Social Listening: McDonald's

McDonald’s has been racking up their sales through collaborations with various celebrities using their recent marketing approach of “Famous Meals.” The collaboration with the infamous Korean boy band, BTS, was a huge success for McDonald’s as it generated tons of sales.

The value proposition of McDonald’s includes quick service, affordable prices, variety of food choices, and thousands of locations. As a fast food chain, they’re very efficient with service and offer drive-thru locations as well as seating for dining in. They offer good value deals and a wide selection of food that caters for numerous target markets.

The brand’s recent strategy is called “Accelerating the Arches.” The plan is to turn customers into fans or otaku, by investing in “new, culturally relevant approaches,” according to an article on Fast Company. The previous collaboration with Travis Scott proved the strategy to be more effective than expected as McDonald’s sales were boosted by 4.6%. After seeing the success and the consumer's response to the Travis Scott meal, the chief marketing officer decided to promote new opportunities weekly in coordination with the BTS meal, allowing customers to engage with BTS and create content to share on social media. It seemed as though McDonald’s mainly utilized Instagram posts to hint and promote their collaboration, but they also posted similar content to other social media such as Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter to target multiple demographics.

The BTS meal mainly consisted of menu items that already exist: A 10-piece McNuggets, medium fries, and a medium coke. What’s special about this order is that it comes with two exclusive dipping sauces from South Korea’s McDonald’s called the sweet chili sauce and the cajun sauce, selected by BTS.

Along with the meal, McDonald’s and BTS dropped their collaboration merchandise which includes tote bags, t-shirts, keychains, and other clothing and accessories. One is called the Saucy collection which showcases drawings made by the BTS members. The other collection is called the Melting collection, inspired by the boy band’s hit song “Butter” that generated “more than 11 million worldwide streams on Spotify within 24 hours of its release,” according to Adweek.

The merch was in huge demand. Many decided to resell their orders, putting them up for multiple times the original cost. Fans saved their branded bags, cups, and sauces from their meals as memorabilia, using them to create and sell their own art and accessories. One of the many creations that stood out was the pair of sneakers made out of the BTS meal packaging.

McDonald’s launched the BTS meal on YouTube which received over 12 million views and more than 700K likes. There were over 21K comments below this video, one of which 2.1K viewers including myself agreed to Melissadave.

Fans of BTS are known to be called the “BTS Army,” and often represent themselves with a superscript 7 after their own usernames on social media. McDonald’s began their Twitter marketing with a confession as they tweeted, “my other twitter is a secret stan account.” This grabbed the attention of the army as they recognized the familiar superscript 7 after McDonald’s name. McDonald’s had good usage of meme formatting of “how it started” and “how it’s going” which targeted young social media users.

Majority of the comments section of the various social media posts for the promotion of the BTS meal were filled with purple hearts and accounts named with a superscript 7. The army was very supportive and responsive towards knowing that their well-known fast food company is a BTS stan. McDonalds replied to some comments on Twitter and the army enjoyed the interactions, such as “have u heard of BTS.”

As Mcdonald’s launched their release dates of the BTS meal, there were many upset fans in the comments section in regards to the participating store locations serving the meal. Places such as Pakistan, Spain, France, UK, Japan, and Egypt were not included, despite the numerous army members throughout those locations. The company did not respond to these comments, although providing alternative opportunities for these locations could have been a good response to consumers.

If I had the opportunity to be the brand manager, I would allow the sweet chili sauce and the cajun sauce to continue to be available even after the end of the collaboration period in response to the wants and needs of the consumers. You can find on many different social media posts and comments asking when the sauces will be back or asking for them to be permanent sauces. The sauces are regularly sold at McDonalds’ located in South Korea, so why not add these special sauces to the regular menu of all locations? The BTS meal showed proof of success and popularity in the sauces. It would only be beneficial to continue to produce the sauces at McDonald’s.

This was a big learning experience on marketing and how companies utilize marketing strategies to their advantage. There are many aspects to pay attention to in order to reach the correct audience and expand from there. Social media plays a huge role in marketing for any company. Being interactive with followers and sharing content that will most likely be shared with others around the world is a successful strategy in drawing attention to the product. McDonald’s has been at the top of fast food companies for a really long time, but they’ve also gained some backlash in terms of healthy food options in recent years. The collaboration of McDonald’s and BTS succeeded in attracting tons of customers around the world. This goes to show that McDonald’s dodged the downhill of their popularity and found a great marketing approach that allowed them to persevere and stay at the top.

Citations:

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https://www.marketingstudyguide.com/value-proposition-example-for-mcdonalds/

https://www.adweek.com/performance-marketing/how-mcdonalds-altered-its-strategy-for-the-bts-meal-and-broke-its-social-engagement-records/

https://www.fastcompany.com/90640363/how-bts-is-driving-mcdonalds-biggest-marketing-play-since-monopoly

https://www.businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-released-two-new-bts-merch-collections-2021-6

https://www.gq.com/gallery/bts-mcdonalds-merch