I’m going to confess straight off that I usually don’t write about McDonald’s because I never eat at McDonald’s. The last time I was a regular at the chain, Bill Clinton was president. But while I’m not particularly interested in McDonald’s latest menu offering, I am interested in general cultural trends and how they impact the business landscape.
And a recent leak of new details about McDonald’s secret new spinoff — CosMc’s — reveals a whole lot about the emotional state of the nation and how companies can leverage the national mood to sell more stuff.
First, a little bit of background is probably helpful for those who don’t follow every scrap of McDonald’s corporate drama. Back in July on an earnings call, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski teased a new but still hush-hush spinoff concept the chain would soon be testing. The new restaurants would be called CosMc’s and would be a “small-format concept with all the DNA of McDonald’s, but with its own unique personality,” he said.
Which is … pretty vague. But enough to set McDonald’s-obsessed internet sleuths in motion. And just a few days ago, they hit paydirt when the wind blew the tarp covering a new building being constructed next to an existing McDonald’s in Bolingbrook, Illinois, revealing a boxy blue building with a large CosMc’s logo. Snack enthusiast @snackolator lays out the details on TikTok (hat tip to Business Insider).
He notes the restaurant’s four drive-through lanes, which suggests it will be more focused on takeout than dining in. He also shares the “conventional thinking … that this is going to be something of a competitor to Starbucks,” focused on selling coffee and snacks rather than burgers and fries, though he notes no one knows yet what CosMc’s will actually sell.
But the most fascinating details of McDonald’s new CosMc’s concept for me is its inspiration. The idea for CosMc’s, Food & Wine has explained, is CosMc, a Mcdonald’s mascot from the 1980s. Mostly long forgotten, CosMc was a burger-loving alien who routinely stole the lunch of other characters like Grimace. You can jog your memory with the ad below (or discover the character for the first time if you’re decades too young to recall).
But there’s likely no need to jog your memory of Grimace. As Food & Wine notes, Grimace has been everywhere this summer: “You can’t blame McDonald’s for betting on another McCharacter, because we’ve all just lived through a two-month period that should probably be called ‘Hot Grimace Summer.’ The limited-edition Grimace’s Birthday Meal — and its now iconic Grimace shake — became a big thing on TikTok. It also became a big thing for McDonald’s bottom line.”
Is CosMc’s going to be a successful Starbucks competitor and earn McDonald’s boatloads of money? I have no idea, and I doubt anyone could yet predict based on the details that are public. But one thing is already clear: nostalgia’s incredible power as a marketing tool is continuing strong.
The Hot Grimace Summer is a prime example. So is the fact that if I venture to the mall these days, 90 percent of clothes appear to be carbon copies of things my friends and I wore as high schoolers in the 1990s (please, fashion, don’t make me wear baggy jeans, tiny tops, and Doc Martens again). Marketers of all stripes insist that nostalgia is one of the most powerful forces in the industry right now, and here at Inc.com we’ve noticed a big uptick in interest in stories that look backward or evoke feelings of nostalgia.
“These days, everywhere we look, marketing evokes a sense of deja vu, with nostalgic elements of decades past finding a place in the brand worlds of today,” opined Sam Zises, CEO at [L]earned Media, in a long AdAge article on the phenomenon full of experts saying essentially the same thing.
Wars, climate change, and Covid have left people unsettled about the present. The rapid rise of A.I. has made the future seem pretty unsettling too. That’s driving people to look for comfort in the past, and it’s paying big dividends for brands that can manage to evoke feelings of nostalgia while staying true to themselves.
So while I can’t tell you exactly what the new McDonalds spinoff will look like, I can tell you that if you want to sell something at this specific moment in time, finding ways to imbue your product with the warm glow of a safe and idealized past will probably help you move a whole lot of product.
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