In pizzawe crustHow OpenKnowledge uncovered

business opportunities using image recognition technology

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03 The menu

04 The strategic value of measuring user generated content

06 A no-barriers approach to business expansion

08 A restaurant with a mission

10 Extracting insights step by step

14 Adapting business expansion plans to consumer behavior

17The takeaway: strategic actions based on image recognition insights

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The menuA pizza restaurant looking to expand to new locations? Easy. Everybody loves pizza, right?

Well, Venice-based Bella&Brava is no ordinary pizzeria. And so, when it came to market research for their business expansion, they decided to go where their audience is: social media.

Think user generated content. Think strategic insights from millions of images of pizza. And the best thing? The most delicious results have a measurable impact.

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Bella&Brava is a startup in the food & beverage industry. The restaurant reimagines the centuries old tradition of Italian pizza for a young audience that favors sustainable ingredients and healthy, vegetarian or vegan diets.

The strategic value of measuring user generated content

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Planning a business expansion, Bella&Brava collaborated with consultancy company OpenKnowledge, taking a digital-first approach to research ten potential new locations across Europe. Keen to match the expectations of their young, dynamic target audience, the company tapped into social data from Talkwalker to find out in which European cities people would be most open to their restaurant concept.

OpenKnowledge knew that Bella&Brava could get an edge if they used strategic insights from an image analysis for their business expansion plans. Pizza has always been a social connector - not just in Italy, but all across the world. People take millions of pictures containing pizza, amounting to a giant database of valuable information: where people eat pizza, which ingredients they favor, what they drink with it.

Together, the two companies landed on the below objectives for the measurement study.

1Extract strategic insights from user generated content to find ten European locations suitable for business expansion based on citizens’ affinity to Bella&Brava’s brand promise and their propensity to consume pizza

2Mitigate business expansion risks by identifying local and cultural circumstances that could affect the business

3Through qualitative image analysis methods, evaluate if and how the menu offering should be adapted for local markets and preferences

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©Image recognition technology has gained more popularity with brands and agencies in recent years. The internet is becoming more visual by the minute, with ten percent of pictures in the entire history of photography taken in the last year. More than 95 million images are now shared daily on Instagram.

A no-barriers approachto business expansion

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Talkwalker image recognition detects brand logos even if the brand isn’t referenced in the accompanying text, and is also capable of finding and analyzing images based on objects or scenes within them. Because audiences use social media to connect and interact (not just with each other, but with brands and products, too), brands can make use of these unsolicited conversations and pictures to base decisions on the voice of the consumer.

Granted, a single image containing a pizza might not be particularly insightful to a brand like Bella&Brava. However, when analyzing thousands or even millions of pizza images, a picture begins to emerge: where do people eat it, what do they consume with it, what are their likes and dislikes. OpenKnowledge proposed using image recognition as the go-to insights technology for their study as these images would bring qualitative insights at quantitative scale.

That’s where image recognition technology begins to open up opportunities that go beyond traditional market research and it’s one reason the company turned to social data to identify and categorize product consumption habits. Another welcome effect: the image analysis allowed it to overcome linguistic barriers and semantic specificities.

Talkwalker heat map showing where pizza images were published in Europe, excluding Italy and the UK.

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Bella&Brava’s mission is rooted in the belief that there’s a universal right to a healthy diet. The restaurant sells only six varieties of pizza - each with carefully chosen,

sustainable ingredients and recyclable packaging.

A restaurant with a mission

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The restaurant worked with OpenKnowledge to make sure the study was generating meaningful insights based on their target audiences’ preferences. That is to say, not all images would be treated with equal importance for the brands’ decision. In order to achieve this, OpenKnowledge worked on four keyword clusters, that brought together brand promise and customer values.

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As the initial database of images containing pizza was very large, OpenKnowledge extracted strategic information from the user generated images step by step.

Extracting insightsstep by step

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STEP 1

Developing keyword clustersIn line with Bella&Brava’s offer and market positioning, OpenKnowledge defined the above mentioned four keyword clusters that served as market research baseline and to ensure the recommendations were in line with the voice of the right audience. These clusters were: Healthy, Made in Italy, Vegetarian and Vegan.

