BURGERS REPLACING POPCORNS IN BLOCKBUSTERS

21.12.09

In May this year, McDonald's and Twentieth Century Fox entered into global partnership for joint promotion for 5 movies. The first being the release of 'Night In The Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian', followed by ‘Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs’. The latest blockbuster release, AVATAR, is the 3rd in partnership between the two global brands.

Mary Dillon, CMO, has positioned McDonald’s as ‘an entertainment brand for kids, families and adults’. McDonald’s remains relevant to its customers by engaging and involving them in entertainment and popular culture. The launch of these blockbuster movies is coupled with Happy Meal toy collections, online games, new product, combo meals promotion and in-store merchandises. McDonald’s is possibly the only single-brand, global QSR franchise that has successfully extended its brand equity beyond pure product-base to experience-base marketing, creating further distance from the competitors.

Yum! for instance has targeted at ‘Product Layers’ as a strategy for growth, which is a product-centric approach. While most other QSR franchises focus on new product launch, seasonal promotion, and run-of-the-mill coupon redemption activities, McDonald’s has moved a notch up by driving customer loyalty through stepping up store experience. Pursuing a more emotive branding approach, McDonald’s campaign of ‘Thrilling Your Senses’’ with AVATAR, brings the new world of Pandora to its customers through various exciting promotions. For instance, McDonald’s Latin America has larger than life-sized images from the movie for customers to be trapped in the world of AVATAR. In Australia, special sweeptakes with hidden codes on cups and trayliners create interaction with customers. In Europe, a morphing tool allows customers to transform photographs of themselves into AVATAR blue humanoids is being installed at selected restaurants. In USA, with each Big Mac purchase, customers are given a ‘Thrill Card’ to access online game, PandoraQuest.

Such global campaign roll out is by no means a simple feat. Operating 32,000 restaurants in over 100 countries with 80% of its stores being franchised, intensive collaboration and buy-in from all the countries and franchisees will be required. While each region has a different campaign mechanism to allow for customization and local adaptation, McDonald’s retains brand consistency by providing standard commercial clippings, artwork, press kits and controlled campaign release timing. One observation is that it appears that the more matured markets of Europe and USA are moving towards higher level of customer-experience engagement while APMEA region is still more product-centric. The AVATAR campaign in Singapore for instance involves only the launch of new Teriyaki chicken burger and McDonald’s/AVATAR commercial. Customer’s in-store experience is lacking.

For Fox, the tie up with McDonald’s meant an additional marketing dollar contribution and new channel to bring the blockbuster movie closer to the hearts of consumers. The revenue impact and return on marketing investment for both parties for such tie-up can be reviewed in 2010 when the full year financial results of McDonald’s is available. For now, it seems that at least for Fox, burgers and film have no correlation yet, as AVATAR raked in US$27m for the opening day, lagging far behind the US$72m by ‘The Twilight Saga: New Moon’.

Whether customers are busy chomping down their burgers and not heading to the theatres or that AVATAR may eventually make a ‘titanic’ turn later into the weeks is still to be seen. But for McDonald’s, the way to win the heart of the consumer is not just through his stomach, but by thrilling his experience as well.