McDonald’s is using Starbucks as the yardstick for its bid to bridge retail and digital
McDonald’s has credited Starbucks' focus on technology as the inspiration for its efforts to link its offline and online channels.
The fast food chain’s customer and digital officer for its European business Pierre Woreczek admitted that the coffee maker is two years ahead of everyone else in the industry in terms of digital innovation. Speaking at the Leaders Innovation conference today (14 January), the marketer said he benchmarked against Starbucks when plotting McDonald’s bid to get a clearer view of how its online and offline channels link together.
Woreczek said the future of the McDonald’s service proposition lies in harnessing digital to lift the restaurant experience with features such as an ordering kiosk and mobile click-and-collect systems. He revealed that this concept was directly influenced by Starbucks’ app, citing the need to benchmark competition to get ahead.
Starbucks’ mobile offering has consistently defied expectations over the last two years, evolving into a key sales driver with the arrival of apps, loyalty schemes and mobile payments. Such is the scale of its offering that mobile payments accounted for more than a fifth (21 per cent) or $1.03bn sales in its fourth quarter. Consequently, those early gambles have future-proofed the business, making it the envy of those companies like McDonald’s looking to navigate that shift from bricks to clicks.
The fast food business has admitted it committed to the digital game late, and has as a result found it hard to blend the gap between retail and digital. While the business wasn’t set up culturally to make the transition, it has overhauled its offering over the last two years including the appointment of its first digital officer to bring urgency to recent investments like the launch of its first global mobile app.
Woreczek's admission that he used Starbucks as a benchmark ruffled fellow panel member and social futurist Mal Fletcher, who said the practice of benchmarking was the death of innovation. He argued strategising based on human behaviour and what consumers find most valuable was better than "trying to do things everyone else is doing".