Circle Case study

How Monkey Puzzle enriched customer insight with Acorn and InSite accurate data

Identifying franchise sites in areas with the greatest opportunity

Company background

Monkey Puzzle is the UK’s largest day nursery franchise network, with over 60 nurseries nationwide. For over thirty years, the Monkey Puzzle team has worked closely with parents, staff and Ofsted to deliver childcare of the highest quality, providing children aged three months to five years with unlimited opportunities to learn, develop and grow within a safe, secure and caring environment.

Why they chose us

  • Sophie Hailey is Monkey Puzzle’s Franchising and Property Acquisitions Associate. She explains:

Before we engaged with CACI, when we were looking at a new site, the only demographic research we would do was competitor analysis. We would type the site postcode into the OFSTED website and look at comparable sites in a five mile radius. We would mystery shop them to find out about what they offered, the fees and waiting lists, to help us establish a suitable proposition and pricing for our potential new nursery.

  • “When you visit a site, you can get a good feel for a location. This is really important, as is the competitor research, but we needed more information and evidence to back up our decisions, as our network expands. We wanted to give our franchisees confidence as well as committing to the right sites for our model. The more relevant insight we have, the better our decisions can be.”

What they use it for

  • Acorn data and InSite reporting would give Sophie and the team access to valuable customer demographic and local market information to enrich their understanding of new and existing sites and opportunities in the local area.
  • “The site reports we generate help us to narrow down potential sites quickly – we look at a number of factors about the catchment that tell us whether it’s worth investigating a proposed site further. We can see how close it is to existing sites, so we can avoid cannibalisation, as well as how strong the customer demand might be in the local community and workforce.”

The benefits

  1. Working with new franchisees, Sophie can show them information about the types of household and persona that make up most of Monkey Puzzle’s customers. It helps them understand who they’re catering for, where they live and what matters to them when the new franchisee is planning services and communication.
  2. “Our nurseries are currently gathering postcode information from existing customers, so we can map exactly where they come from in each catchment. This will help us understand our existing customer base better and recommend how to customise the proposition and marketing for different types of location.

Read the case study

Please take a look to the full customer story here. If you have any questions, please get in touch with us.