McDonald’s wanted to introduce rice-based entrees in Northern Asia to grow the dinner day part and find a way to bring families together. They needed a short-term packaging solution that allowed for effective containment in less than three months. They were also looking for a longer-term solution that offered a more consumer-centric approach.
tms took a two-step functional packaging approach for both short and long-term gains. The first batch of packaging was delivered in less than three months, allowing the restaurant to quickly launch rice entrees. For the longer-term solution, tms analyzed main consumer preferences for a dinner experience. We harnessed these insights to create new packaging that encouraged meal sharing while maintaining product integrity and quality.
Leveraging tms’s award-winning design teams and extensive supplier network, we delivered new packaging in record time, then adapted the next round of designs using our findings with limited investment on the front end. Our modular packaging enhances the customer experience, allowing them to share food in a way that feels comfortable and familiar.
For years The Marketing Store has helped our client McDonald’s innovate and deliver unique Happy Meal experiences for billions of kids and families across the world. Today, we have reached another milestone in this journey together.
McDonald’s mission to “feed and foster communities” continues with its first global environmental milestone. Read more here about their ambition to move to a more sustainable Happy Meal toy by the end of 2025.
tms (formerly The Marketing Store) is proud to be one of the suppliers taking part in McDonald’s “Mutual Commitment to Diversity Equity and Inclusion,” or MCDEI. This is one piece of our larger diversity, equity and inclusion journey involving education, representation, transparency and more. Learn more about “McDonald’s Plans to Boost Spending with Diverse-owned Suppliers” below (originally published by Restaurant Business here).
The Company won commitments from suppliers on diversity while vowing to devote a quarter of its supply chain spending to diverse-owned companies by 2025.
– by Jonathan Maze on Jul. 22, 2021
McDonald’s on Thursday said that it will increase spending with diverse-owned suppliers by nearly 10% between now and 2025 and that it has received commitments on diversity from 20 of its largest suppliers.
The effort is an outgrowth of a commitment to diversity the Chicago-based burger giant made last year, and is meant to use its $14 billion supply chain as a force for encouraging improved diversity among a broader set of companies.
McDonald’s said it would spend $3.5 billion with diverse-owned suppliers by 2025, nearly a quarter of its annual supply chain spending and up from 23% now. The company said it currently works with more than 385 diverse-owned suppliers in the U.S.
“McDonald’s partnership with our vast network of suppliers is not only fundamental to delivering on our purpose to feed and foster communities, it’s also key to realizing our diversity, equity and inclusion ambition,” Marion Gross, McDonald’s chief North America supply chain officer, said in a statement.
The commitment comes two months after the company said it planned to increase spending with diverse-owned media by 2024. That commitment came in the face of a lawsuit from The Weather Channel owner Byron Allen saying that McDonald’s only spent a fraction of its ad budget on Black-owned media companies.
It also comes as McDonald’s faces challenges from a number of angles on its treatment of Black Americans in particular—the company is fending off lawsuits from current and former franchisees as well as from former executives. One of the franchisees’ lawsuits was recently dismissed.
McDonald’s a year ago promised to bolster diversity within its system and in February said it would tie executive bonuses to diversity goals. It also hired a new global chief diversity and inclusion officer in Reginald Miller.
Much of the effort is aimed at the supply chain and pushing the companies with which it works to improve their diversity hiring.
The company and 20 of its largest suppliers joined the “Mutual Commitment to Diversity Equity and Inclusion,” or MCDEI. The companies making this commitment promise to improve their own cultures of inclusion and belonging and dismantling barriers to economic opportunity. McDonald’s is starting the pledge in the U.S.
The company said the effort to spend more of its advertising with Black-owned media was part of that commitment to boost spending with diverse-owned suppliers.
In making the commitment, the suppliers who made the MCDEI pledge agree to implement an overall diversity equity and inclusion (DEI) strategy, including annual training. They also vow to increase representation in leadership and staffing and accelerate their use of diverse suppliers.
They also commit to invest in programs designed to make a “measurable difference in talent pipelines, succession planning and in communities” where the suppliers operate. And they commit to create a process to track progress, share regular updates and best practices.
McDonald’s is working with Supply Hive, a Chicago-based technology firm that will help track suppliers’ progress toward the effort.
