Following the lead of its Travis Scott partnership in September, McDonald’s has also partnered with the K-pop superstars on a line of limited-edition product that includes T-shirts, hoodies, flip-flops, in addition to more quirky items such as a robe and a umbrella. The collection will drop at 7 p.m. ET now, and fans must download the Weverse Shop program to get the goods. Over the next four months, McDonald’s will also be rolling out digital content featuring BTS, solely about the McDonald’s app in the United States.
The BTS partnership, and its global scale, is a result of the achievement the brand found in the United States using its previous signature meal bargains with Travis Scott and J Balvin last fall. McDonald’s U.S. chief advertising officer Morgan Flatley states that after she introduced the outcomes in these previous Famous Meals to her fellow marketing heads from around the world (she declined to discuss specific data), everyone wanted in, resulting in 47 different markets becoming involved in the BTS venture. The BTS collaboration indicates the way the company plans to continue pairing famous names using its food and branding as a marquee advertising franchise.
In 2019, McDonald’s laid out a wide, new brand approach called”Accelerating the Arches,” and one of its main columns was to turn more customers into fans by”investing in fresh, culturally relevant strategies.” Dealing with Travis Scott past year opened the company’s eyes to the desire because of its brand to appear in civilization, but also the power of ceding some creative management to the fans it had been expecting to attract. It also boosted earnings by 4.6%.
“We thought Travis would be really large, and it was considerably larger than we anticipated,” Flatley states. “We learned that people wish to create content with us. With Travis we saw customers posting videos of pulling up to the drive-thru blaring among his songs, and saying,’You know exactly what I need…’ This whole phenomenon was made with consumers making content together with our new, which we hadn’t seen to that level (before). So with BTS we’ve really leaned into that. Each week there’ll be new opportunities for customers to produce their own content with the meal, with BTS, and really be able to participate in that manner.”
Another significant lesson from the Scott and Balvin foods was about how big the appetite is for both product and other small, physical things to commemorate the moment. By way of example, seeing people rescue, framing, and even selling their Travis Scott meal receipts on eBay, McDonald’s has now built in more particular edition aspects to the BTS meal, such as a custom take-out tote for each order. McDonald’s had no idea anybody would want a McNugget pillow that retailed from McDonald’s for $90. They are now accessible from stores for hundreds of dollars.
With Wieden+Kennedy, McDonald’s worked with Scott how he would interpret the brand, and how it could be intertwined with his own brand in a exceptional manner. His lineup included embroidered print denim shorts, a hamburger tie, a work jacket, and a complete McDonald’s x Cactus Jack-branded basketball uniform. McDonald’s is famously, and understandably tight-fisted using its world-famous brand, seldom taking risks or leaping at gimmicky stunts. The Scott venture wasn’t a unanimously popular decision, together with all the McDonald’s independent National Operators Association telling the firm that 470 of this chain’s roughly 1,600 franchisees opposed the cooperation, due to Scott’s lyrics and songs work not being entirely family-friendly.
Still, if the brand was going to reach its objective of getting more culturally relevant, Flately states it needed to escape its comfort zone. For Flatley, the Scott cooperation, and the excitement around the new BTS partnership, illustrate the advantages of loosening up.
The Famous Meals thought, arguably McDonald’s greatest marketing initiative because Monopoly (which launched in 1987 and has given out hundreds of millions of prizes around the globe , as well as ignited an epic crime ring), starts with the brand’s U.S. creative agency Wieden + Kennedy New York. The starting point is simple: Stars who love McDonald’s. The brand and agency go through a rigorous evaluation process to make certain each partner really does like the brand and its food.
“Wieden+Kennedy actually challenge us which makes us better, and they keep us honest and grounded in this,” says Flatley. “They bring us a list, and we’ve got an iterative process in deciding who is the best choice. The good news iswe now have a pipeline of potential future partners. Some things we wonder about is: BTS is enormous, so if we continue to do really big actors, is there something that’s a little more insider? We’ve done a good deal in music, what other distances should we play in? The playground is big, so long as that central insight is true.”
In December, McDonald’s decided to see what literary Famous Meals would seem like by producing signature meals for holiday movie characters like Rudolph, the Grinch, and Die Hard’s John McClane. Anticipate the newest to continue to drive that kind of experimentation.
“The insight of, even the most well-known people have their favourite arrangement, is indeed wide open,” says Flatley. “It has shown us this rabid fandom that exists when we can get the ideal ways to unlock it. I kind of knew it was out there, yet to see it in action, it is helping us understand that this fandom is present, we simply have to seek out creative, interesting, unexpected ways to recreate it.”
