You may be thinking, is there anything liberals and conservatives can agree on? Turns out, yes – it’s where we dine out.
Given the current political climate, we thought location data could help identify some common ground and underscore how we, as consumers, are more similar than our political discourse may suggest.
Case in point: whether a person identifies as liberal or conservative, they can agree on where to eat.
To find the similarities between the two groups, we compared attendances of political activists (defined as someone who had attended an event categorized as “liberal” or “conservative” in the past 6 months) at hundreds of US restaurant chains. Here’s what we found:
Liberals and conservatives are equally likely to be seen “breaking bread” at one of these restaurants: For all of the above restaurant chains, liberals and conservatives indexed identically or nearly so. In other words, there was a <1% difference in the percentage of consumers visiting each brand from each group.
Persona Over Party – What this Means for Marketers
Location intelligence uniquely captures the human experience. What we found was that identifying as a liberal or conservative had little bearing on the places people eat and brands they consume in their daily life. As brands continue to rely on data to reach target consumers, it’s clear that understanding where consumers go determines what they do, and is more relevant to their needs and interests than political affiliation.