Among the suppliers that have made the commitment: Accenture, Alma, Baker McKenzie, Burrell Communications, Cargill, CPH Inc., Ecolab, Elkay Interior Systems, Everbrite, Fair Oak Foods, Flavor Reddy Foods, FordHarrison, Greenberg Traurig, HAVI/tms (formerly The Marketing Store), IW Group, New Horizons Baking Company, Omnicom Group, Perrino & Associates, Schreiber Foods, Tyson Foods and Wieden+Kennedy.
“These commitments allow us to dismantle barriers to economic opportunity in far-reaching ways,” Miller said in a statement. “As a values-based organization, we are compelled to do our part to make the world more equitable, and the absolute best way is to leverage our size and scale through our value chain.”
We are excited to announce that our branding and packaging design agency Boxer Brand Design and McDonald’s have won two Communicator Awards for the 2020 McCafé® holiday packaging line. The 12-piece system received the competition’s highest honor — the Award of Excellence — in both the overall design and packaging categories.
A leading international awards program honoring creative excellence in marketing and communications, the Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts’ (AIVA) Communicator Awards have been running for 27 years. Over 6,000 entries were submitted for the 2021 competition.
“The work entered in to this year’s 27th Annual Communicator Awards is even more impressive than in seasons’ past. This year’s entries are a truly stellar embodiment of our ‘Communication is everything’ tagline,” noted Eva McCloskey, managing director of the AIVA.
View the full list of Communicator Awards winners here.
We are thrilled to share that Boxer Brand Design, our embedded branding and packaging agency, and McDonald’s have won a Graphic Design USA (GDUSA) American Package Design Award for the 2020 McCafé® holiday packaging line.
With McDonald’s customers craving instant moments of uplift and escape after a year that left everyone feeling more than a little jittery, Boxer created a delightfully designed line of seasonal holiday packaging for McCafé® that delivered a feel-good pick me up everyone could warm up to.
“The idea of the holidays is to celebrate simple joyful moments, and the packaging for McCafé® celebrates that simplicity with a clever graphic solution that incorporates the core brand element of coffee with the iconic graphic element of winter: the snowflakes,” said VP, Creative Director of Boxer Brand Design Diana Samper.
12-piece packaging system was used across the entire coffee and bakery line, giving millions of McDonald’s customers seasonal delight aplenty served hot, cold, unique and bold.
The GDUSA American Package Design Awards is an annual program that’s been running for 58 years. The competition celebrates attractive graphics and the power of effective design to advance the brand promise and to forge an emotional link with the buyer at the moment of truth.
Originally published in Built In here.
“No one should feel left out of the fun of a game or sweepstakes because they have a disability.”
Senior Front-End Developer James Gambrell said this philosophy underlies tms’s (formerly The Marketing Store’s) approach to how it builds customer engagement solutions, like McDonald’s long-standing Monopoly game. Overall, the customer engagement agency’s projects — which include contests, games and sweepstakes, loyalty programs, web pages and retail experiences for brands like McDonald’s — are engaged by more than 110 million consumers each day, so accessibility is more than just a buzzword.
To keep employees informed on the latest accessibility news and best practices, Gambrell said tms (formerly The Marketing Store) has partnerships with multiple experienced accessibility consultants. In an interview with Built In Chicago, Gambrell shared how his team is building accessible digital experiences for web and mobile apps, his experiences on past accessibility projects and the insights his team’s derived from using multiple screen readers in various configurations.
However, his team’s work isn’t done in a silo. The senior developer said teams across the business work together to incorporate their expertise into accessible products for everyone to enjoy.
“It is essential that all teams effectively collaborate because each has unique responsibilities in delivering a holistically accessible UX,” Gambrell said. “Bringing our initiatives to fruition depends on other teams’ work.”
What does accessibility mean to tms (formerly The Marketing Store)?
Equity. We want everyone, regardless of their ability, to be able to share in the “same” experience as everyone else. No one should feel left out of the fun of a game or sweepstakes because they have a disability.
What are some of the most significant learnings your team has gleaned from building accessible web and mobile applications?
