Church of the Customer Blog
« The McChronicles of McDonald's, Part 2 | Main | J. Crew's personal touch »
October 21, 2005
The McChronicles of McDonald's, Part 2
Josh Hallett asks, what should companies do with its citizen marketers?
For a company with millions of customers, that's a big, big question. Engaging citizen marketers like the McChronicles blog as they pop up one by one is not a scalable approach for McDonald's. The same is true for other companies, whether it's Stride Rite, Verizon or Kodak. Rather, engaging citizen marketers means inviting them to join a customer community.
To create a customer community is a strategic, company-wide decision involving operations, marketing and legal. It requires executive-level decisions about the roles citizen marketers will play, giving up centralized control of message management and deciding who internally is responsible for making the idea work.
Ideally, that planning work involves a group of the early citizen marketers, too.
The genius of McDonald's is that a burger, fries and a shake are the same from
Minneapolis to Moscow, but McDonald's does not have replicant customers, so why
treat them that way? Loyalty that blossoms into customer evangelism does not come from positioning; it's earned by the value delivered plus the maintenance of the relationship.
But how do big companies with millions of customers do this?
Last summer, McDonald's caused a mini wave of buzz among marketers with the idea of "brand journalism." It was the vision of Larry Light, now the outgoing global marketing chief of McDonald's.
Back then, Light said that "identifying one brand position and communicating it in a repetitive manner is old-fashioned, out of date, out of touch." Brand journalism would tailor the company's marketing to niche audiences, not unlike like how a small community paper features the world's top stories but focuses primarily on local news. Like what blogs are today.
But a tangible asset of Light's vision never materialized.
If it had, something like community.mcdonalds.com might have been created. As far as we know, Light's plans were never shared publicly, but here's a stab of what it could be like:
The global customer community is a centralized locale for customers to practice and share their "journalism" in 100 different languages with the company and one another, similar to what McChronicles is like today but vastly more scalable. With a social media ecosystem engineered into the community's DNA, customers would connect via their interests and locales a la MySpace. With tens of thousands of customers participating in the first year or so, the community would become a growing source of knowledge for the company and its franchisees on how well specific stores, regions and countries are performing, with vast amounts of data on how to improve and innovate.
Soon, the company would recognize its potential as a laboratory for testing ideas and products among niche groups. The ROI: eliminating a good deal of research money paid to outside firms for data the community would aggregate on its own.
Over the course of the first two years, the community's value would blossom into unforeseen yet organic vines of longer-term loyalty. It would represent a new front in customer-centric marketing by appealing directly to the evangelists and true believers.
It would be unlike anything else out there among fast food companies.
Other blogs that reference The McChronicles of McDonald's, Part 2:
» What Should Companies Do? from hyku | blog - Josh Hallett
The following is cross-posted to Marcom Blog Over at Church of the Customer Ben McConnell talks about a passionate McDonald's blogger, McChronicles. You can read Ben's post to get all the details, but what I want to focus on is... [Read More]
» McPost about McDonald's from New Persuasion
If you saw my post about Burger King, you'd know I'm a fast food lover. When I was a kid, I could not believe that adults would not choose to go to McDonald's everyday - and I made a vow [Read More]
» McBlog: McChronicles, McDonalds and Customer Evangelism from Mostly Muppet Dot Com
What to make of The McChronicles?
If youre an obsessive fan of something, and arent we all (check my URL) then you immediately understand the impetus for this McDonalds blog.
If youre a random Googler or Yahooligan, you&#... [Read More]
Ben … do you think McDonald’s could actually create a genuine and compelling MySpace-like community that wouldn’t come off feeling like an advertisement? I have little confidence McDonald’s could pull that difficult task off.
If McDonald’s were to create such an online space, wouldn’t it just continue its “inside/out” approach to marketing? I think so.
What’s so special with sites like McChronicles is they are created “outside/in.” Because they are created by customers living on the “outside,” these sites feel more genuine than if created from marketers working on the inside.
I’m not convinced companies like McDonald’s need to create MySpace-like tools to foster online community with customers. So many “outside” online community building tools exist already that it does not make sense to create one from “inside” a company. (Can you imagine the corporate bureaucracy hairball that would emerge with a project of this nature?)
Instead, companies should not prohibit or deter its customers from creating communities and participating in these communities. It’s the “whole giving up control” message you’ve been preaching.
Starbucks probably won’t admit it, but they are learning tons from the Starbucks Gossip site. And that’s a site they didn’t have to create. An “outsider” did. So long as Starbucks doesn’t prohibit or deter the Starbucks Gossip site from happening, the company will continue to learn tons from its evangelical and vigilante customers voicing their opinions on the site.
Along the same lines Coke has their blog system at MyCoke.com
http://www.mycoke.com/index.html?tunnel=blogs
John, that's a provocative and controversial question. I love it.
My optimistic answer is yes, McDonald's can create a customer community without it being a detracting ad center. But it would require determined resolution by key leaders to prevent a distasteful advertising patina from taking root.
The Starbucks gossip blog is quite educational (after all, it's Romenesko!), but how can Starbucks aggregate its data? It's all anecdotal and, well, gossip.
