Oxean worked with that objective in mind, helping McDonald’s reach one million visits to its locations across the region in only 3 months. Effective communication, incentives and follow-ups were the key of this successful initiative that won an Eikon Award in 2016.
The Challenge
Open Doors was an initiative born in 2015 to allow customers into restaurants to see the food preparation process. People asked for a spontaneous or scheduled visit, with the latter being the most common type among organizations such as schools or medical groups. In addition, hostesses openly invited customers to have a tour of the kitchen when in the restaurant.
Even when Open Doors was created to respond to crisis situations related to unsatisfied or information-hungry customers, it was managed and grew as an instrument to add value to the McDonald’s brand. It involved inviting a diverse audience to have guided tours of the kitchen and a behind-the-scenes view. This improved brand reputation by focusing on concepts such as hygiene, product quality, employer brand, and safe food handling, among others.
What did we do?
In 2015 Oxean, along with other Arcos Dorados’ suppliers, developed a brief to introduce the initiative to countries where the organization operates, featuring a campaign in four languages. Locations in each country began executing the campaign to the best of their abilities, although most of them completed it successfully. Oxean also developed the image of the initiative, and the internal and external communication campaigns.
The internal campaign aimed at instructing Operations staff on how to encourage customers and their families or friends to make the tour. The message we came up with for them to use was ‘Would you like to know how the most popular hamburgers in the world are made’? In addition, we created another message for Staff members –‘How long since you went around the other side of the counter?’, which invited them to revisit the fundamentals of the business.
Starting in 2016, the stake was raised by setting a quantity target for ‘Open Doors’ implementation in restaurants across the region. To follow up that target, a space in the company’s Portal was enabled by means of a traffic-light-style indicator.
We are currently redesigning the contents of the ‘Open Doors’ handbook with McDonald’s new service culture.
Other initiatives were focused on increasing the number of people making tours. They included the institution of ‘Open Doors’ national day, actions with influencers, creation of communication and media kits, gifts, etc.
Results
In 2016 the ‘Open Doors’ initiative was implemented a million times across the organization. Supported by reinforcement actions, this number was reached in the first quarter of the year, resulting in an enormous impact on how various concepts, such as brand and quality, were perceived.
