Restaurant & Fast Food Industry Brands Report

According to Statista, consumer spending on the restaurant industry in the UK has grown steadily year on year, barring 2009 when spend dropped marginally due to the recession.

FDF Worldcommented that there was an expected 4% increase in the value of the UK industry in 2017, with the predicted value of the market exceeding £20bn.

That’s a lot of spend to play for, and this year competition is fiercer than ever between independent restaurants, big-name chains and smaller casual-dining brands. As our report shows, brand is a huge purchase driver for hungry consumers.

Unprompted brand recall is an important metric for any restaurant or fast food brand, as so many consumers often dream up the meal or cuisine they fancy before they go out in search of a place to eat.

How often have you had a pang of hunger at work and, rather than going home to see what’s in the fridge, developed a craving for (specifically) Nando’s, Wagamama or KFC? The likelihood is, quite often. It’s in the nature of food brands to become synonymous with our cravings, fulfilling a sensory drive as they do, hence why brand recall is a determining factor in all other metrics.

In an increasingly competitive Restaurant & Fast Food market, standing out amongst the noise is vital for winning market share by being easily remembered and recalled.

This is why restaurant and fast food brands, the world over, plough millions of dollars into branding and advertising every single year, to remain at the forefront of consumer’s minds.

Which brands are winning the greatest Unprompted Recall, and what else can we learn about the Restaurant & Fast Food industry from Attest’s 2018 Restaurant & Fast Food Industry Brands Report?

Consumers have plenty of choice

In total there were 104 brands named in our test of unprompted brand recall.

A brand had to have 1% of unprompted brand recall to be in the Top 18 brands, and 5% to be in the Top 5.

Overall, unprompted brand recall in the restaurant market is led by Nando’s, with an unprompted recall of 16.5%.

Other globally known brands such as McDonald’s and KFC also scored highly on unprompted recall, with these chain restaurants taking a large percentage share, followed by a large number of smaller chains all with a few votes each.

The industry is fragmented by the large variety of cuisines and price points named. Brands from fine dining, to take-away delivery services, and local independents all made the full list, showing that ‘eating out’ encompasses a variety of experiences for UK citizens.

Strong Net Promoter Score

The NPS for the industry was unusually high, at 49. This is likely because brand recall in this instance seems to be based on direct experience with the brand rather than on brand perception, as eating out is something most people have experience of on a regular basis.

Consumers were more likely to name brands they had a positive, memorable experience of, and subsequently score this brand highly.

The highest NPS recorded was for Miller & Carter, with a whopping 100, dropping only to 55 for Nando’s, KFC, Pizza Express, and Burger King who were at the bottom of our top 10. This, along with the high overall average, shows that whichever restaurant people recalled, it was often because they liked it.

It’s to be expected that lesser-mentioned brands would do well in the NPS, since they were being recalled by consumers who had intimate knowledge of them rather than the bigger, better-known chains. The high NPS of larger brands, who garnered a significant share of unprompted brand recall, is therefore perhaps more impressive since it shows them gaining a positive reputation across a much broader swathe of customers.

NPS was high across the board for both sit-down restaurants and fast-food establishments. Demographics such as gender, age, and location, didn’t make a significant difference to the overall NPS (a male-only view of the results gave a 45.6 NPS and female-only, 52.4; over-35s gave a 46.6 NPS and under 35s, 48.3). This could be because many of the establishments recalled are chains which operate countrywide, and do not target a specific audience.

Similarly High Purchase Intent

As you would expect, purchase intent was similarly high. Toby Carvery topped the table with 93% of people saying that they would be ‘Very Likely’ to visit. Within the rest of the top 10 ranking brands, this only fell as far as 55% of people responding that they were ‘Very Likely’ to visit KFC.

Additionally, when we delve deeper into the data for most high-ranking restaurants, the Purchase Intent responses were very minimally negative. Taking KFC (10th) as an example… Of those who didn’t choose ‘Very Likely’ (55%), 30% chose ‘Likely’, and no one answered ‘Unlikely’. We see similar trends across the board in the Top 18, with most respondents reacting with some positivity towards the brands.

