Mellow Mushroom is an established brand known for its handcrafted, stone-baked pizzas and vibrant restaurants that reflect its psychedelic ’70s roots. Powered by a network of passionate franchisees, the brand has spent decades building loyal communities across the country.

For years, guest engagement was driven at the local level—and it worked. When the Mellow team set out to modernize their marketing strategy, they quickly recognized the need for a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of their guests.

The team turned to Bikky for a detailed view of their guest behavior and demographics. Today, they’re using those insights to diagnose location-specific challenges and power hyper-personalized campaigns brand-wide.

Historically, Mellow Mushroom relied solely on guest surveys to understand the demographic makeup of their customers. While the surveys offered helpful insights, Ahsan Jiva, EVP of Strategy and Transformation, and his team recognized that most responses came from a unique subset of guests—and likely didn’t reflect their customer base as a whole.

On top of that, survey responses existed in isolation, disconnected from the rest of Mellow’s reporting. This made the surveys useful for directional insights, but not comprehensive enough to guide major strategic decisions. As Mellow continued to grow, the limitations of this approach became increasingly clear.

At the local level, Mellow wanted a clearer picture of who was visiting each restaurant and whether their long-standing assumptions about who their guests were were correct. At the brand level, they wanted to advance their guest engagement strategy with more personalized offers and campaigns. Achieving that required clearer, more accurate data to inform their targeted messaging.

Mellow Mushroom began using Bikky’s Demographics, tying together guest behavior data and demographic information. The team discovered that assumptions they had made about their guests were incorrect. Median household income was higher than expected at many locations and their average guests skewed older than previously thought. 

Using Bikky’s demographics insights, Mellow Mushroom started to build a clear view of their guests, replacing limited surveys with brand-wide data about age, income, gender, and family composition.

At one of their Florida locations they saw that guests skewed younger than the broader brand footprint. The store format was designed specifically for that demographic, 24–35-year-olds, with a focus on high-top tables and happy hour specials. Still, the restaurant was consistently losing traffic.

Two key insights helped the team figure out why. Digging deeper into Bikky’s Demographics they saw that Jacksonville Beach guests had shifted, the core consumer was older than they realized and concentrated at the upper end of the age range. They coupled this with sales data by table which uncovered that booths were consistently their busiest tables.

Mellow Mushroom could see that guests who once came in for happy hour were aging into family life. With a thorough understanding of guest behavior, the brand chose to “age up” the location alongside their guests. With the data to back it up, franchisees felt more confident investing in layout changes, such as adding more booths.

“Any franchisee would be hesitant to spend money ripping out tables and putting booths. But when you have clear sales data by table, and demographics they can easily see the value of the investment.”

At their Auburn, Alabama location, the Mellow Mushroom team assumed their guest base was mostly college students due the restaurant’s proximity to the university. As a result, marketing leaned heavily on discounts and drink specials—efforts designed to appeal to students.

When the location was flagged as underperforming, the team used Bikky’s Demographics to dig deeper.

The findings told a different story: based on age and income data from Bikky they saw that a meaningful portion of guests were faculty and local residents, not students. With this clarity, the Mellow team realized they could adjust their pricing strategy and avoid unnecessary promotions and discounts.

Now Mellow Mushroom is going beyond the local level and exploring hyper-personalized segmentation powered by Bikky Demographics. Bikky seamlessly integrates with their offer management platform, Sparkfly, and SMS and email provider, Attentive. Allowing them to tailor communications based on age, income, life stage, and more. 

“Leveraging demographics and the segmentation tool together allows us to get hyper-specific with our targeting. I think that’s where the power comes in.”

The brand is embarking on generating specific creative that targets the core demographic by market and then eventually by each location. They’ve also redesigned their offer strategy to better serve their largest income segment

By connecting Bikky with their marketing and communications ecosystem, Mellow Mushroom now has a full insight, action, outcome loop powered by real guest data. The brand is making confident decisions at all levels knowing they have more than assumptions—they have empirical data to back everything up.

“Bikky definitely changed our perception of who our guest actually is. Now there’s no question.”