I'm not sure how much you've travelled outside of the US and even Europe. But there is definitely some localization of McDonald's. During my time as a Sauder School of Business MBA student I became known as the East Asia expert despite the fact like half my class was visibly asian and I'm visibly not.
Anyway McDonalds in Japan and China definitely alter the menu compared to Canada and the US and even Germany...
I'm not nitpicking, I like your blog a lot. I link to it. And when I get my Mac back from the shop I will prophasize it somehow over on my blog.
In the mean time I'm stuck with dodgy internet cafe computers in China. I've vowed to participate more in the blogospher, ie leave comments, so I just wanted to say Keep up the good work.
I can't figure out how to do quotations on this keyboard. It is an American Dell keyboard but in windows it is set up as Chinese. I've learned to type on German keyboards, Japanese keyboards and now by trial and error Chinese keyboards. I discovered the @ symbol which is shift quotation mark. In Japan I think it was shift 7.
I served as Asian Sales Manager for an international manufacturing enterprise for several years. My travels have brought me to China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Macau, et al. for over 20 years.
Alas, I do NOT know how to use a Chinese keyboard. Good luck. It sounds like you will master it in no time.
John's comment above is just about exactly what I was going to say when I hit the comment link. So: what he said. But there's more to it than that. Company-created initiatives are doomed to fail. Let's not pull punches here--it's not a question of whether the "patina of advertising" takes root or not. They will fail.
The missing ingredient in all of this is that the service or product has to be one that excites its customers and they must strongly identify with the product. The product or service has to be a really big deal to its customers. I'm sorry, but almost nobody feels this way about McDonald's. Or Coke. The salient point is this: the customer community must come into existence under its own power, or not at all. And if you force it, you will kill it before it's born.
Does Apple take steps to create its customer community? Star Trek & Star Wars? Harry Potter? They don't claim to. And if it were found out that secretly they did, the fans would turn on them for being deceptive. At one time or another, these companies have even sued or at least issued cease & desist orders to their own fans. It doesn't stop the rest of the fan community a bit.
If you don't have the magic, you can't fake it.
The one best thing that creates customer evangelism is an absolute killer product or service that customers strongly associate with their own self identities. If somebody did that with a Big Mac, I think that would actually be sad, not cause for celebration. You can't talk about stuff like this as if it were separate from what the company actually produces and sells. An extreme example, I know, but I imagine big tobacco companies see their woes as just a marketing and public relations problem.
Michael -- You're right that customers must feel pretty strongly about a product/company to evangelize it.
But I would posit that your argument that "almost nobody feels this way about McDonald's or Coke" is too big of a generalization for a company with tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions, of customers.
Besides, a few years ago, who would have thought that an organized Microsoft evangelist community (the Microsoft VIPs) or even a Channel 9 would have been successful?
Both of those communities are growing.
From what I understand, people who collect McDonald's happy meal toys are a pretty obsessive group. And today there's this this article about a guy who loves Barq's root beer dong the customer evangelism thing on his blog.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/24/technology/24blog.html?
This is what I mean: it has to come from the customers. The company has to get out of the darn way. And certainly, fer heaven's sake, don't sue them!
I forgot to say they mention your book in that NYT article I posted in my previous comment. Did they contact you about that?
Yes, the NYT contacted us as a source for the article.
Here's the thing about the initial citizen marketer blogs like the ones mentioned in the NYT story: They are the first step. The next step is to facilitate -- not dictate -- the means for customers to meet other customers. That's where the organized customer community comes into view.
Michael, you said, "The one best thing that creates customer evangelism is an absolute killer product or service that customers strongly associate with their own self identities. If somebody did that with a Big Mac, I think that would actually be sad, not cause for celebration. You can't talk about stuff like this as if it were separate from what the company actually produces and sells."
Well, the McChronicles isn't infatuated with a sandwich, but we are with the complete brand experience. This, in our case, is a multi-dimensional immersion involving us, as an 8-year old, buying into the ads and imaging, as a teen aspiring to "master" our first date at a real restaurant, as a young adult grabbing a bite to eat in our first strange town, as a young parent taking the kiddies out for a snack after a soccer game, as an adult recalling the flood of memories that occurs whenever we see the golden arches.
No, it's not a Big Mac, but it IS an absolute killer brand.
When it comes to McDonald's, we're not talking about dollar store thumb tacks. We've got a bona fide, meaningful, life-long brand experience that is relevant the world wide. McDonald's produces much more than a sandwich - and has almost since the day they were launched.
I'm still waiting for McDonald's to roll out "MyMenu". They've already got card readers for the gift cards (well, in some markets, anyway). How hard could it be for them to let me enter my favorite special grill orders on their website, and tie them to a membership card or keychain tag?
Then when I go in to order something a little bit different than standard, I won't have to stop and explain it. Every. Single. Time. I can just swipe my card and say, My #1, please.
Just wanted to let you know that McDonald's launched an external blog off of Mcdonalds.com called "Open for Discussion". You can reach it via this link directly.
http://csr.blogs.mcdonalds.com/default.asp
The blog is being authored by Bob Langert, Sr. Director for Corporate Social Responsibility.
