This is the story of how a highly targeted marketing programme, built around a mobile customer service, developed a new commercial opportunity for McDonald’s.
McDonald’s extended opening hours to 24 hours for many stores. This opened up a big sales opportunity and set a clear challenge for marketing. Make people aware and get them through the door. But with a majority of restaurants still closing at 11pm, we needed to be highly targeted in how we went about it.
We dubbed our potential audience ‘night owls’. The people out and about after 11pm are habitual creatures, be they working, travelling or out having fun. Our strategy was to disrupt their nightly rituals and direct people to participating restaurants. Communication, therefore, had to be time and place specific.
Mobile was central to our solution. We created a ‘restaurant finder’ smartphone application, enabling people to find their nearest open restaurant at any time of day or night. With the app as the hub to our marketing, we used media to drive people through to this asset. Media that offered a combination of geographical and time-of-day targeting to maximise the relevance of our message: including late night radio sponsorship; backlit posters; service stations; ATMs and mobile.
Fantastic results
The campaign made a significant contribution to sales, contributing 4% to overnight sales value and an ROI of £2.71. Extended Hours ROI was only 15% less than that delivered by mainstream all-daypart food advertising. A fantastic result.
McDonald’s Extended Hours campaign clearly demonstrates the effectiveness of a powerful, mobile-led campaign concept, combined with effective targeting, in delivering a very specific audience for a specific business opportunity. We successfully harnessed customers for specific parts of an extensive retail estate in a way which that was inconceivable only a couple of years ago.
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