McDonald's // recruitment // uniform
‘How do you change peoples perceptions of a ‘McJob’? Simple. Just print 25,000 t-shirts’
When we were asked to help recruit staff for McDonald's, we thought—many of the people who love going to McDonald’s could really enjoy working there.
But there was a challenge: people often saw McDonald’s staff as robots doing “McJobs.”
However, after meeting with lots of staff and hearing how they were treated, we realized it’s actually a pretty amazing company to work for. More importantly, the people weren’t “McRobots”—they were smart, funny, and interesting. We just needed to help people notice that and engage with them, giving them a bit of cool factor.
To break down these barriers, we decided to add a little real personality to the staff uniforms*. We tackled people’s perceptions head-on and got the gag in before they did. The going price for the ‘my boss is a clown’ t-shirt was rumored to be around 50 euros, though sadly, I only have a picture to show for it.
What I love about this idea—and why it’s in my book—is that sometimes you don’t need to spend a lot of money to solve a problem. Yes, we had the budget to make a TV commercial (and we did), but what made a bigger impact was a bunch of t-shirts that cost just £3 each. It’s something I try to remember.
None of this would have happened without the head of marketing—she was a legend.