Case Study: Hug Digital achieves faster, location-driven consumer insights from check-in data with Brandwatch

How hug digital uses check-in data to guide their everyday consumer research

Hug Digital, a fast-growing Middle East digital agency with a dedicated Research & Analytics team, needed a faster, more location-aware way to understand regional consumer behavior. Traditional brand-volume-and-sentiment approaches were too slow and blunt for their clients’ needs, so the team explored using social check-in data to get a clearer, place-specific view of customer activity and sentiment.

Using Brandwatch combined with regional check-ins from Swarmapp and Path (nearly 1 million shared check-ins), Hug ran Explore + Entities queries and used interactive word clouds to halve analysis time. They uncovered that cafes—especially Starbucks—dominate check-ins with highly positive sentiment, identified travel and landmark check-in patterns (e.g., King Fahd Causeway) and mapped TV binge-watching habits by region. These insights enabled geo-fenced ads, location-based offers, cross-promotions and faster crisis detection, and now inform ongoing client strategies across the Middle East.

Hug Digital

Youssef Shalaby

Head of Research & Analytics