Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenge
After years of accelerated growth 6 years ago, McDonald’s Breakfast shares declined and TOM awareness remained stagnant the last 3 years. There were many barriers to growth:
• McDonald’s breakfast range was just not strongly embedded in Malaysian’s hearts and minds.
• Malaysians preferred affordable localized breakfasts and are spoilt for choice, whether they choose to eat-in or eat-out.
• To compound matters, with the impending launch of GST, people had developed a savings mindset and wanted cheaper options; the easiest being breakfasts found at local hawker stalls. The task was to implant McDonald’s value breakfast into the hearts and minds of Malaysians.

Insight, Strategy and the Idea
Quickly associate McDonald’s with breakfast in consumers’ minds through a gimmick and mnemonic. Gimmick: free breakfast! Mnemonic: Mondays. We encouraged consumers to consider McDonald’s breakfast as their staple repertoire through constant reminders of how tasty, varied and affordable it is, and through leveraging another morning staple, newspapers.

Media Execution
Phase 1: Owing Mondays
• We started training consumers to look forward to Monday breakfasts by tying McDonald’s breakfast to starting your week right on Mondays
• We achieved immediate high visibility with our front page special promotion coupons on consecutive Mondays nationwide.

Phase 2: Tasty, Affordable Variety We sustained the high visibility with continual reminders in key and secondary newspapers of how tasty and affordable McDonald’s breakfast variety is.

Phase 3: Big Bang Monday
• 205,000 Malaysians enjoyed a FREE Egg McMuffin together on National Breakfast Day. We excited readers and created anticipation of this big bang event with our daily super premium positioned newspaper reminders in the week prior.

Results and Effectiveness
McDonald’s Breakfast results were remarkable. :
• The campaign increased TOM awareness by +13%
• The breakfast sampling exercise brought in additional 8% sales through add-ons purchases
• Imagery scores improved by 21% for “have food I feel good about eating regularly”
• Breakfast sales enjoyed a phenomenal 35% growth