Why We’re Loving It: The Psychology Behind the McDonald’s Restaurant of the Future

By Luke Battye

McDonald’s BIG problem

“The reality is our recent business performance has been poor. The numbers don’t lie” — Steve Easterbrook, CEO McDonald’s, 2015.

Back in 2015, McDonald’s was struggling. In Europe, sales were down 1.4% across the previous 6 years; 3.3% down in the US and almost 10% down across Africa and the Middle East. There were a myriad of challenges to overcome. Rising expectations of customer experience, new standards of convenience, weak in-store technology, a sprawling menu, a PR-bruised brand and questionable ingredients to name but a few.

Breaking through the limits of value-engineering

McDonald’s are the original fast-food innovators; creating a level of standardisation that is quite frankly, remarkable. Buy a Big Mac in Beijing and it’ll taste the same as in Stratford-Upon Avon.

So when you’ve optimised product delivery, supply chain and flavour experience to such an incredible degree — how do you increase bottom line growth? It’s not going to come from making the Big Mac cheaper to produce — you’ve already turned those stones over (multiple times).

The answer of course, is to drive purchase frequency and increase margins through new products.

McDonald’s Achilles heal: Status quo bias

Numerous studies have shown that no matter what options are available, people tend to stick with the default options and choices they’ve made habitually. This is even more true when someone faces a broad selection of choices. We try to mitigate the risk of buyers remorse by sticking with the choices we know are ‘safe’.

McDonald’s has a uniquely pervasive presence in modern life with many of us having developed a pattern of ordering behaviour over the course of our lives (from Happy Meals to hangover cures). This creates a unique, and less cited, challenge for McDonald’s’ reinvention: how do you break people out of the default buying behaviours they’ve developed over decades?

When a Big Mac Meal with a chocolate milkshake is what I order, and have done for 20 years, how do you drive another £1 spend with me?

Welcome to ‘The Restaurant of the Future’