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STEP 2

The visual content analysis funnelBased on the keyword clusters, the company analyzed an initial 454,500 images containing pizza that were posted between January and August 2017. As the goal was to find European cities suitable for business expansion, the search was then narrowed down to 66,400 images with an exact, street level geo-localization tag. In a next step, the images were grouped according to the city they were taken in. Cities with fewer than 50 results were discarded, which left 30,165 images from 82 cities.

Compatibility Index

Once the images from 82 cities were identified, OpenKnowledge created an index, ranking each city on a scale from 0-100 for their propensity to consume pizza. This was calculated comparing the volume of user generated content with the number of active users on social media in each city taken into account in order to have data statistically significant. In a next step, the consultancy connected propensity with individual scores relating to the relevance of the four clusters defined in step one.

This returned a ranking of ten European cities (and 2156 images) that would be good candidates for business expansion.

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STEP 3

Contextual image analysisIn order to gain deeper, more contextual understandings and find insights, OpenKnowledge further analyzed images containing pizza posted from the top ten cities that were identified in the index, using Talkwalker’s ability to recognize brands, objects and scenes present within images.

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“In the digital age, there are two types of organisations: those that collect data and those that transform it into opportunities”

Ilaria Baietti, Director - Brand Interaction @ OpenKnowledge

Adapting business expansion plans to consumer behavior

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OBJECTIVE 1

City rankingIn line with the study’s objectives, OpenKnowledge delivered ten top cities that scored highly in the measurement study to Bella&Brava, some of which were surprising but strong candidates the company would not have taken into consideration otherwise.

OBJECTIVE 2

Mitigating business risksBased on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the images, OpenKnowledge found several local and cultural circumstances that could affect the business expansion.

• Where getting a terrace is essential. 72% of pizza is consumed in bars and restaurants, but in some cities like Nice, there is an above average level of consumption in outdoor areas (+38%) due to socio-demographic variables (e.g. climate, tourist flows, number of events in the city, etc.).

• International footprint vs. local heroes. Research showed that some cities had attracted different business models. On the one hand, cities like La Valletta or Nice are home to small, “boutique” restaurants that tend to communicate their Italian roots and family heritage. On the other hand, places such as Leipzig and Mainz showed the presence of several franchises (Vapiano, L’Osteria), which come with a more international audience - an important decision factor for Bella&Brava.

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OBJECTIVE 3

Menu optionsThe company also evaluated if and how the menu offering should be adapted for local markets and preferences, which returned the following audience insights.

• ‘Healthy’ is flexible. The analysis showed that what constitutes “healthy” food is interpreted differently in every country. Consumers in cities with traditionally calorie-heavy food cultures tend to perceive traditional Italian ingredients (buffalo mozzarella, parma ham) as light and healthy - something the company had not foreseen and which could influence their local menu offer significantly.

• ‘Made in Italy’ doesn’t mean the same everywhere. Their Italian heritage being one of the cherished pillars of the Bella&Brava brand, it was crucial for the company to evaluate how this would play out in different markets. Many images in different European countries showed non-traditional pizza ingredients (avocado, pumpkin, peas, corn, peach, etc.) but were still perceived as typically ‘Made in Italy’, something that was new to the company and that they could use to their advantage.

• Putting the right drink options on the menu. Without any filtering restrictions, the beverage brands most associated with all pizza images were Coca-Cola and Pepsi. However, when looking at images in the four Bella&Brava clusters, results showed that people who consume healthier pizzas tend to favor San Pellegrino mineral water with their meal. An interesting trend in some cities is the consumption of cocktails with pizza, where the typically Italian Aperol Spritz often accompanies pizza at the table. Should these locations be chosen for expansion, an Aperol Spritz would be a good addition to the drinks menu.

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The takeaway: strategic actions based on image recognition insightsThe digital and social world is playing an increasingly decisive role in the business decisions of startups and big brands, and social listening is one of the most time and cost effective tools to collect relevant consumer insights.

Pietro Peccenini, CEO of Bella&Brava, stressed the importance of integrating digital methods and new data sources into their decision making process, in order to be one step ahead of the competition.

Based on this study data, his team has organized travel plans to evaluate the proposed locations, several of which are strong contenders that would never have been taken into consideration using traditional market research methods.

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