In 2012 McDonalds was faced with a serious trust issue.
Blasted in the media, by documentaries like “SuperSize Me”, eating at McDonalds had come to be regarded as a sure fire path to bulging belly’s, fatty thighs and overall poor health.
The fact was that many consumers no longer trusted McDonalds as a sensible eating choice.
The answer to those trust problems?
Opening up and telling the truth.
Andrew McCartney, managing director of Tribal DDB, developed ‘Our Food, Your Questions’ which invited members of the public to write to McDonalds and ask them their questions about their food.
Naturally Micky D’s haters relished the opportunity to ask the kinds of questions that most brands would prefer to avoid talking about.
Just take a look at some of the types of questions that McDonalds was willing to answer…
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For uber-popular questions McDonalds even went as far as creating videos which went into even greater detail. Check out this question about McNuggets infamous “pink goop”
In order for the public to ask the question it had to be connected to their social networking account such as Twitter. This gave McDonalds even greater exposure through the question askers own personal network.
Within four months 16,000 questions had been put to McDonalds. And in this time an astounding 10,000 of those questions had been answered.
In our social media driven world brands can’t run away from the hard questions anymore. Not answering these questions does not mean that they are being publicly asked on sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Full disclosure – backed with real evidence – gives brands the opportunity to tell their side of the story.
For McDonalds that’s been the perfect “recipe” for rebuilding trust with it’s customers.
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