Case Study @Google:
Building a better Burger Survey

The opportunity

Leverage the deep knowledge of Zagat super-users to build a burger survey that surfaced the right information.

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The challenge

Zagat was a pioneer in sourcing consumer data around a few common buckets of diner sentiment (food, decor, service). While I worked there as Senior Editor, managing the national blog and newsletter strategy, I recognized an opportunity to surface more dynamic survey candidates and prompts that would provide richer feedback for more specific diner interests. The brand’s “Best Burger” list, for example, only ranked restaurants primarily known for their burgers but didn’t identify restaurants with more varied menus that also happened to serve standout burgers.

 

The solution 

I had my team build a new, 17-market Burger Survey, driven by Zagat’s blog and newsletter. We started with the usual Zagat list of burger-focused spots, but then worked with the data team to identify worthy candidates at non-burger-focused spots. Additionally, we replaced Zagat’s trademark food, decor, and service rating categories with one unified rating more appropriate to a burger-loving audience—one that combined flavor, quality of ingredients, and value. Using the results, we built out full lists for each market, and also built the survey form to include general consumer data—for example, what percent of respondents order their patty medium rare? The answer: 43%, the most preferred cooked patty temperature.

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Results and learnings

The survey results were a hit with users, garnering traffic performance well above our usual survey result releases. We also received an outsized amount of press coverage. While there was some confusion about how the survey differed from the annual Zagat book list, my ultimate goal was to rethink how Zagat thought about dining surveys focused on specific dishes or experiences. As the company was owned by Google at that point, the learnings from the experiment were incorporated into Google’s own evolving thinking about curating user sentiment (see Google Maps case study).