Why restaurant brands must embrace precision targeting over broad discounts

As consumers increasingly seek personalised value, restaurant brands face a strategic crossroads: adopt targeted, data-driven offers or risk losing market share and insights to more agile competitors. Industry experts highlight the importance of technology and measurement in transforming promotional strategies into long-term growth drivers.

There is a persistent refrain among restaurant executives, “We’re not a discount brand.”, that, in the current market, risks ...

being less a principled stand than a strategic blind spot. The facts show consumers are acting on value, and those actions are reshaping who wins visits, captures data and ultimately builds future demand.

Market signals are stark. According to Circana data cited by QSR Magazine, nearly 30 percent of foodservice traffic in the past year occurred on a deal, the highest rate in five decades. The National Restaurant Association reported an extended period of declining traffic, and third‑party location analytics cited by QSR show diners trading down, skipping extras and shifting meals to grocery and dollar stores. Those shifts mean consumers are already making trade‑offs on price and value; the question for brands is whether they will respond intelligently or cede those moments to competitors.

The binary choice many operators describe, discount for everyone or discount for no one, is a false dichotomy that obscures both risk and opportunity. Broad, untargeted discounting does what leaders fear: it trains customers to wait for promotions, erodes margin and produces little insight into who truly needed an incentive. Conversely, refusing to participate in value conversations at all hands incremental visits and the rich behavioural data that accompany them to rivals. The real alternative is precision: offers targeted to the right guests at the right times through the right channels, with redemption tracked and fed back into customer data systems.

Technology is the enabler of that precision. Industry data and vendor experience presented in QSR show brands using offer‑management platforms to convert promotions into intelligence. When an offer is instrumented correctly, every redemption yields useful signals, frequency patterns, channel preferences, price elasticity, day‑part behaviour and basket composition. That information allows marketing to evolve from broad messaging to surgical communication: personalised incentives for guests who need them, no incentive for those who do not, and a measurable path to reduce future discount dependency.

Independent research supports this direction. A Hospitality Technology study found 57 percent of consumers prefer personalised discounts tied to order history rather than generic offers, while 40 percent value tech‑driven rewards and loyalty features. PAR Technology’s recent data indicate a third of consumers are leaning more heavily on loyalty programmes amid cost pressures, with nearly 70 percent saying such programmes help manage dining costs. These findings underline two linked truths: personalised value converts better than mass promotions, and loyalty alone cannot be the whole solution.

Loyalty programmes remain critical for retention, but they are inherently top‑of‑funnel limited. As the QSR analysis observes, loyalty speaks to people who already know and like a brand; the larger growth opportunity lies outside that base. Acquisition requires offers across email, SMS, paid media, affiliate networks and partner channels, then attribution that shows whether an offer created a net new customer or simply discounted an existing one. Brands with unified offer platforms can run cross‑channel campaigns, track redemptions at transaction level, attribute incremental lift and feed those insights into customer data platforms and marketing automation. Brands without that infrastructure often run fragmented promotions, lose attribution, and cannot answer the basic questions that distinguish profitable acquisition from wasted spend.

Operational mistakes compound the problem. Independent commentary from industry practitioners points to common errors: overreliance on third‑party marketplace discounts, inconsistent pricing timing, and failure to synchronise offers with digital platforms and loyalty systems. Academic and industry studies also show promotional tactics can increase footfall and repeat business when designed with urgency and measurement in mind, but only when offers are part of a coherent, data‑driven strategy rather than ad hoc price cuts.

The strategic advantages of measured offer management are concrete. Precision targeting preserves margin by avoiding unnecessary discounts, drives incremental trial through controlled acquisition, captures behavioural data that improves future targeting, and supports dynamic tactics, such as predicted behaviour offers and day‑part promotions, that protect revenue while increasing visits. Over time, that intelligence reduces reliance on discounts because brands learn which segments respond only to price and which respond to other levers.

This is not an argument for becoming a “discount brand.” It is an argument for becoming an intelligent brand. The promotional instrument itself is the least valuable element; the greater asset is the data and learning unlocked by disciplined experimentation and closed‑loop measurement. Brands that adopt this posture are not conceding principle, they are reclaiming pricing power by using offers strategically and with attribution.

The competitive picture is already diverging. Some operators are investing in platforms and processes to run personalised offers at scale, unify tracking across digital and physical channels, and measure closed‑loop incrementality. Others remain wedded to blanket refusals or fragmented promotional tactics and risk ceding customers, dollars and long‑term intelligence to those who do not.

Economic pressure has accelerated this inflection point. Consumers expect personalised, realtime value and will vote with their feet when they find it. Industry and academic evidence show personalised promotions and well‑timed offers can work, but only when they are accompanied by the technology and attribution that turn short‑term discounts into enduring customer insight.

The choice for brand leaders is therefore straightforward in its implications if not in its execution: defend an outdated principle and accept that competitors will capture incremental visits and the data that builds future share, or build the infrastructure to compete intelligently, targeted offers, unified measurement, and a closed loop from promotion to lifetime value. The latter path preserves margin, drives measured growth and transforms value spending into strategic learning. The question is not whether value matters; it is whether you are prepared to use it with precision.

Source: Noah Wire Services