Background

In March 2020, Covid-19 brutally forced many businesses to close its doors. McDonald’s dining rooms, our most powerful medium of engagement with our customers, had to close indefinitely. In the months and the varying stages of lockdown that followed, we fought to remain accessible via delivery and drive-thru. With all restaurant brands promoting the same contactless options and touting identical safety assurance messages, the essence of and differentiation among brands were becoming blurred. With no end in sight for the pandemic, we knew that we couldn’t just “ride it out”. We needed to make sure that the trust we had built with our customers would not be eroded simply because we couldn’t (yet) welcome them back into our stores like before. Our challenge was to find a new way for McDonald’s to stand out and be meaningful in the new normal.