Why are we so surprised by success?

Two weeks ago I wrote an article about McDonalds and the responses I received, both on email and by phone have been surprising, to say the least. There were two key themes to these responses – one a little flippant, but the other prompting me to expand on it this week.

Leading a retail marketing agency, I spend a great deal of time walking through stores and dealerships and observing shoppers and retailers firsthand. Paco Underhill refers to this as “thinking standing up”. It’s the idea that you need to move from behind your desk and get out of the office in order to see, hear, smell, touch and feel the experience of shopping.  

Before every major client proposal meeting, all of my client service staff must conduct store walks. At every team launch, all field staff undertake a “Retail Brand Health Scramble”, an exercise of visiting several stores as a mystery shopper, and then getting together to share and discuss their personal experiences. It helps the teams shape solutions that will improve other shoppers’ experiences.

When you do this for work, in hundreds of different locations, predominantly across metropolitan Melbourne and Sydney, you need a comfortable and consistent place to stop and “think sitting down”. The new McDonald’s restaurant formats are now a working environment where you can do this while grabbing a bite to eat. They’re a consistently good choice, in my humble opinion.

So yes, in all this travelling, I really do meet my clients at McDonald’s too. Why not?

However, McDonald’s is not where I “entertain” my clients to say thank you for choosing to work with my company and provide jobs for my staff. As one CXO level client expressed in an email to me after reading my blog: “Kevin, for the avoidance of doubt, I don’t care how good the experience is at McDonald’s, don’t even think about taking us there for dinner.”  

While flippant, the point is important. Last week I talked about the shopper experience being a blend of “what the products does”, which is the responsibility of the manufacturer, and “where and how I buy it”, which is the responsibility of the retailer. The two elements in the mix, when blended well create a great shopper experience.

Selling relevant items in the right environment creates a feeling of comfort and shoppers buy. Putting irrelevant items in the wrong retail environment creates confusion and shoppers walk away.

So a message to my clients and peers: Relax, McDonald’s has no intention of selling high-end $30-plus mains washed down with a $40 bottle of wine. What it does very well is compete with a burgeoning high-end coffee and café sector in a consistent manner nationally and with a great shopper experience. Oh, and it’s making heaps of money by doing it within its existing store footprint.

The second theme came to me from an anonymous call from a long-serving employee of McDonald’s. The caller, let’s call him ‘Ronald’, said that the article was very accurate and did in fact represent the path that the McDonald’s team had embarked upon.

Ronald had worked through series of re-brandings, new advertising, new menu formats and huge consumer promotions over the years. None of these had come anywhere near to the results delivered by this latest journey. Ronald also thanked me for noticing and taking the time to write about it. He said “thousands of people have been working for several years to achieve this”.

So what’s so important about that? While I don’t know for sure, I don’t believe that this journey started with a “big idea”. I don’t believe that anybody said: “We need to move our brand position”. I don’t believe anybody said: “We need a new show-stopping promotion” or “let’s update the store universe”.

I believe somebody would have said: “What do we need to do to make our shoppers happier?” That somebody was probably somebody who had worked in a “Maccas” for many years. Someone who had worked their way through the company, watching and talking to shoppers in many outlets over time.

They, as all good shopper marketers do, would have shopped at similar types of outlets themselves. They would have watched other shoppers and built up a picture of what they liked, and then looked for opportunities to replicate the positives as “the right product” and “in the right environment” (ie. their own stores). The two key elements in the mix to deliver a great shopper experience.

In the early 2000s around Australia what they saw was a good cappuccino selling for $2.50, and a pastry bought in from a local commercial bakery selling for $3.50, in a tiny cramped café, with linoleum floors and standing room only.

All McDonald’s did was recreate a consistently good cappuccino selling for $2.50, and a consistently good pastry sourced from a local commercial bakery selling for $3.50, in a large, light and bright “café style” existing McDonald’s store with consistently clean amenities and free WiFi.

Still surprised they made a success of it?

In his role as CEO of CROSSMARK, Kevin Moore looks at the world of retailing from grocery to pharmacy, bottle shops to car dealers, corner store to department stores. In this insightful blog, Kevin covers retail news, ideas, companies and emerging opportunities in Australia, NZ, the US and Europe. His international career in sales and marketing has seen him responsible for business in over 40 countries, which has earned him grey hair and a wealth of expertise in international retailers and brands. CROSSMARK Asia Pacific is Australasia’s largest provider of retail marketing services, consulting to and servicing some of Australasia’s biggest retailers and manufacturers.

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