The Burger CEO Problem

While the possibilities with Machine learning use-cases are immense, the core capabilities
which power 80% of use-cases are few. It is the cutting and cross sectioning across
business lines and different kinds of features and data points which when wrapped over
these capabilities drive magic for any business.

Let us assume I am the CEO of a big burger company. What kind of analytics experiments
and capabilities can help me grow my business. What are some of the questions which can
help me drive sales and profit growth?

Let us analyse from a core business perspective.

1. What will be the future sales of different burgers in my portfolio in next few
quarters? Is there a seasonality impact which can help me check if a burger
performs well during a festival or season?
2. Is there any burger which is suddenly becoming huge in a geography? If yes, What
are the characteristics of that burger and that geography that can help me replicate
that success in other similar geographies? Maybe I can find a pattern that in hot
seasons, people love spicy sauce while in colder seasons it is all about crunchy
patties! OR in places with high population people like a ready to eat rice bowl due to
minimum waiting time while in places with low population people are ready to wait
few minutes for a properly cooked one.
3. I test my new launch burgers on sample consumers before launching, can I prove
that a burger below 3 out of 5 rating has chance of failing miserably in market? OR I
need large media and banner push to make a 3/5 burger successful?
4. Do I want to break my business into geographical clusters based on my market
share, penetration, competition count, media budget, demographics etc. so that I can
have separate strategy for each?
5. I have multiple interventions or drivers that can impact my sales – number of stores,
media budget, discounts and consumer promotions, outdoor events etc. etc. Can I
find which are the core drivers which work well in different geographies? And
possibly the quantum of impact due to each? Can I go a step further and find the
most optimized spend in each geography?
6. I subscribe to the report of a secondary research firm which has data from
thousands of burger chains across the world. Can I find any specific trend which is
gaining traction in some other country which might become a hit for me in future?
Can I find a competition chain’s burger which has suddenly captured a lot of market
share and plan a rival offering?
7. I do a lot of online campaigns, what are the age, gender and demographics of people
who respond the best to my campaigns?