How McDonald´s is elevating its Digital Experience-Video

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Transcript: Pierre Woreczek Adam Burns – MeetTheBoss TV Hello and welcome to Meet The Boss TV. In this program, how McDonald’s is using digital to enhance the brand experience online – and in store. We’ve all seen McDonald’s redesigned restaurants – but how is this global giant embracing digital to shape a better experience, in store and online? To find out, Jonathan Spragg spoke with the company’s European Chief Brand & Strategy Officer – Pierre Woreczek. Jonathan Spragg – MeetTheBoss TV: What is the biggest sort of hurdle that you've had to overcome to really reap the benefits of digital marketing? Pierre Woreczek: Yeah, I mean, the hurdle is very simple. You have stores, many stores, and internally people feel that they have the connection with the customers. That they don’t need an extra link to be able to interact with customers because this company was so much focused on delivering the right experience in the store. So suddenly when you say, you know what, you need to invest in another kind of relationship, that is a little bit surprising, and the question immediately becomes what is the right return. Why shan’t – we should more focus on the stores, be even better on the stores? And they are right.

But the world is changing, and the issue is that when you go in the store you are on with the customers, but when they go out of the stores, you are off. And the question is why McDonald’s should be on and off and on and off. We should be on every time, in the store and outside the store. And this is what digital brings to us. It enable us to be on in the stores, on outside the stores, and to connect the physical experience and the virtual experience together. And that is new, and this is what the people inside the company has to understand. Jonathan Spragg: Has that been difficult for you to – I guess to evangelize the whole digital space within the McDonald’s Europe? Pierre Woreczek: Yes, you need to deep dive in this, and you have to make some business cases and explain why companies should move. But honestly, very rapidly, people live it, breathe it and understand it. I think the challenge is to put in place the right organization, to make it happen fast. That is the challenge. And some markets have been doing that very well in McDonald’s. If you take France, for example, they made a very conscious decision that digital should be led by an entire group representing the different function of the company.

So, suddenly, it becomes a key element that the company was pushing together and not, again, only one piece of the company. It becomes a company issue, not just a marketing issue or a communication issue. And all the different components that digital can impact was considered, prioritized, organized, and the vocabulary and all the language that goes with digital was shared inside the company. So I think this is, for me, a perfect example how a company should move, trying to incarnate at every level the digital revolution. I found a word I like very much. Somebody was talking about concierge brand. I like this word very much. Concierge brand, what a brand is doing to me. What a brand is doing to simplify my life. And digital is there for that, and that will go faster, faster and faster. And if you are not listening, if you are not watching how technology is changing to enable you to do this, how the different elements of accessibility are moving, if you stay behind, then suddenly you will stay out, you know. You can’t be behind. Behind means out.

 Jonathan Spragg: Are there any particular areas that you’re looking to focus on at McDonald’s with regards to using digital, something you are looking towards at the moment? Pierre Woreczek: Yeah, I mean, there are two big areas at the moment. The first one has to do with the stores, okay. We are a fast-moving company, and our goal is to provide the best food possible at the best price with the faster – with the best ______ possible. This is the expectations of people. So you need to be sure that you bring the right technology to get there.

So, for example, in stores, we have a kiosk to enable people to order what they want, at the speed they want. We have put in place, we are testing a mobile ordering, so people can also decide to order from outside the store. We’re also putting in place, thanks to these new technologies, new services, so when you go and order at the kiosk, you could decide to have the service at the table because thanks to the new technology, you can just send your new order, explain where you will sit, and somebody will bring the food to you. 

The second area in the store is the experience. We have created a new concept called spirit of family, where we put digital elements to entertain the family and to entertain the kids. So it’s not just about the food. It’s also about the pleasure and the fun that goes around. And the creators of McDonald’s ______ that we are not in the food business. We are in the entertainment business, and we need to leverage the digital assets to answer to this objective. And we have worked very hard to leverage iPad, to leverage magic table, to leverage new kind of projections, so the kids and the family can have a much bigger enjoyment when they go in the stores.