We learned how to manage creative desires while still delivering an accessible web experience. Just because an app is accessible doesn’t mean it has to be boring, basic or uninspired. Additionally, it was great to learn how much even marginal accessibility changes can improve the overall experience for users with disabilities.
What are some things devs must keep in mind when building apps that will be used by both users with disabilities and users without disabilities?
Devs need to be mindful that a user could interface with a web or mobile app and never use a mouse to click during the experience. So the app’s page navigation, interaction and corresponding analytic triggers need to take that fact into account.
Also, it’s important not to be afraid to challenge the design if it creates an accessibility implementation concern. Devs should be seen as allies to the creative process and should help inform creatives when the aesthetics compromise the functionality of an app for accessible users. Whenever possible, devs should try to present viable solutions that can honor the design desires or intentions while still being accessible and easier to implement and maintain.
What are some of the most impactful tech tools used in that project?
Apps like Page Tester, WAVE and axe are great at providing a sound assessment of where accessibility efforts could be improved in an app. Using screen readers, such as VoiceOver and JAWS in different configurations, is also important because they all have different idiosyncrasies. Using them all illuminates potential changes that could be made across the board to ensure a more equitable user experience.
We also employ accessibility-based continuous integration tools to check for and fix accessibility issues in our component library before using launching them in apps, which has been hugely impactful.
What’s an accessibility-driven project your team is working on now? What is its intended impact?
We recently developed a series of web experiences for one of our largest client’s mobile app, where millions of families scanned special game pieces found on packaging that allowed them the chance to win prizes and unlock rewards. It presented a lot of unique hurdles. There are multiple accessibility pitfalls we can encounter during each interaction because of the many devices users could be interfacing with. Our team has been working to anticipate and solve for those instances as much as possible to make sure that what we’re producing is truly accessible to all.
For the second time in a row, The Marketing Store, a global customer engagement agency, was awarded the Global Supplier of the Year Award for their work with McDonald’s Happy Meal.
The award was presented globally in the pre-program footage at McDonald’s virtual Worldwide Convention 2.0 last week. Francesca DeBiase, EVP, Chief Supply Chain Officer, McDonald’s, and Kandice McLeod, Category Lead for Global Strategic Sourcing Services at McDonald’s, emphasized The Marketing Store’s achievements in implementing manufacturing innovations, driving significant cost savings, mitigating tariffs, fostering brand partnerships and encouraging sustainable best practices — all while staying committed to families and communities.
Most notably, since the coronavirus pandemic began, The Marketing Store has helped to successfully manage global inventory across markets to ensure there are no breaks in the supply chain.
“Supplier of the Year is the most prestigious award we have in McDonald’s Global Supply Chain. It’s reserved for suppliers who work tirelessly to deliver sustained results that enhance our brand, expand the competitive gap and demonstrate excellence across award categories,” said DeBiase. “Congratulations to The Marketing Store for being a role model of supplier Self-Managed Excellence and for being Customer Obsessed.”
The Marketing Store and McDonald’s have been working together for over 30 years.
Originally published in Ad Age here.
Millions of people are stuck inside their homes, looking for work, homeschooling their children and fighting for social equality. Consumers are exhausted, scared and mentally overloaded. Dealing with this overwhelming combination has driven them to look for brands that align with their struggle and basic beliefs.
The known and familiar have an advantage at times like these. Case in point: General Mills sales grew 21 percent, driven by brands customers experienced in childhood. But there is room for growth in many sectors, especially for brands that embrace the right strategies. At tms (formerly The Marketing Store), we follow six proven tenets to strengthen engagement:
Listening to your consumers has profound ramifications. Consumers share their opinions when they feel a brand is listening. Take a pause on messaging to ask consumers their wants, likes and concerns. Create a plan of action that highlights what you’ve heard and how you’ll address it. Listening is the key to relevancy, as consumers are keen to tell brands what they want or how they feel.
To assure people that they’re being heard, tms (formerly The Marketing Store) uses a bevy of digital tools to connect clients with consumers in real-time and pivot according to their preferences. Working with McDonald’s, we executed COVID-19-focused research that helps us understand consumer preferences and how to help them feel safe.
Brands have traditionally been afraid to venture into the political arena. There was a perceived risk to picking a side, but that time is long gone. Consumers actively look for brands that represent them. Let consumers know you are with them and how you are following through. Then use the amplification power of branded channels to share that message broadly.
