McDonald’s spices up its chicken strategy

The fast food industry is one rife with intense competition. While the golden arches of McDonald’s is an emblem that represents the epitome of fast food, the brand continues to be on the hunt to find new ways to stand out from other ambitious fast food brands. It was no different when it launched its new menu item, the Mini Cuts Spicy Chicken in Indonesia last year.

However, simply launching the product wasn’t enough. McDonald’s knew that it needed to find a fiery way to capture the attention of fast food lovers with its new Mini Cuts Spicy Chicken, and position the brand as the one that consumers turn to when they are looking to order fried chicken.

As such, McDonald’s turned to GrabAds and collectively set out to strengthen consumers’ perception of McDonald’s as their fast food brand of choice in Indonesia. 

Leveraging insights from GrabFood’s first-party data, Grab hyper-targeted fast food and chicken lovers within three to five kilometres of a McDonald’s store. This was then layered with geo-fencing of places with historically high demand to display eye-catching banner ads to give the new dish maximum visibility on the GrabFood home screen.

“When we started working on this campaign, the objective was to increase awareness of McDonald’s new menu – specifically its new Mini Cuts Spicy Chicken, and to increase their sales on the Grab platform,” said Alexandra Debby, country head of GrabAds, Grab. 

To achieve this, GrabAds worked with McDonald’s to leverage high visibility on its ad units through the “power banner” located on top of the GrabFood home page. 

Keeping a tight purchase loop

Along with the creative, Grab ensured a seamless ordering process on the app and boosted delivery sales with real-time ROI optimisation, keeping the purchase loop tight. The campaign, which ran from 10 to 24 February, generated more than 88 million impressions on all digital channels, reached a whopping 79% of Indonesian foodies, with improved top-of-mind recall of its new menu item and generated almost 16 times return on ad spend for McDonald’s. 

Fresh data solutions across the board

That being said, Debby added that the beauty of GrabAds’ solutions lies in its ability to mould and help brands from a variety of industries from FMCG to automotive, financial services and telecommunications. The solutions are catered to meet their different objectives be it from awareness to consideration to engagement and conversion. 

Moreover, Grab users come onto the app multiple times throughout the day to make transactions, and hence, brands who want to engage with consumers in the Grab ecosystem have the ability to appeal to those who are not just ready to engage, but also those who are ready to make a purchase.

A localised understanding 

Having the right message delivered in a creative format is absolutely key to increasing engagement with target consumers on the Grab superapp. But equally important is the need to localise. 

GrabAds’ full stack solutions, and the localised team behind it, have an in-depth understanding of the market landscape in Southeast Asia, Debby explained. 

“Specifically for Indonesia, we harness our learning and insights from our different campaigns and automation processes whenever we are working on creative ideas to help brands or agency partners craft the right advertising messages,” Debby said. 

“I believe the most important thing is to first understand a brand’s campaign objectives before working to develop customised solutions and crafting and implementing the campaign strategy by targeting the right audience using insights from our first-party data.”

For example, if an F&B merchant is looking to drive top-of-mind awareness for its brand, it could use assets within the home feed ads or on the GrabFood home page to achieve its objectives.

The Grab masthead has the highest visibility among all the available ad units and is an effective means to drive top-of-mind awareness. However, if the brand is looking to make its products more discoverable, it would be advisable to use Rank Booster to improve its ranking via the search engine. 

“We are happy to support brands in reaching, engaging and moving consumers to action on our platform, and to see our partners’ businesses grow as a result,” Debby said.

Debby added the GrabAds team actively asks partner teams to reach out whenever there is an idea for a campaign, and the teams always work hard at bringing these ideas to life. 

The same dedication also goes in supporting the thousands of small medium businesses across Indonesia, Debby said. One of Grab’s key initiatives is GrabMerchant, an all-in-one, self-serve merchant platform for business owners to grow their online customer base, optimise operations, while keeping costs in check. 

To further make it easy for SMBs, it has several key features such as:

• Self-onboarding: Food businesses can build an online store, set up cashless payment options, and be up and running on Grab in 24 hours. 
• Insights: Merchants get a detailed view into their sales, their operations, their customers’ purchasing habits, and the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. It allows them to spot and respond quickly to new opportunities such as creating bundled meals based on what customers are ordering, and equips them to address operational inefficiencies. 
• Ads: An ads creation tool that empowers merchant-partners to build their own food banner and food search ads, and track the ad performance in real-time.
• Supplies: Grab merchant partners can purchase supplies and ingredients at wholesale rates, and enjoy the convenience of next-day delivery.

“Marketing is like playing chess. Making the right move will determine if you will win in the competitive market,” Debby added.

This post was written in collaboration with Grab Ads.