Measurement & Market
What is incrementality in restaurant promotions?
Incrementality is the portion of a promotion's sales that would not have happened without it. A redeemed offer is not automatically an incremental sale: a discount used by a guest who was coming anyway, on an item they would have bought anyway, is a margin giveaway wearing a marketing costume. Incrementality separates the demand a promotion created from the demand it merely subsidized.
Measuring incrementality means comparing against what would have happened anyway — through holdout groups who don't receive the offer, matched control stores, or a counterfactual baseline built from pre-promotion behavior. Redemption counts and gross promoted sales, the numbers most promotion reports lead with, answer a different and much easier question.
Promotion portfolios are typically barbells: a few offers that genuinely create visits and attach, and a long tail that quietly converts full-price sales into discounted ones. Ranking every running offer by measured incrementality, not redemptions, is what makes the tail visible.
Why it matters
Discounting is one of the largest unexamined line items in the industry. The redemption report says the promotion is working; only an incrementality read says whether the brand bought new sales or paid customers for visits it already had.
How Quantiiv Puts This to Work
Discount Effectiveness
“We discount heavily and sales respond. But are the discounts creating new business, or just giving margin away on visits that would have happened anyway?”
See the solutionLTO & New Item Analysis
“Our LTO sold well. But did it grow the business, or did it just cannibalize the core menu?”
See the solutionRelated Terms
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