the week ahead in a single portal.
“We throw a lot up on the wall, and they can cherry pick based on what they believe works best, but in time this is really where the system will become magical,” Nocifera says. “Once they activate things, what we do now is we document and we start to overlay that with sales data.” He adds that this makes a company more purposeful and data driven rather than relying on subjective opinions and guesses.
Besides lending context to marketing opportunities, Local ID can help stores prepare for short-term changes in foot traffic. Nocifera cites the most recent Burning Man—an annual music festival held in the Nevada desert—as an example; he saw pictures of brands running out of products at the festival because they were not prepared for 60,000 attendees.
Although Jersey Mike’s did not begin using Local ID until this July and other brands are equally new to it, Nocifera says they have already received some exciting metrics supporting the utility of the system.
“We’ve got one of those dream quotes of saying, ‘This has made my life 10 times easier. It saved me hours of finding things … and now I’ve got a one-stop shop.’”
Although Local ID will work with businesses outside of restaurants, Nocifera says that foodservice and the quick-serve category specifically are its prime targets because of the frequency at which consumers visit and interact with the brands. Also, he adds, that the industry has been largely neglected by when it comes to technology updates and disruption. To that end, the company wants to fully understand foodservice in order to better serve its clients. Local ID’s head of marketing even hails from Jack in the Box.
“You really have to get into the particulars and the intricacies of these chains, especially in a franchise system where it’s very complex,” Nocifera says.
By Nicole Duncan