The correlation between high NPS and high Purchase Intent is evident here and to be expected.

Understanding your brand’s NPS, the customer reactions that drive it, and the marketing strategy you need to keep it high, is crucial to attracting consumers to your brand.

Key Attributes

What are consumers saying about the Restaurant & Fast Food brands they chose?

A quick glance at our Wordcloud shows that people overwhelmingly think about the food itself when they think of restaurants. Most people are concerned with flavour: ‘delicious’, ‘tasty’, ‘yummy’, ‘great’ and ‘quality’ all perform well. Overall then, eating out is a sensory experience for consumers, with lasting impressions of great taste leading to high NPS and Purchase Intent scores across the board.

Beyond taste, we see price and convenience alco come into play. ‘Affordable’ and ‘value’ demonstrate that people are concerned with cost-effective purchase.

Ease of purchase was another important consideration. It’s clear that geographical proximity was significant with ‘convenient’ scoring highly, again reiterating that the highest scoring brands are pervasive throughout the country (and therefore most often the largest).

Brand Leaders

The overall leaders of our first Restaurants & Fast Food Brand Index were as follows (ranked by Total Brand Equity, on the far right):

You can see how this looks plotted as both Total Brand Equity (TBE) and against the matrix of ‘well known and well liked.’

Takeaways

The Restaurant & Fast Food industry offers a broad range of experiences and services, with over 100 brands being easily recalled. There seems to be minimal preference for a certain cuisine or dining style, even within the top 18 brands mentioned.

The NPS for the industry is notably high compared to other industries indexed by Attest (Gambling & Gaming industry scored the lowest with -27.7 and the Health & Wellness industry scoring 24.5).

Interestingly, this NPS was only very slightly variable between genders, ages and locations, indicating that the brands scoring the highest in other metrics were ones which appeal to a broad range of demographics.

As expected, the high NPS throughout the industry lead to high Purchase Intent, likely because the sensory experience of a product contributes significantly to the desirability of the brand.

Two of the words most associated with the recalled brands in the Restaurant & Fast Food industry were ‘Tasty’ and ‘Convenience’, indicating that taste plays a major role in memorability of the brand and further that the size of the brand (and therefore highest likelihood of geographical proximity) is another determining factor in recall.

Conclusions

The restaurant and fast food business is thriving in the UK, with an overwhelming positive reaction to all the brands mentioned. We, as a nation, love to eat out!

Looking purely at unprompted recall there was a vast range of cuisines and dining styles, even if many brands only appeared a handful of times. The closer to the top we got, the more similar responses became. And our Top Five were all budget to mid-range restaurants, and all giants in the industry.

Nando’s, McDonald’s and Pizza Express have over 320, 1249, and 470 outlets in the UK respectively. Their branding is visible up and down the country (and has huge global reach, particularly in the case of the first two). Not only do they provide good bread-and-butter service, but their logos and slogans are universally known (Nando’s and Pizza Express also have supermarket ranges, adding to their pervasiveness). In short, they are well-liked by their customers, and well-known by both customers and non-customers alike.

Taste is crucial to a restaurant’s success. It is the sensory experience that will create a lasting impression and drive strong NPS and Purchase Intent. A small, relatively unknown restaurant brand can definitely compete for customers: the restaurant and fast food arena is so diverse that it would be seemingly impossible to saturate. But to make the top recalled brands, it’s hard to compete with the big players. Not only is the food as well-liked as smaller brands and independents, but they have a strong brand presence across the world that is instantly recognisable to most people.

Whether your brand features in the top 18 mentioned here or not, tracking brand-based metrics is vital to ensure you’re providing a memorable and stand-out experience for your consumers.

Unprompted Recall directly correlates with both NPS and Purchase Intent within this industry, so to successfully drive traffic you need to understand your consumer’s experience.

Measuring these key metrics will help you to figure out which aspects of your brand need to be worked on so you can stay (or break into) the top echelons.

And if your brand wasn’t featured, we can help you run a tailored brand equity matrix specific to your category or target consumer (e.g. just for takeaway delivery service, or just for high-end dining).

Get in touch with us to learn more.