McCafé
McCafé was at an exciting tipping point. In the last two years, we successfully landed a new positioning and launched the Flat White. Both campaigns scored off the charts in terms of awareness, distinctiveness and relatability, but there was still some work to do in terms of driving reappraisal of McDonald’s coffee. After all, McDonald’s heritage in burgers and fries doesn’t make them the obvious home for great tasting coffee.
In a nutshell, people loved our ads but were yet to be convinced our coffee is at parity with the biggest coffee chains. Therefore, the task became to persuade coffee drinkers McDonald's sells proper coffee and encourage them to give it a try.
How? We knew that people want to feel assured they are going to get a good cup of coffee, but they don’t always enjoy the pretentiousness that comes with it –tomato notes and wood finish coffee anyone? Therefore, the aim of the campaign was to drive McCafé's quality credentials in a simple and pragmatic way.
We set out the proposition 'Good but without going on about it'. Because, unlike other coffee providers, our confident humility meant that we don’t need to romance our quality proof points in nonsense and superfluous terms.
This approach led us to create 'We could but we don't', an integrated campaign that pokes fun at the pretentious world of coffee advertising and shows the ridiculous ways we could have talked about the quality of our coffee if we wanted to. But we didn’t, because we make great tasting coffee, simple.
McCafé Iced Latte
McDonald's was planning to launch its new Iced Latte under the 'ICED' platform –A refreshing summer-only drinks range— but we challenged their marketing plans as we thought that a bigger opportunity relied on launching it under the McCafé platform.
We found out that 83% of the iced lattes are bought instead of a hot coffee, as they satisfy the 'pick me up' need-state. But most importantly, we could utilise this new addition as a way to keep building McDonald's credentials as a coffee provider.
That's why we convinced the client to continue to poke fun at the world of coffee advertising and create another 'We could, but we don't' instalment. A distinct construct that helps us to position McCafé as the perfect solution for those people who just want a simple, great-tasting coffee without the fuss.
As in the previous campaign, each execution touches on the ways we could have advertised McCafé iced latte in that particular channel but chose not to.
