Known for its hand-crafted, stone-baked pizza and psychedelic decor, Mellow Mushroom is working with Bikky to better understand their guests, personalize their marketing efforts, and power future expansion.
Since opening its first location in Atlanta in 1974, Mellow Mushroom has grown to more than 160 locations across 16 states. While its laid-back atmosphere and groovy aesthetic remain delightfully unchanged, the brand has never stopped evolving behind the scenes. They’ve been investing in digital transformation efforts even before COVID, but still lacked a complete picture of their guests and how they behaved.
“Our franchisees do an excellent job of driving community engagement with tens of thousands of guests in their email lists,” said Ahsan Jiva, EVP, Strategy & Transformation at Mellow Mushroom. “But we didn’t have core customer-level insights for any of those people.”
This realization kicked off the team’s search for a CDP—and Bikky’s industry-specific orientation made it stand out as the clear category leader. “We felt like Bikky was the only platform addressing the needs of the restaurant industry specifically,” said Jiva. The platform’s robust marketing segmentation and measurement capabilities, as well as its integrations with leading guest engagement and offer management tools, also allowed it to fit seamlessly into the team’s tech stack.
Since onboarding Bikky, the team has used the platform to better understand and diagnose differences in guest frequency across geographies. They started by looking at average frequency by location to identify relative underperformers, then compared that data with guest feedback and employee turnover rates to uncover correlations. This helped the team determine which locations would benefit from operational interventions to improve the guest experience and drive more frequent visits.
The team also used Bikky to address the industry-wide decline in traffic resulting from today’s challenging environment. Using Bikky’s demographics reporting, they reviewed year over year changes in traffic by income segment to determine which cohorts were most price sensitive. These guests now receive targeted value-based offers, ensuring promotions have tangible and targeted results.
In these instances and more, the Mellow Mushroom team used Bikky’s recently-launched AI analyst, Data Assistant, to get actionable insights from their data in just seconds—making it easier than ever to incorporate data into their decision-making processes. Already, this has helped them increase efficiency and maximize impact from their marketing budget. “We can now be smarter about how we use the marketing dollars that we have to spend,” said Jiva.
Looking ahead, Mellow Mushroom is building out a best-in-class marketing technology stack to execute its data-driven marketing strategy. The brand is pairing Bikky with marketing and loyalty platforms Attentive and Sparkfly to seamlessly create personalized campaigns that speak directly to guest behavior and preferences.”Bikky’s data is the foundation of our technology stack. As we continue to expand our marketing capabilities, guest data will drive every initiative we launch. And we’re just getting started—we’re really excited to leverage this data across our organization, not just in marketing,” Jiva said.
The brand recently launched a new restaurant prototype and plans to grow its franchise footprint in the coming years. Bikky’s insights on guest demographics, loyalty and lifetime value are informing their market planning and prioritization efforts. “Where is our brand already established with our target guests and where is it less so? Bikky’s data will guide where we decide to expand both company-owned locations and franchising. “
