We’re probably about to hear a lot more about “One McDonald’s Way,” the Golden Arches’ approach to finding the best business cases throughout its global system and scaling them to other markets.
CEO Chris Kempczinski talked about this strategy at length during the company’s Q2 earnings call last week, in which the company reported global comp sales of 11.7%, despite major headwinds. As he describes, One McDonald’s Way examines “horizontal” ways of working and digitizing the organization. An example of this is China, where a whopping 90% of McDonald’s sales come through digital channels.
“Visiting China brought to life the power of a highly digitized economy and our potential for global growth. It was remarkable to see how the market has forged digital relationships with customers,” he said, adding that the market is also leveraging data and technology to run restaurants more efficiently. McDonald’s intends to pull those learnings for the rest of its system, he added.
It will also pull some insights from Canada’s “rigorous” review process that prioritizes tasks with a goal of empowering managers to stop projects that are less important and shift their focus to customers’ needs.
“Using a new framework, the team has already cut their number of key business projects in half,” Kempczinski said.
Additionally, the UK and Ireland teams pulled learnings from Germany on how to successfully execute a burger rollout, and indeed leveraging the chain’s core menu will very much be part of this One McDonald’s Way strategy. For instance, CFO Ian Borden noted that the spicy McNuggets were offered across various markets in Q2, reaching all-time high sales in Australia.
“Our ambition on chicken includes further scaling emerging equities across markets. The McCrispy Chicken Sandwich has now scaled to over 10 of our largest markets, including Spain just this past quarter. The sandwich is already resonating with our customers, bringing attention to our chicken portfolio, and driving significant chicken share gains,” Borden said.
Marketing is involved here, too, and as the system comes off of its largest global unified marketing campaign ever, launched for the FIFA Men’s World Cup, it is now using that playbook for a similar campaign for the FIFA Women’s World Cup in 28 markets.
This approach – identifying best practices to scale – will be driven by a new business unit, called Global Business Services. According to Kempczinski, GBS will “unlock further efficiencies and capabilities of our people and resources” through digital tools and by making data and insights more accessible throughout the system. GBS is led by Skye Anderson, and includes the finance, people, marketing, development, supply chain and technology functions.
Efficiency has become a bigger focus for McDonald’s since announcing its Accelerating the Arches 2.0 plan in January that included some organizational restructuring and breaking down segment and market silos, which Kempczinski called “outdated and self-limited.”
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
