Empowering In-House Research with The Brainfreeze Collective™

7-Eleven shifted to a hybrid, in-house research model, culminating in The Brainfreeze Collective. The program was designed to provide greater hands-on control, scale research efforts, and deliver richer qualitative insights.

Over 300,000 customers have joined, dedicated to helping 7-Eleven "build the convenience store of the future." A core tenet of the collective is to avoid "professional survey takers." Instead of direct cash payments, participation is incentivized through a loyalty points-based sweepstakes program. Mario noted, "We didn't want people doing it for the money, doing it for the points. We wanted to build a community of people who really want us to succeed and really want to be heard."

To make sense of their vast transactional data, 7-Eleven developed sophisticated retail behavioral segmentations. This included RFM (Recency, Frequency, Monetary) analysis to identify their most valuable customers and mission-based segmentation to understand the primary reasons customers visit (e.g., for a drink, snacks, lottery). This structured approach allowed for more focused and impactful results.

The community allows for dynamic, multi-wave studies and continuous follow-up with the same participants, an advantage over static, one-off surveys. 7-Eleven also leverages video feedback to capture the emotional and subconscious motivations behind customer choices. This qualitative evidence helps to bring real consumer voices directly to stakeholders and into the decision making process.

This action-oriented culture drives Mario and his team to focus on research questions that directly contribute to strategic objectives. “We might be wasting our time…how is this going to impact the bottom line? How is that going to help us serve the customer better?”

Driving Innovation and Data-Driven Growth

The strategic shift to this research model has delivered substantial benefits and a clear return on investment for 7-Eleven. It allows for rapid iteration and follow-up, enabling 7-Eleven to adapt quickly to new questions and refine research as insights emerge, without the delays and added costs associated with external vendors.

This has significantly increased the speed and volume of research projects. “We can conduct as much research as we want, however we want it, whenever we want it, without having that limitation of evaluating well, can we really afford this?" says Mario.

Feedback is also immediately linked with real-world product validation. The Brainfreeze Collective has directly contributed to successful product launches. Customer feedback from the community guided new product naming and flavor selection, preventing potential missteps based on internal assumptions. The real-world testing in “lab stores” further de-risks new product introductions by validating actual purchase behavior.

By bringing research in-house, 7-Eleven has drastically reduced its expenditure on third-party research. The sweepstakes-based model for the Brainfreeze Collective has also eliminated the need for costly participation incentives allowing for more frequent and in-depth research without escalating costs.

The ability to combine quantitative data with authentic qualitative insights has empowered better, data-driven decisions. Mario emphasizes the power of this approach "you can't always convince people based on data. What I really like about the Alida platform is the ability to gather customer videos to support what the data and the analysis says”. This ensures decisions are based on real customer needs, not just internal opinions.

7-Eleven's innovative approach to in-house research, powered by the Brainfreeze Collective, has transformed its ability to understand, engage with, and serve its vast customer base more effectively and economically, directly impacting product innovation and strategic decision-making.