It's estimated that ~1% of the world's population eats at McDonald's every day.
McDonald's best lever to influence purchase decisions is the menu, which the $190B fast-food chain designs with many psychological hacks to boost sales.
Here are 10 of them 🧵
1/ In the mid-2010s, McDonald's sales were lagging. The brand turned around its fortunes with a multi-year menu & store redesign that:
◻️emphasized simplicity (speeding up avg. drive thru time from 400 secs to 350 secs)
◻️highlights signature items (pricier = higher margins)
2/ Here is McDonald's challenge: loyal customers love the classics (Big Mac, McChicken).
And they spend only 30 secs on the menu (getting them off default options is hard).
But McDonald's sells 2B+ meals a month, so influencing choices for a small % of customers boosts profits.
3/ Attention cues
Dynamic menus were the biggest change. While value items are typically static pics, signature items are animated.
Our peripheral vision specializes in detecting motion. Dynamic signature items capture our attention and end up in our potential choice set.
4/ Decision anchoring
First options are key in decision-making. In a study of buffets, 70% of eaters put one of the first 3 items on the plate.
Signature items are often the 1st thing you see. By highlighting them, they are nudging the higher-margin items into your choice set.
5/ Optimized for working memory
Cognitively, humans can hold 5-9 "items" in our working memory at one time (e.g., 7-digit phone numbers).
McDonald's dynamic menus highlight 7-10 items. Naturally, the majority of the menu real estate emphasizes higher-margin items or combos.
6/ Price anchoring
Even if *none* of the signature item nudges work, we've been exposed to the priciest items on McDonald's menu.
A subsequent purchase from regular (or value) menu will seem like more of a deal based on the price difference...leading to the perception of value.
7/ The power of grouping images
Gestalt principles describe how humans perceive objects and one of them is pattern matching.
McDonald's often groups 3 similar images together of a single product category (usually Signatures) to create a "pattern" that captures our attention.
8/ Health halo
Studies show that menus with healthy food items actually end up pushing people to eat junk food.
Why? The healthy images raise the "health index" of an entire choice set, giving us permission to indulge.
Naturally, McDonald's includes such images on its menu.
9/ Experience chunking
Inside the restaurant, McDonald's separated the order and waiting lines.
The key here is that our perception of "waiting" is reduced vs. if it was a single line. Thus, our memory of the experience is that the wait "wasn't too long".
10/ Self-order kiosks
You've probably used one. While the joke is that McDonald's is making us work, the kiosks are *def* effective at making us spend.
How? We don't feel pressure/anxiety of ordering in line. Instead, we take time and fully customize (=spend more) on the order.
11/ The logo
This isn't part of the redesign but worth flagging: the colors in McDonald's logo are very strategic.
We see color before words and images. And many fast food chains use red, which evokes urgency and desire.
(Research suggests it raise blood pressure/appetites).
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To guide guests (and create an unforgettable experience), the park's design is a masterclass in visual and color psychology.
Here are 14 examples 🧵
1/ The job of building the park falls on Disney's Imagineers.
There are about 1.5k of them and they use this design pyramid which focusses on visual communication, wayfinding and "making things memorable."
2/ The red "carpet"
When you enter the Magic Kingdom, the bricks are red. This was Walt Disney's way of signalling to guests that he was "rolling out the red carpet" for an unforgettable experience.
In 2021, Peloton has seen its market cap fall from $50B to $17B. The “iPad on a bike” joke is trending but it’s a bit unfair.
Peloton’s design smartly uses many psychological hacks to get people hooked on exercise (and it's worth learning from).
Here are 9 of them🧵
1/ The psychological challenge with fitness is called “hyperbolic discounting”: we value immediate though smaller rewards more than long-term larger rewards.
The pain of diet or exercise NOW isn’t worth the long-term benefit of “being in shape”.
2/ Peloton's goal is to get you on -- and hooked by -- its bike. The key to this is "the habit loop": a neurological phenomenon that governs any habit (good or bad).
It has 3 parts:
1⃣CUE: Trigger craving
2⃣ROUTINE: Action to get reward
3⃣REWARD: Satisfaction of craving