So all this store experience is a critical part of what we do, okay. And then you have a second key part, which is more related to the relationship we’ve created with consumers, either through our marketing, so through Facebook, through Twitter, through our websites, how we engage customers to have either more or either more understanding about what the brand stands for. And you know, some people said – I love this sentence – they said since digital exists, don’t do something that you will not be happy to hear on digital, and it’s right. Digital makes the brand totally transparent.

So how we make the relationship with McDonald’s outside the store as entertaining and pleasant than it could be inside the stores. And – for example, for the kids, we are creating a place called Happy Studio where the kids can come, no advertising, no push for anything, for food, for anything. It’s just about having the right fun and the right relationship inside the family between the parents and the kids. This is also a good example.

So these are the two areas that we’ve been focusing on quite a lot during the last months. Jonathan Spragg: Fantastic. I wanted to quote you on something that you said at the CMO World Tour that you were at a couple of months ago. You said that there are various differences between markets; however, curiously, digital itself is leveraging those differences between the markets. Can you expand on that a little bit? Pierre Woreczek: Yeah, it’s interesting. It’s always a paradox. You know, with digital, everything travels. So if you start to do something locally, you need to think that it will travel. And it has to have a global strength, okay, and you have to think about it. You can’t think that you are in a closed world anymore. And the local relevance has also to resonate with the rest of the world, okay. And what you do locally could be used or even expanded in the rest of the system or in the rest of your work, and you need to understand that, and you need to be ready for that. So it’s always this balance between glocal and local, that digital is rating even more than any other things before. Jonathan Spragg: You mentioned global, glocal. We have the local. We have national. I mean, how do you define which digital tools do you use for each of those three tiers, or do you try and use the same digital tool and the digital strategy across all three? Pierre Woreczek: You are asking probably one of the most challenging and complicated questions. And I think if you look around the different companies, you’ll see different models, different approaches, and you see the company that move from one and then to another and then back to the first one, so your question is very challenging, and I don’t know if there is a magic answer.

Today where we are in Europe and where we start to work at also the global level, first they are big, iconic moves that are shared by everyone. And I don’t see why this cannot be even handled more globally. Okay. After that, we can express them more locally, with more local relevance, but I don’t see why some big ideas can be defined and designed at a more global level. In the same way, creativity can happen everywhere, and this is the strengths of McDonald’s, the power of the countries and the creativity at the country level. And I can really imagine a great idea moving from a market and expanding to the system. And we need to keep that working, and the best example is Mein Burger approach in Germany, where they’ve been engaging the consumers to think and invent new burgers. These ideas have started to travel because it is potentially a global idea. So I think both are existing and should continue to exist.

The second thing is we need to be smart, and we need to partner when we can do economy of scale, okay. Why should we reinvent hardware, when we can have a common hardware? Why should we invent some software when we can have common software? So I think naturally there are areas where we can scale things to the benefit of the entire system. But when things have to stop is when it starts to impact negatively the relationship. And when you start to feel that you lose the proximity, that you try to find only the minimum common denominator, then you have to stop. You have to stop and try to keep the creativity and the power at the local level. Pierre Woreczek: I mean, you know our brand, especially in Europe, were sometimes a scapegoat for a lot of issues. And perception is reality, and we need to deal with this. So it has, in a certain extent, pushed us to be more transparent, more open and listening to what people were asking and telling us. Sometimes they didn’t know what the reality was. Sometimes they help us to progress. And that should continue. I don’t know if you heard about the experience Canada has put in place to explain how they do their product and how they do the business. I think it was amazing and so well received. So we also need to find the right vocabulary and the right approach to talk to people because sometimes we try to do this, and either they don’t listen to you or either they feel that you don’t listen to them. 
So how you manage the right bottom-up relationship and after that the right top-down relationship, that is a question, okay. And I think in the future, people should feel that they are part of the game, okay. There is not only the consumers here and the company here. They should feel they are a little bit part of the company because they bring ideas, because they propose solutions, because they criticize, and they feel and hear that you are taking into consideration what they express. You can’t do everything, of course, but they feel you try. And this is where we have to be.

 Source: www.meettheboss.tv