IRI and MFour Partner to Launch IRI OnSights

Unique Location Solution Provides More Accurate and Comprehensive Understanding of Consumption Behavior in Bars and Restaurants Nationwide

IRI, one of the global leaders in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, and MFour, the leader in mobile market research, announced their partnership to launch the IRI OnSights™ solution. The new solution leverages MFour’s first-party GPS location information to collect verified data on hundreds of thousands of consenting mobile panelists’ visits to U.S. bars and restaurants. This location information adds a powerful new dimension to the vast consumer behavior data and insights available on the industry-leading IRI Liquid Data platform.

“Layering verified data that measures on-premise consumer behavior into IRI’s expansive collection of point-of-sale, loyalty card and consumer panel data assets adds a new level of granularity for more powerful insights that drive growth for IRI clients.”

“On-premise consumption and purchasing are becoming increasingly important to the consumer packaged goods industry,” said Robert I. Tomei, president of Consumer and Shopper Marketing for IRI. “Providing IRI clients with measurement and insights on this activity is critically important to ensure that they have an accurate view of both consumption (share of stomach) and purchasing (share of wallet) as they design campaigns. Until now, marketers’ understanding of consumer purchasing and consumption behavior at restaurants and bars has been largely anecdotal, which is often inaccurate and limits marketers’ ability to build comprehensive insights that include both on- and off-premise activity.”

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“MFour’s leading location platform collects millions of weekly retail visits from hundreds of thousands of our validated Surveys On The Go® app panelists, providing unparalleled accuracy of on-premise consumer behavior insights,” said Chris St. Hilaire, co-founder and chief executive officer of MFour. “Combining observed passive insights — which show where mobile consumers go — with active insights from survey data capturing the ‘why’ behind their visits is a holy grail for market research. We’re so pleased to join forces with IRI to develop one of the most important advances in mobile research.”

IRI OnSights leverages consumer insights from more than 1 million verified MFour app users who have chosen to provide their locations and de-identified demographic information. The data from MFour’s voluntary and verified users provides IRI clients with both passive tracking insights and actively collected survey information to improve marketers’ understanding of consumer behavior in U.S. bars and restaurants:

• Passive Insights: GPS location data collected from MFour has tracked more than 3.8 million visits to bars and restaurants since spring 2018, and the number of tracked visits will continue to grow weekly. MFour provides accurate measurements of how frequently establishments are visited, and how much time consumers spend at each. For example, IRI OnSights uncovered that the fast-growing brew pub/bar and grill segment represents 5 percent of all U.S. bar and restaurant visits and has a strong Midwest skew, especially in Green Bay, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and Cleveland.
• Active Insights: The solution also incorporates data from custom and syndicated consumer panelist survey responses collected through the MFour mobile app, providing valuable insight into the motivators of a restaurant or bar visit, what was consumed and visitor demographics. According to a recent study of on-premise data, 39 percent of visitors aged 21 and over consumed an alcoholic beverage during their last visit to a bar or restaurant (excluding quick-serve restaurants), 54 percent of those drank beer, and nearly half of beer drinkers chose a domestic craft beer.

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Using these two data collection methods, the OnSights solution delivers robust insights that marketers may analyze to better understand their customers, deliver more appropriately targeted marketing communications, design more effective promotional campaigns or uncover unmet consumer needs.

“IRI is thrilled to partner with MFour to deliver this powerful new solution,” said Carl Edstrom, senior vice president and principal of Survey and Segmentation for IRI. “Layering verified data that measures on-premise consumer behavior into IRI’s expansive collection of point-of-sale, loyalty card and consumer panel data assets adds a new level of granularity for more powerful insights that drive growth for IRI clients.”

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