McDonald's is heavily investing in its digital transformation under the lead of its Chief Digital Officer, Atif Rafiq. Here are some of their digital initiatives thus far.

1. How McDonald’s is preparing
its Digital Transformation
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@sdwouters

2. McDonald’s is among the best known brands
in the world as it is the largest chain of fast-
food restaurants. It has ~69M daily customers
in 36K restaurants across 119 countries.
It once started out as the disruptor in its industry.
With innovations in standardization, experience in
menu and restaurant design and marketing.

3. Over the past years, McDonald’s has
been facing new challenges, such as the
heavy pressure to be more transparent
about their food and processes.
Meanwhile some of the competition has been
heavily investing in digital, while McDonald’s
mostly remained at the sideline. It allowed others
like Starbucks and Subway to take the lead.

4. “We were late coming to
the party, but we will
catch up and accelerate.”
~Don Thompson,
Former CEO McDonald’s

5. “Right now, there’s a high
tolerance for risk. The
company is seeking
progress over perfection.
If we want everything to be
just right, we’ll never quite
get there. So let’s get out
there and try things, let’s
test things. We can fail fast
and spot the successes
and scale fast.”
~Steve Easterbrook,
CEO of McDonald’s

6. The man hired to lead the
change, Atif Rafiq, is a former
Amazon and Yahoo executive
and now Chief Digital Officer
at McDonald’s since 2013.
He is busy preparing
McDonald’s for the
digital age and while his
plans are still developing,
here is what McDonald’s
is doing in digital so far.
"Our objective is to be
ready to move at the
pace consumers are.”

7. It has a Digital Transformation team of
about 20 employees, coming from
Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, PayPal,
AOL, and various other tech companies.
The team is set to grow
to 200-250 employees
within the next year.

8. It has started its own digital offices
in San Francisco and Chicago, where
it plans to re-invent the customer
experience in the digital age.
While the competition looks at how
pizza chains let their customers
order through mobile, McDonald’s
is getting its inspiration from start-
ups and big tech companies and
wants to work with them.

9. McDonald’s was a sponsor
of SXSW 2015, an event
that focuses on innovation.

10. It was among the first
companies to accept Apple
Pay, and the only one to
offer it in Drive-through.

11. Its pilot coupon app offers
coupons that will only stay
valid for a few minutes.

12. It is also working on its mobile
ordering app, while testing a fast lane
for mobile orders in its restaurants.

13. Each restaurant will have a
standardized set of hardware and
software by 2020, including things like
beacons and various NFC applications.

14. One of these applications
is the smart dinner table,
which turns the restaurant
tables into mobile games.
Check the video

15. Following the lead of
Starbucks, McDonald’s is
piloting wireless charging
spots as an additional way
to attract customers to
hop into their restaurants.

16. While McDonald’s realized the threats and
opportunities of digital rather late, it is now
taking strong action to remain competitive.
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dado@dearmedia.be
+32 474 82 68 07
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