McChanges in the Air

A case study about the time I worked on a research project for McDonald’s.

The Situation

In December 2014, the McDonald’s client team from Golin’s Chicago office contacted the Dallas office looking for support on a social media listening project. The client wanted to understand what supporters and naysayers of McDonald’s said about the food on social media. They sought data-backed answers that would spark operational changes.

I was enlisted by the senior manager to dive deep into data about the quality of potatoes, beef, chicken, and breakfast foods, plus two subcategories within “brand love.”

The Solution

As we dug into the backlogs of thousands of mentions for the six main business priorities, the first task was to define Boolean searches on Sysomos. My team collaborated with the client team in Chicago to determine several versions of branded terms, like mcdonalds, McDonalds, @mcdonalds, McD’s, or #MickyDs, so we could capture as many mentions of McDonald’s as possible. Next we constructed a list of as many terms related to a category as possible. For chicken that included phrases like “cage free,” free-range, conditions or “factory farm” or “animal welfare” or “quality of life.”

After the Boolean searches were finalized for all six categories, I performed an initial search. During this period of data coding, five to six sub-topic areas rose to the top in number of mentions. This information was shared with the Chicago team and they told us which areas to move forward with as part of the deep data dive.

My main task was whittling down conversations for the chicken and potatoes categories from more than 2,000 mentions to only relevant samples. Determining the sentiment and relevance of tweets was simple, but forums and blogs presented issues because many of the mentions were irrelevant to my research and had to be thrown out. By creating a simple coding system on Excel I was able to determine three main themes to focus on in my analysis of the chicken and potatoes being used.

Results revealed interesting perspectives of McDonald’s food from enthusiasts to mega-haters to apathetic hungry people. Regardless of a user’s stance on McDonald’s they were always clear about the brand they were discussing.

The Result

A comprehensive deck was delivered to the McDonald’s client team in Chicago. On several conference calls with my team in Dallas, they asked challenging questions so they were capable of and comfortable with presenting our data to clients at McDonald’s.

As a result of the research performed in this project, McDonald’s went on to test and launch breakfast all day in October 2015 and committed to only using cage-free eggs.