Scale for Good

With consumers increasingly judging global brands based on perceptions of values and social impact, McDonald’s has faced a complex set of challenges raising questions about the company’s impact on communities and society at large. From the ingredients, preparation, and sourcing of its food to the nature of employment, consumers and influencers alike needed to hear McDonald’s commitment to using its scale for good.

Over the past 5 years, BPI has helped McDonald’s to shift the narrative and bolster reputation among policy makers, food and environmental influencers as well as workforce and community leaders. To continue to drive positive sales growth and brand trust, while inoculating against the regulatory and political risk, McDonald’s invested in a multi-tiered campaign telling its story on how they use their scale for good as an employer and food provider to targeted audiences of influencers.

BPI worked with McDonald’s to design and develop Scale for Good, a global corporate responsibility platform, to tell a story that could make consumers feel good about the food they loved. We developed a year-long campaign to raise perceptions of the company’s food quality. To make the most of limited resources, we developed a model predicting which consumers were most likely to be persuaded by the McDonald’s narrative. 

Building on sophisticated messaging research, we developed a narrative architecture that defined the key elements of the story that each different food item could tell – and that contributed to the larger McDonald’s story of change and improvement. Optimizing the delivery of each wave of media based on measurement conducted from the last – using BPI’s proprietary Vantage tool – we drove persuasion-level frequencies, leading to broad-based gains both on favorability and on the perception that McDonald’s “serves food I feel good about eating”. 

We continue to work with McDonald’s today to drive brand trust and  maintain an integrated understanding of the risks it faces and the role that influencer communications can have in reducing them.