Cousins Subs partners with SiteZeus to propel data-driven market planning

101-unit sandwich chain will use A.I.-powered platform to assess infill and store reinvestment opportunities

TAMPA, Fla., Nov. 8, 2021 — Cousins Subs launched nearly five decades ago when cousins Bill Specht and Jim Sheppard decided to bring their favorite sub-style sandwich to the Midwest. The Wisconsin-based sandwich chain now operates nearly 100 stores in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana and remains hungry for growth. The company has always been driven by a strong mission – to Believe in Better. Their focus is on serving better quality food, building better communities, and now using better data-driven tools to help identify the best locations in which to expand and bring their concept to more consumers. Cousins Subs is using SiteZeus’ A.I.-powered location-intelligence platform to apply a scientific methodology to analyzing reinvestment, relocation, and remodeling decisions and ultimately drive more strategic and profitable infill expansion.

Like many brands, Cousins Subs wants to maximize growth in its existing markets. Yet infill growth can be a challenging opportunity to navigate. Brands need to move carefully to avoid cannibalizing sales from their existing stores. Cousins Subs recognized that in order to fully and accurately evaluate the impact of adding any given location to its ranks, it needed a proven scientific solution to make better, data-driven decisions.

Traditional market-planning solutions consider only a few variables to validate site potential and often take months to calculate it. The SiteZeus platform factors in numerous variables from both third-party data sets and the brand’s own performance data. Additionally, the Cousins Subs real estate team can enhance their infill analysis with the platform’s breakthrough sales impact solution. This data-driven approach enables the real estate team to make fast and accurate infill growth decisions with minimal sales cannibalization, thereby enabling a healthy franchise development system.

We expect this all-in-one market-planning tool to give us a tremendous competitive edge in the market. This data-driven approach is critical to identifying corporate expansion opportunities, as well as stronger franchisee-operated stores and territories.”

Joe Ferguson, Vice President of Development at Cousins Subs

Brands are adopting business models and location strategies to match the highly competitive, complex real estate market that exists today. By partnering with SiteZeus, Cousins Subs can now review portfolio health, analyze ways to optimize existing sites to further boost revenue potential, and develop remodeling and relocation strategies that deliver a higher ROI.

The pandemic has driven shifts in where people are living and working, as well as changes to traffic patterns and order and delivery methods. So it’s important for brands to look at their real estate store portfolios through a lens of new customer behavior that has developed during COVID-19. Our data-driven predictive model allows growing concepts like Cousins Subs to pivot quickly in response to ongoing market changes and gives them the scientific analysis necessary for successful portfolio optimization.”

Sean Ryan, Director of Support and Professional Services at SiteZeus