Brand strategy is to always be creating opportunities to generate conversations with the public
If before McDonald’s bet on a campaign per quarter, to talk about product launches, today, the strategy is different. Méqui wants to be part of the daily lives of Brazilians.
For this, as CMO João Branco says, the brand seeks to create – and be present – in conversations. And there is no shortage of examples: the BBB itself, a reality show that McDonald’s sponsors, is a full plate to generate opportunities to be closer to the consumer.
“Instead of doing a campaign in the product launch quarter, in which we shield ourselves from all sides to avoid going wrong, now we have a conversation a week, a day, something constant”, he says.
more conversations
This change in communication happened when we understood that we no longer needed campaigns, but conversations. Instead of running a campaign in the quarter for product launches, in which we protect ourselves from all sides so as not to go wrong, now we have one conversation a week, a day, something constant. And we are less afraid of making mistakes, at the same time we take more risks since we don’t put everything in one thing. We are all the time throwing sparks and seeing how much that fire grows, we are all the time kicking on goal and some balls come in. It’s more like what Anitta does, releasing a song almost every week versus making a single album.
Language close to Brazilian
The change we made was in the language, in the form, and not in our essence. For example, I launched a product called Signature Mushroom Dijon, which was a premium mushroom and dijon mustard product. Today we have a language closer to Brazilian. People need to look at what you do and say and see themselves in it. The communications we put on the air today compared to four years ago, you’ll notice that even the consumer scenes have changed. Now, today’s sandwich is more assembled, the sauce drops, we smear each other, the casting has changed, with more diversity, with everyday people. We use memes, what people say on social media. Why are we doing this? To show that we are no longer just your childhood friend who stayed behind, it is the childhood friend who accompanied you.
BBB
The BBB is part of a story, not an isolated project. You may have already noticed, even in previous years, the effort that McDonald’s has made to get closer to the Brazilian people, to rejuvenate its communication and to get more into the daily lives of its consumers. In December of last year, we launched the teaser of the Méquizices campaign, with celebrities showing what they were crazy about with our products.
And this plan continues at BBB and, now, we talk about the Méquizices of the participants. In other words, we are activating the brand within the BBB in several ways, and this is just one of them. We’ve already done a test talking about Drive-tudo, then we send shared-size products and there’s still more to come.
Luciano houses
This action was born from the same objective of ours of entering the daily lives of people’s conversations. I joke that we are a brand of delicious food and that we want to be on people’s lips, but that we literally want to be on people’s lips, when they are eating and when they are talking about us. And for that, we need to be in the conversation. When we announced that McDonald’s would be a sponsor of Big Brother, I think the participants got what the brands were or got a souvenir from last year. Participants talk a lot about McDonald’s inside the house, and Luciano was one of the spontaneous mentions that went viral.
He was talking to Douglas [Silva] and said: ‘man, I want to be famous like Beyoncé, for not being able to eat at McDonald’s’, and it went viral here – and of course we also helped this message to be disseminated. And then we gave him the opportunity – not to mention luck – for him to be out in the next elimination, which for him, who obviously would have liked to stay longer, for us the opportunity arose to fulfill at least a little piece of his dream. As soon as he left, we made contact with the administrators of his career, we made a deal and, at this moment – when he was still in the house – we changed the description of our page to ‘the best place for Luciano’s fans to take a picture with him’. This was something we were able to do naturally without having to ask for special permission as a sponsor of the program.
this year’s party
We’re going to use a lot of the principles we used at last year’s party. We created entertainment, but in a way that only McDonald’s can do. BBB has many parties, and for people to remember ours, until today, it was because we did something special. And in our view, we use a marketing secret that is nostalgia, nostalgia, the emotional credit you have for a brand. The great differential of McDonald’s in Brazil, versus any other brand, is the emotional connection that we have with the public. A person our age, for example, went to McDonald’s as a child and has memories of the smell, the taste, the little toy, and that is stored in our hearts. And when we have a party at the BBB, it refers a lot to the codes of birthday parties that we remember that someone had, of happy moments. But we mix it with new things, with modernity, to show that your ‘childhood friend’ accompanied you. So we go there and put something very current in that BBB context, and do inside the house what you can have in yours. An example was the sleepover, where you managed to eat exactly what the brothers were eating, wear exactly what they were wearing, and have a party at home. So, we’re going to use the same principles, but now, with the pandemic at a more controlled stage, we’re going to try to replicate the same concept, but with something you can do outside your home.
sleepover buzz
At that time, restaurants were closed because of the pandemic and what worked was only our delivery and orders via the app. On the night of the party, iFood dropped due to the volume of orders.
We had an increase of more than 1000% in searches for our brand on Google, in addition to McDonald’s having six simultaneous trending topics on Twitter. In the first quarter of last year, when the party took place, we registered a growth of 3 percentage points in brand preference, in brand attributes, recall levels.
João Branco do Mequi
Every employee of a company, whether the official spokesperson or not, knows things about the brand that give him some influence over his network. This universe is getting more and more mixed up, because I no longer believe in the division that, in my networks, for example, I am just João. Even as a person who takes care, together with a team, of such a targeted brand, I can no longer make this differentiation. That’s why I decided to really introduce myself as I am here: João Branco do Méqui. Obviously the company knows all this and we understand that it has many benefits. And, within this context, I adopt my tone of voice, but it has a lot of the brand, since we have things in common. I work here because I really like Arcos Dorados, I agree with the values, and I identify with most of the things the brand does. And, if I’m the person who takes care of marketing, I think I can also contribute by leaving seeds along the way of what the brand image is, the intentions, and I see that giving people access is something that generates proximity; the same thing that the brand does in its communications, I also try to do in mine – either on behalf of the brand or on behalf of João do Méqui.
