McInfluencers

How McDonald’s Uses Pop Icons to Maintain Cultural Relevance

The Brand

McDonald's worldwide growth can be attributed to its huge investment in marketing. The company proudly adopts a combination of traditional and digital strategies to promote its business to its broad variety of consumer audiences across the globe. While the use of celebrity influencers in advertising has significantly increased over the past two decades, McDonald’s has taken a particularly interesting slant on the trend by collaborating with a selection of the hottest pop music stars in the world in an effort to reinvigorate its aging and struggling brand by positioning itself on the cusp of mainstream culture—generating tremendous buzz with otherwise inconsequential celebrity meal endorsements.

The first McDonald's celebrity meal dates back to 1992, when the company named a meal after—basketball megastar—Michael Jordan. The "McJordan Combo Meal" cost $2.49 and consisted of a quarter pounder with bacon, barbecue sauce, fries, and a drink. Fast forward nearly 30 years, and McDonald's revived this exact strategy in partnering with rapper and pop culture icon, Travis Scott, with the same menu items in September 2020 in the midst of the COVID pandemic. Soon after, Colombian reggaeton singer, J Balvin, saw the release of his very own McDonald’s meal in October of the same year. In June of 2021, McDonald's went at it once again with—world-renowned K-Pop supergroup—BTS, releasing an hour-long animation depicting a block of melted butter in order to promote the band’s newest single, Butter. While the Butter music video managed to attract over ten million organic views in its first thirteen minutes of release, the song garnered further momentum by serving as the soundtrack for the BTS McDonald’s meal campaign. Continuing this trend, McDonald’s announced the launch of its next collaboration with Atlanta-based female hip-hop sensation, Saweetie.

The Rationale

Firms must establish natural but creative ways to influence customers. Given the modern obsession with celebrity, McDonald's has exploited this market vulnerability as a marketing strategy by offering customers a taste of their favorite celebrity’s lifestyle in a way that they can easily emulate. By revealing that Travis Scott had grown to be a fan of a McDonald's meal, his fans were prompted to try his go-to meal. Despite the simplicity associated with existing McDonald's ingredients and menu items, people believe that they will be connected with the celebrity by consuming what the star had consumed grown up to.

McDonald’s choice of marketing strategy can be explained by the declining effectiveness of other marketing communications and the company’s need to differentiate from their competitors. Studies have suggested that in the current world, most brands are in an “image stage,” in which symbolic value has become more important than functional advantages. Celebrities who are familiar to the brand’s target audience provide such symbolic values, which are then transferred to the brand through different types of marketing communications. Today’s customers are not only interested in a product because of a combination of basic ingredients, they are looking for products that meet and exceed their expectations. Therefore, celebrity endorsements make McDonald’s products appear to be superior to alternatives in the market in the eye of many consumers—allowing the company to stand above the competition.

A multi-faceted creative, Scott was honored at the 72nd Annual Parsons Benefit. As an artistic pioneer, he’s played a pivotal role in design, retail, and entrepreneurship while also establishing opportunities for future generations of creators. It is evident that he and many other innovators are changing the corporate industry by creating their own narratives through brands. Scott's most recent partnership with PlayStation promoted the new PS5 and his Cactus Jack streetwear label. Sony employees were seen wearing Cactus Jack apparel with the PS5 logo on it, as well as pairs of exclusive Travis Scott x PlayStation x Nike Dunk Low sneakers. Likewise, McDonald's employees have also been spotted sporting customized x McDonald’s crew t-shirts featuring Tavis Scott, J Balvin, and BTS. Those same t-shirts have since gone on to achieve cult status across the internet as collectors items resold at exorbitant prices. In this way McDonald's has begun to adopt aspects of the business model we find in streetwear. Namely, creating artificial scarcity, which drives demand through the sensation of FOMO. Kanye West, founder of the Good Music label, to which Scott signed as a producer in 2012, is one of the biggest names in streetwear. Aside from his outrageously successful Yeezy brand that is partnered with Adidas, West also helped spawn the fashion career of his former protege, Virgil Abloh, who went on to become streetwear juggernaut in his own right with his top ranked Off White label, before also becoming the Men’s Artistic Director at leading luxury fashion house, Louis Vuitton.

By attaching themselves to these mainstream influencers, firms have been able to co-opt the success of the hype-driven business strategies used by said influencer brands and their brand partners in the arts and entertainment sectors due to Gen Z's notorious clout-chasing culture. Brands like McDonald’s are now adopting these strategies by calling on select celebrity endorsers to narrate their brand stories with a creative direction that focuses on status. This isn’t a simple co-sign by one of The Avengers, some star athlete, or some random celebrity. In an effort to latch onto their popularity in generating enthusiasm with younger audiences, the McDonald’s meal partnerships have avidly pursued leading musical acts from the global stage that are able to court the full attention of massive sectors of social media.

These artistic collaborations also focus on diversity and inclusion. The firm reveals that approximately 48% of Generation Z living in the US are people of color, making the younger population racially and ethnically diverse. As such, the campaign aims to be all-inclusive, thus far using a globally representative range of celebrities across different genres—tapping Travis Scott and Saweetie from the American trap hip-hop scene, J Balvin from the LatinX Reggaeton market, and BTS from the rapidly exploding K-Pop scene.

With these pop music driven meal endorsements McDonald’s is also tapping into Gen Z’s penchant for digital media consumption, as the first native digital cohort. With social media’s constant spotlight and expanded access to celebrities, we find a rise in the potential for parasocial relationships with those celebrities. This tendency is known to motivate audiences, especially in youth groups, to adopt the celebrity’s lifestyle and culture in an effort to appear relevant to their peers . As a result, modern celebrities across the board have demonstrated an expanded level of influence on today’s consumer culture, and these influencer meals are just another prime example of the extent to which these social tendencies can become an effective tool for marketers.

Effectiveness

Celebrity collaborations play a significant symbiotic role both as short-term pop-cultural moments for both the McDonald’s brand and the artists and as contributions to the brand’s long-term corporate agenda. In the short term, the firm gets to remain culturally relevant by attaching itself to the leading recording artists and pop icons of this era. For example, the #travisscottmcdonlads and #btsmcdonalds have over 350 million TikTok views, resulting in increased sales of McDonalds menu items as well as heightened market value, music streams, downloads, concert tickets, and merchandise sales for Scott. The Travis Scott meal became so popular that McDonald's finished ingredients within eight days of the launch. In the long term, the company manages to foster customer loyalty and extend its mindshare throughout the market in order to preserve its coveted position at the top of the (fast) food-chain. As customers seek to bond with their favorite celebrities, they will most likely purchase from the celebrity's favorite brands. The collaborations have caused a great deal of chaos, with die-hard fans stealing posters and packaging items and attempting to resell them online for anywhere from $50 to as much as $10,000. Nonetheless, these partnerships typically pan out as huge successes, and are expected to continue. It is evident that brands that collaborate with influential icons can leverage the appeal and publicity that celebrities provide without changing the products that they offer.