Major brands are learning this lesson the hard way, with strong outrage over minimizing Black Lives Matter or avoiding the equality conversation.
Loyalty is often viewed as a transactional relationship, devaluing customers in the process. True loyalty thrives when consumers see themselves, or something that represents them, in a brand or products, and when the consumer feels they are getting the greater value out of the relationship. All too often, brands deliver near valueless points or hierarchal loyalty systems that are disliked by consumers. These systems scream high-dollar spenders only.
Consumers don’t want to decipher complexity. To diffuse this transactional relationship, create an exchange of value that feels authentic and considerate. Show the consumer the brand cares about them as an individual instead of a sales figure. Thank the consumer for engaging with and purchasing your products. Gift them with a warm feeling that keeps them coming back.
In order to create this, consider the value chain of loyalty. Using initiation in strategy, creative to drive an emotional connection, analytics to measure ROI, technology to deliver the final experience and compelling rewards that create true value exchanges with consumers, these building blocks are accessible for any brand.
For example, tms (formerly The Marketing Store) partnered with a major telecom company to launch a new method of rethinking loyalty. Its premise is simple: Customers in good standing get thanked every week with exclusive offers, sweeps and more. There are no points or strings, just a weekly appointment to thank customers.
Millennials and Gen Z are growing resistant to manipulative advertising. They see through marketing, and they ask, “Is this company honest? Reliable? Do they stand for something?”
Letting consumers understand exactly what you want them to do and what the benefits are is tremendously powerful in establishing a bond and, ultimately, respect. Show transparency consistently so consumers will trust your branded messaging and want to engage with your products.
Consistency is key to engagement. When a brand sets a value proposition, consumers expect brands to follow through. This can tax resources, so it’s equally important not to overpromise. Be upfront about exactly what the exchange is and why it has value, deliver it consistently and make up for it when the value exchange is broken.
This is established through the prism of simplicity. The easier the program is to execute and maintain—and for consumers to engage with—the higher the chance it will be successful and create meaningful consistency.
Never forget one of the most important elements of consumer loyalty: joy. Brands should provide moments of joy, whether through surprise and delight tactics, a personalized thank you or joyfully designed digital experiences that deliver a smile instead of focusing just on a sale. Surprise and delight can do wonders for customer engagement, but ultimately it is a tactic. True joy can be driven from being relevant, timely, thoughtful or just plain fun.
These steps will help brands build sustainable loyalty and engagement. We recommend brands should focus on curating the one thing that drives true engagement and loyalty, brand love. It sounds aspirational, but when you break down what’s happening with consumers, the brands they love that bring them comfort are succeeding during 2020 turmoil.
Using these six principles will help brands make connections while consumers are distracted and overloaded. Become a brand that provides comfort and be worthy of consumer love to drive lasting engagement and loyalty.
Ryan Hedges is VP, Digital Experience, at tms (formerly The Marketing Store) with over 16 years of experience in advertising and digital marketing. He’s led strategy and campaigns for Pepsi, American Express and Universal Studios and most recently has focused on tms’s (formerly The Marketing Store’s) loyalty and digital work. He lives in Los Angeles with his husband and two dogs, while being an avid cook.
Digital marketing used to be just a blip on a company’s radar.
“In 2006, when I started working in marketing, digital strategy was becoming more important but it wasn’t a focus yet,” said Jim Higgins, a senior vice president at tms (formerly The Marketing Store), a global customer engagement agency.
In the years since, brands have replaced passive marketing tactics like mailers and TV with digital-driven experiences like social media and chatbots that call upon user participation and yield measurable ROI data.
“Digital marketing is no longer about checking a box so that brands can say they are doing something digital,” Higgins said. “Now, it’s about how they can lead with digital technology.”
To accommodate the evolving needs of their clients, marketing agencies have undergone digital transformations of their own.
For example, tms (formerly The Marketing Store) has established a formal UX practice in recent years, doubled its data team and brought technology development in-house to redirect its focus toward digital campaign creation.
“In the past, our clients were primarily concerned with getting more eyeballs on their brand,” Higgins said. “Now we partner with them to solve their actual business problems.”
