Fast food meets fast advertising in a new campaign from Cossette promoting McDonald’s Canada’s new “Create Your Taste” hamburger.
Introduced last week in 220 Ontario restaurants, the “Create Your Taste” concept enables in-store patrons to build their own Angus beef hamburger using digital touchscreens.
Customers are able to choose from 30 different ingredients including two types of bun, five cheeses, nine sauces and 12 toppings. Once their order is placed, guests are directed to a specific table where a server brings their meal to them.
To promote the personalization aspect of “Create Your Taste,” Cossette created an ad hoc production studio in the back of a McDonald’s restaurant in Whitby, Ont. and pumped out a series of eight personalized commercials, all in the less than 10 minutes it took for customers to receive their order.
The agency used pre-shot ingredient footage, created a script and added a voiceover, as well as individual names for hamburgers (“Bob’s Bourgeois Burger,” “Lianne’s In-a-Pickle Burger”) created by the patrons. One of McDonald’s new “Guest Experience Leaders” showed the hidden-camera style ads to customers on an iPad.
“We were looking for the opportunity to really highlight the personalization aspect of the ‘Create Your Taste’ concept,” said Chuck Coolen, McDonald’s senior marketing manager for Ontario. “The challenge we put to Cossette was to really play that up in an engaging way so that people take away the message very clearly that they can come into McDonald’s, choose from unique ingredients, and build their own Angus burger.
“They came back to us with what I consider a brilliant concept, which we immediately fell in love with.”
McDonald’s is pushing out the ads via digital pre-roll and social media, accompanied by a series of out-of-home ads featuring examples of a “Create Your Taste” hamburger and the headline, “Build your own Angus burger.”
The “Create Your Taste” initiative is part of the fast-food giant’s new “Experience of the Future” concept, which it said in its 2015 annual report (p. 16) was designed to “fundamentally enhance” its relationship with customers and their experience with the brand.
McDonald’s is a major player in what research firm Euromonitor International called the informal eating out (IEO) category, which comprised eight million outlets and U.S. $1.2 trillion in sales in 2014. Despite accounting for just 0.5% of locations in this category, McDonald’s accounted for 7.2% of all category sales.
The popular chain has experienced declining sales in the past two years however, as consumers have gravitated to other food options. System-wide sales were US$25.4 billion last year, representing an approximately 7% decline from $27.4 billion in 2014.
Coolen said McDonald’s Canada was looking to adapt to changing consumer habits and “contemporize” the restaurant experience as it approaches its 50th anniversary in 2017. “It’s an evolution of the brand to stay contemporary and relevant as customer needs evolve,” he said.
McDonald’s first introduced the “Create Your Taste” concept in Australia, and began rolling it out in U.S. markets last year. It rolled out in more than 220 Ontario locations last week, with plans to introduce it in 1,000 of its 1,450 Canadian restaurants by the end of 2017.
The chain said it takes 5-8 minutes to prepare a “Create Your Taste” hamburger, compared with less than five minutes for a typical menu item. The base price for the custom hamburger is $6.99.
While the “Create Your Taste” concept adds a layer of automation to the ordering process, Coolen said McDonald’s planned to add as many as 10-15 employees per restaurant – including the “Guest Experience Leaders,” and additional kitchen staff including a dedicated “Create Your Taste” cook. He said any additional labour costs would be defrayed by increased sales volume created by four new order points per restaurant.
The fast-food giant has also added “dual-point ordering” that enables in-restaurant customers to order at one point of the counter and pick it up another, facilitating better traffic flow in the restaurants. Coolen said the new system also paved the way for mobile ordering and payment.
