KAMIST

McDonald’s: Nostalgia is our Forte

Hello, OptiMIST People!

Back at it again with KaMIST! Your weekly dose of insights into the latest marketing trends. In this week’s KaMIST we’ll dive more into how McDonalds is bringing our old memories back to our dining table!

When you hear the word McDonald’s, Happy Meal is definitely one of the things you think about, right? Well, the giant American based fast-food chain, McDonald’s, is bringing back Happy Meal with a twist. They’ve announced that they are releasing Happy Meal specifically for adults. McDonald’s USA Chief Marketing and Customer Experience Officer, Tariq Hassan, said in an interview that the company is taking one of the most nostalgic McDonald’s experiences and repackaging it in a new way that’s hyper-relevant for their adult fans. 

McDonald’s is bringing this project to life through a collaboration with a streetwear brand called Cactus Plant Flea Market to drop the Cactus Plant Flea Market Box. The adult Happy Meal comes with either a Big Mac or 10-piece nuggets, fries, and drink. Marketing strategies that tap into consumer’s past have proven to be quite popular these last few years. Jenna Barclay, a TikTok content creator, said the pull of the past is strong, particularly for millennials like her. Products that recall some of the most nostalgic memories a customer possesses, have an appeal that goes beyond a mere craving for a burger. “We are at a point where childhood simplicity is gone from people’s lives — we’re longing for that feeling of comfort and a time when things felt easy, before stressful jobs and mortgages and kids.” she added.  A marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, Jonah Berger, has also stated that nostalgia can also have practical appeal for many companies. Selling something to a customer is easier if you don’t have to introduce the product in the first place, he added. 

What do you think about this? Are you first in line to buy the “Adult Happy Meal”? 

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The idea of delivering the most value for the consumer has evolved over the years. As we know, the best marketing strategy is cetera desunt for adaptive future-leader mindset that uncertainly evolved over decades. Companies began to use various promises in effort to persuade and attract customers. The fiercely increasing conditions of competition added the popularity of the concept of “brand” and “advertisement” by adopting the concept of neo-marketing and elaborate them with psychological terms. Albeit, all emotion influences consumers personal relationships, business choices, and buying decisions. The emotion itself has situational and reactive qualities, as well as satisfaction and expectations formed over lifetimes of experiences and interactions.

When a boy goes to an ice cream parlor or restaurant, he will feel befuddled. Choosing what he is going to get, that’s the thing that he despises. Would chocolate chip or strawberry ice cream please him better? Cheeseburger or fried chicken? He feared that what he selected will not give him as much pleasure as the other option would give. What he doesn’t choose could provide a higher sense of pleasure than the one he chose. One interesting finding utilized by neuromarketing is that people really don’t want to lose out. People are just as worried about what they might lose as to what they might gain.
In the meantime, one of the biggest challenges that marketers deal with is customers’ expectations in the pre-purchase phenomenon where the consumers haven’t fixed their buying decision yet. To tackle the challenge, many companies are competing to build relationships with their customers, with the expectations that they will be able to provide the best customer experience for specific individuals. Therefore, the company must be customer-centric to carry out a successful marketing strategy in order to be noticed by consumers and to forge a brand identity.

According to McKinsey (2019), by making a fundamental change of mindset of focusing on the customers, companies gained significant enhancement on several aspects. Along with operational and IT improvements, companies generate 20 to 30 percent uplift in customer satisfaction, a 10 to 20 percent improvement in employee satisfaction, and economic gains ranging from 20 to 50 percent of the cost base addressed in the various journeys.

To overcome these challenges, companies have to understand consumers’ behavior and expectations. Hence, companies should put a bigger concern towards consumers’ buying-cycle from awareness to its advocacy. By implementing the concept of Neuromarketing, stereotypes of the communication matters of the marketing basis will be integrated with taste of individual market itself. The more personalized the promotion, the higher the probability that the advertisement will work. It could be done by using big data to allow the company for this huge aggregation of all consumers personal information that they’ve ever revealed to build a precise representation of who they are, now, more than ever before. Data and insight are not delivered to consumers as a whole but individually by delivering the most value to the customers with a very specific scope based on how they think.

In order to win in today’s marketplace, companies must be customer-centered, to the point that ideally, each individual customer’s values are taken into an account to derive the value that they are truly seeking. In essence, by generating consumer reactions, and treating them not as reactionary receptacles of marketing strategies, but as each their own person with differing individual values. Therefore, reinforcing belief is a very important matter for marketers that influences consumers experience. They must deliver superior value to their target customers traditionally and digitally with knowledge of neuroscience marketing strategies combined. Neuromarketing will surely strengthen customer’s contentment of a product itself.