Higgins and his colleagues Shivian Morgan, a UX design lead, and Wendy Cotto, a senior director of analytics, walked Built In Chicago through how they continue to equip for a digital-forward future.
Higgins: It means different things to different clients. For many brands, “digital” starts and stops with digital advertising. For other brands, their focus has gone further as they look to provide value and convenience through digital tools, like mobile offers at McDonald’s or T-Mobile’s customer appreciation app. At tms (formerly The Marketing Store), we help our clients deliver that value, but we also push to go beyond the functional, utilitarian relationship and try to find ways for brands to connect on a more emotional, engaged level while also inspiring their customers to take meaningful actions that drive the business.
Cotto: From a data and measurement perspective, having a digital focus means that we can track consumer behaviors in a more real-time way to optimize or enhance their client experience. This allows our team to come up with ideas and recommendations based on data we have access to. It’s been an evolution on our clients’ side and our own as we’ve built a team to support and drive those conversations.
Higgins: When I started in 2006, digital strategy was becoming more important but it wasn’t a focus yet. We had a small team of people that managed our outside partners to deliver the digital aspects of our clients’ programs. Now, we built a team of experts in-house to lead in creating solutions. As we’ve transformed, we’ve also begun to proactively identify products, feature sets and business models that will address our clients’ business challenges instead of waiting for our clients to bring these challenges to us.
Cotto: Last year, we doubled our analytics team to be a more data-led organization. If we’re approaching a new program or campaign, we evaluate how we can inform creative, strategy and UX to give them a jumping-off point based on historical data. We’re also in touch with our clients more frequently and at different points in the process, whereas before we were more on the back end.
Morgan: The technologies and the pace at which we’re building require our teams to be incredibly nimble, and it also requires our clients to trust us. We take them with us on a journey of explanation and understanding to make sure they know the what and the why behind our technical decisions.
Higgins: When our client McDonald’s signed a Happy Meal alliance with Disney, we convinced McDonald’s to enhance the total value of the Happy Meal and broader family experience. Throughout the campaign, we paired five major Disney film releases with digital experiences directed at the whole family. For Avengers: Endgame, this included visiting the McDonald’s mobile app to scan and collect icons that would allow users to build the ultimate Avengers team. Toy Story 4’s included arcade-style tickets that users could scan for a chance to win prizes or earn points to spend in a digital reward store.
Higgins: We were running program after program, and we wanted to make sure that there wasn’t fatigue, which we see in promotions after a few weeks. We worked closely with Wendy’s team to understand from a data perspective what people were and weren’t interested in, and with Shivian’s team to develop and iterate on features to keep people coming back.
Cotto: When the campaign ended, we pulled together a playbook of best practices that will inform our future work. We worked as close to real time as we could last year to ensure we delivered the information to the right people at the right time. Now we have those learnings compiled into a place where we’re able to share that out internally to inform our next campaign.
Higgins: We’re getting more connected to customers through mobile experiences, and now it’s about connecting with people through a much wider mix of channels, including smart devices in the home and even the car. We’re leaning on our research practice to understand how people’s preferences are changing on how and when they want to interact with brands. What may have been considered intrusive in the past might not be considered so anymore, especially right now as people are discovering new approaches to stay connected.
Morgan: With the evolution of 5G, we’re going to have broadband speeds on our mobile devices. That, plus the fact that our mobile devices can process rich 3D immersive environments or stream it, means that we’re going to be able to do all kinds of immersive, in-depth experiences that we’ve never been able to do before.
Originally published on Built In Chicago here.
Launching the Monopoly promotion year after year for McDonald’s Australia comes with a challenge: topping ourselves from the previous year.
In 2016, the experience became fully playable on mobile, setting new records. With each following year, we have set new records and added innovative new experiences.
In 2018, we added new games and an exciting new way to win called The Chest. Once again, our campaign reached a new high benchmark.
For this 2018 campaign, we won two Effie Australia awards: a Silver for the Food, Confectionery & Snacks category, and a Bronze in the Shopper Marketing category.
For 2019, our new Monopoly promotion is now underway in Australia and New Zealand. Here’s hoping we have the most exciting and successful Monopoly yet.
We share this award with our fellow agency partners VMLY&R, DDB, and OMD. Our congratulations to all!
