CMO profile: McDonald's Australia's Chris Brown on switching agency for client-side

Brand magnetism

Bringing fresh thinking to the McDonald's Australia brand, business and marketing team is clearly part of the remit. As Brown points out, he joined a solid business with a respected brand and advertising approach.

McDonald’s Australian operations reported $1.7bn in revenue for 2020, up slightly from $1.67bn in 2019, and achieved its highest levels of profitability last year off the back of drive thru and home delivery. This was despite the global group reporting its worst global sales in 15 years.

“A conscious decision was made [by the McDonald's executive team] to bring in an outsider, which reinforced that a fresh perspective, new energy and different points of view were going to be embraced and wanted,” Brown says.  

“Secondly, we are living in transformative times, irrespective of Covid. Technology broadly and digital specifically is completely disrupting categories and changing customer expectations at a pace we have never seen before. Expectations of brands has never been higher. To achieve success moving forward, brands have to evolve to customer needs now and in the future.

“At RGA, we talked about transformation at speed. That was an important part of what I needed to bring into McDonald's. It was about helping drive transformation of the brand to continue to be successful.”  

Achieving that is both about brand power and culture for Brown, who cites the Peter Drucker quote, ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ as his motto. Making sure marketing is connected, consists of the right capabilities, and isn’t operating in silos, is therefore vital.

“So creating a more engaged, energised and connected culture was my first priority. Then specifically, how to deepen capabilities in digital and digital media,” Brown says.  

The second priority was putting the customer at heart of what the business does. Brown cites sharpening insights, better understanding the customer journey, understanding customer pain points and striving to surprise and delight to exceed expectations as the ingredients for success.  

His third priority is improving marketing’s output. “Our advertising is good and respected overall. But how do we make our brand and our content magnetic so that it brings people in, wanting to actively engage with it? It’s a big opportunity for us,” Brown says.  

The fourth priority is focusing on and celebrating simplicity. “Great strategy is about sacrifice. I believe in focus and simplicity, and how we simplify as much as we can to get the impact that we want from the activities, initiatives and programs we are doing,” Brown says.

“There are lots of things you can do, but you need to be focused on what you should be doing and what will give the biggest return on effort. Coming in fresh, I looked at everything we were doing as a brand and I wasn’t sure the whole was greater than the parts.”

Passion play

As a first step, Brown restructured the team, bringing in some new people in as well as individuals from across the business. He’s also introduced a new marketing framework in a bid to better organise thinking and sharpen up the McDonald's point of view.

Brown points to the McCafe launch in May as an example of creating a simple but compelling point of view around the new McCafe blend. The platform adopted ‘Coffee fit for an Aussie’, both plays to the unique relationship Australians have with coffee, as well as connection on an emotional level, he says.

“Great coffee matters. What’s more, at a brand level, McCafe was created in Melbourne and born here. In launching a new blend into that concept, it was important to celebrate this was a new coffee designed for Australian tastes and high expectations of coffee,” Brown explains. “We saw some good early commercial results, and we can have a lot of fun with that platform and build on it over time. It offers a sharp point of view.”  

Another element of marketing’s evolving approach is elevating the importance of digital, and the My Macca’s mobile app specifically, into the heart of how the brand goes to market.

“Digital changes the way we generate insights, the customer journey, how we deploy our marketing, and test it. It’s transformed how we do business,” Brown comments.  

Thinking about how the McDonald's brand lives in culture is also in the spotlight. Brown points to work done leveraging the brand’s sponsorship assets as a great example of building the magnetism he wants to see pervade the entire marketing approach.  

“It’s not just sponsoring but also demonstrating we are fans too and recognise the passion points around the NRL, AFL and even with Korean K-Pop stars, BTS, and our ‘Famous orders’ campaign last year,” Brown says. “It’s thinking about how we can lean into culture to create more engagement with our brand.”  

There have been learnings from Covid informing the marketing approach too. A big one for Brown is the fact brands can bring a smile and uplifting moment to consumers in tough times.

“We saw this with our 50^th birthday celebrations, which ran over winter. It was very much about celebrating our relationship with customers over the years. The insight was that we are only who we are because of the customer,” he says. “The language of the campaign was you made us who we are, and us being part of people’s lives, as well as our role as an employer.

“This is about recognising as a brand that you can bring a smile to people, and not take it all too seriously. Even with our latest Monopoly campaign through social, we saw people saying it’s great Monopoly is back, we could all do with a bit of fun with that. Doing that in an appropriate, authentic way reminds us we can bring a smile and bit of joy to people.”  

Through all this, Brown stresses the bringing a real-time approach to a brand and “acting as a publisher”. “We’re evolving to that mindset as we orchestrate our campaigns,” he says.

He’s also, not surprisingly, a massive believer in the power of brand.

“Investing in brand is one of the smartest things we can do, and we are continually shifting investments into long-term brand building,” Brown adds. “That said, we are a dynamic business so getting the balance right is important.”

Read more: What McDonald's is doing to optimise its marketing and media mix

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