In Frozen Yogurt Wars, A Battle for Digital Domination

To the unsuspecting eye, the success or failure of a frozen yogurt company is measured by the length of line on a summer night. But for Pinkberry and Yogurtland, two brands that jumped onto the dessert scene as the market for frozen yogurt exploded in the mid-2000’s, the competition begins on much more expensive real estate: the screen.

And it’s a battle that Yogurtland is winning.

A new analysis of the two frozen yogurt brands’ local online presence, conducted by Where2GetIt for the new Street Fight “Brand Battle” series, finds that Yogurtland outperformed its smaller counterpart across Google, Facebook, Foursquare and a number of other local properties. The data and analysis was pulled through Where2GetIt’s Brandify analysis tool and shows that Pinkberry, a brand that blew up as a celebrity favorite in Hollywood in 2006, falls short across what Where2GetIt dubs “the six pillars” of local presence: data quality, local SEO, reviews, social engagement, local advertising and competitive benchmarking.

“When you have hundreds — if not, thousands — of locations, it’s very difficult to know which locations are performing best,” Manish Patel, chief executive at Where2GetIt, said about the study. “For national brands, the challenge is to develop a strategy that will allow the company to compete in each market rather than relying on a homogenous, one-sized fits all approach. That’s easier — but far less effective.”

The Brandify tool, which the Anaheim, Calif.-based company used to generate the results, ingests data about each brand from across the web, scoring the firms across the six areas. Then the system merges the scores, normalizing for variables such as brand size, to yield an overall rating for the performance of each brand online.

The “Brand Battle,” highlights why Yogurtland bested Pinkberry, for instance, in social engagement, Pinkberry has more followers by half, but Yogurtland is far more active and its users much more engaged. The point is that you can have a million followers, but they might all be dead accounts if you’re not interacting on a daily basis.

For the first analysis, Where2GetIt also offered its prescriptive ideas for each chain. For Yogurtland, the leading tip was to create local pages, which this chain does not do at all. For Pinkberry, Where2Getit’s lead recommendations were to increase engagement and improve data quality.

View all the findings on the Brand Battle page.