McDonald’s North American marketing team were looking for a new perspective to connect with their consumers on an emotional level and build brand love and advocacy.
Leveraging ‘actual’ consumer behaviour and language from Social data, McDonald’s wanted to discover how consumers were interacting with the brand and decipher what they were saying when no questions were asked.
By applying AI to Social data we observed a true understanding of McDonald’s in consumers’ verbatim, and surfaced the most important topics being talked about. This helped us bring to life a deeper, objective understanding behind what drives advocacy.
Scale – Deciphered an exhaustive view of 88 million food, drink and quick service restaurant conversations, images and videos.
Dynamic segmentation – Mapped their existing attitudinal based segmentation onto the data to understand each segment’s unique drivers and motivations.
Prediction – Used data science to predict which emerging food and cultural trends were likely to be important to influence future menu innovations and brand positioning strategy.
Three key human insights emerged from our analysis to create a truer connection to each
consumer segment:
Nostalgia – Regardless of background, everyone has McDonald’s in common.
Real connections – Visiting McDonald’s together connects people in a more human, less digital way.
Idiosyncrasies – McDonald’s inspires 1000s of moments of joy, where kids can be adults and adults can be kids, e.g. dunking fries in a milkshake.
Our research inspired the ‘In Common’ TV campaign which celebrates shared McDonald’s rituals, proving
we all have more in common than we think.
A social campaign captured real customers’ portraits and stories of their favourite McDonald’s moments
and memories.
All rituals, casting and settings were directly taken from customer stories that emerged from our Social
data analysis.
