The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
WHY MCDONALD’S WANTS TO TRACK ALL YOUR DINING HABITS,
App will interact with diners, make order suggestions.
You know a lot about McDonald’s, but McDonald’s doesn’t know much about you. At least not yet. By year’s end, the world’s largest burger chain will roll out nationwide a mobile ordering system that will collect a wealth of data about the habits of customers — everything from what kind of burgers they prefer to how often they swing through the drive-thru.
McDonald’s plans to use the information to customize the way it interacts with diners. Imagine, for example, having the McDonald’s app on your phone suggest a milkshake to go with your twice-weekly Quarter Pounder order.
Despite a management shake-up at McDonald’s recently that saw the departures of the heads of marketing, menu strategy and digital, analysts expect the chain’s innovation plans to continue moving forward.
The ability to collect data on customers is important to McDonald’s, which is trying to reverse a yearslong decline in customer traffic. The move also places the fast-food giant, which lagged behind in the race to introduce new technology like mobile ordering and payment, as a leader among chain restaurant companies in translating customer data into customized service.
Through loyalty programs and apps, companies have for years been gathering information on customers to increase visits and sales. But the chance to collect data and use it in a way to make a customer’s experience better and faster is still a relatively new frontier, said David Pierpont, an executive vice president at marketing firm Ansira.
“Consumers are willing to share data if the benefits are right,” he said. “I think you’re going to see more and more. Everyone’s trying to figure out how can they leverage it.”
Millennials and the younger Gen Z set tend to be more open to their data being shared, but Pierpont believes acceptance of data-sharing — with all its dangers and benefits — is more widespread than many people admit.
“They say they don’t want to give everything away, but they’re on Facebook, they’re on Google,” he said, noting that about 90 percent of Facebook’s users keep location services on, allowing Facebook ads to target consumers based on their location.
McDonald’s has had a smartphone app for several years, but it’s primarily been focused on delivering coupons and store location maps. The ability to order food and pay through the app, which is expected at all U.S. restaurants by the last three months of the year, is already in place — and spurring sales — in some of the chain’s international markets.
In Japan, McDonald’s has found that customers using the app spend 35 percent more, on average. The app makes it easy to place orders, so customers return more often, McDonald’s Global Chief Marketing Officer Silvia Lagnado said. And when customers do take the app’s suggestions to add a milkshake or some McNuggets on top of a value meal, those orders are stored and often repeated as-is, leading to higher spending.
In France, where orderand-pay is already up and running, McDonald’s is collecting “behavioral insight” from customers and using that information to personalize the promotions they receive.
“The same technology advancements that are so dramatically changing the way that we live are also transforming the way we market today,” Lagnado said at a recent investor presentation.
“We’re increasingly able to measure things that we would have not dreamed of measuring just a few short years ago.”
McDonald’s also is participating in a number of pilot programs to test technology and its effectiveness in getting more customers in the door.
The company recently completed a pilot in Singapore where it placed Google ads in areas where its restaurants had slower customer traffic at that very moment and so were able to handle more delivery orders.
The company is partnering with Facebook to measure the effectiveness of its advertising on the social media site. Using Facebook location-tracking information, the chain can see the time between when customers see an ad on Facebook and when they walk into a McDonald’s restaurant. McDonald’s says it has similar pilot programs running on other social media platforms.
The new initiatives come at a time when the company is trying to improve customer traffic in the U.S., which has been in decline for years.
In a sign of just how much change is taking place at the burger giant, the company last week announced the departures of three key executives: Deborah Wahl, chief marketing officer; Lance Richards, vice president of menu strategy; and Julia Vander Ploeg, vice president of digital. The three are the first division leaders to depart since the hiring of a new U.S. president at the beginning of the year, former Kraft executive Chris Kempczinski. Their replacements — veterans of PepsiCo, Starbucks and Bank of America — start this month.
Darren Tristano, president of food research firm Technomic, said the personnel shifts are unlikely to slow the chain’s plans.
“I think McDonald’s is recognizing that they need to continue to bring in the right people and move faster than they did in the past,” Tristano said. “It’s going to be about egos and experience and direction — and you’re either onboard or you’re not.”