This is how you innovate

Ryan Barry:

Hi everybody, and welcome to this episode of Inside Insights, a podcast powered by Zappi. My name is Ryan and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Patricia SA, who's live from the DMV in Columbia, and Kelsey Sullivan who's waiting to get to Marina Bay to have a drink. You want to know why? Because it's 85 and sunny in Boston today. 

Woo-hoo. Summertime is coming. My daughter was saying to me today, ladies, April flowers bring May... Wait, April showers bring May flowers. And I said to her, "Miss Blake, there has not been a shower yet. I don't know what you're talking about, but maybe they're coming." Today is sunny though, ladies. How you doing?

Patricia Montesdoeca:

Doing good. I was able to get through the whole entire DMV process and it only took three hours to renovate my license. As far as process goes, there you go. What else, what else, what else? It's not sunny. It is warm. It's cloudy today, but it's fine. It's still warm.

Ryan:

It's still warm. You know what I'm feeling tonight? A couple of Pacificos and a fire in the backyard. That's what I'm going to be doing tonight.

Patricia:

Nice. Speaking of fire in the backyard, my new son-in-law, Fernando, shout out to Fernando. His birthday was April 6th and my present didn't arrive on time, but it should be arriving today, but by the time we launch this, it should be okay. He should have already received it. I got them a tabletop fire pit.

Ryan:

Oh, how cool. For their backyard?

Patricia:

Well, they live in an apartment, like a complex, but they have a patio and so their door leads, their outdoor patio leads to all the garden and it crosses and they can see the dog park, because remember they have a puppy. And so I wanted them to have something so they could sit outside with the puppy and play, and so I think a little portable fire pit was a good idea.

Ryan:

Beautiful thing. Yeah, fire pits are good. There's also another one called Solo Stove that's a little metal one built for apartments. It's really nice.

Patricia:

Oh, nice.

Ryan:

Yeah, it's all outdoor living, everybody. Happy Spring.

Patricia:

Outdoor living.

Ryan:

Except for people who live in deep South America or South Africa and you're getting ready for winter. We're sorry but we've been cold for a few months here, so we're ready for the nice weather. This is a very exciting episode for me, and I actually wore yellow on purpose today because of this...

Patricia:

McDonald's!

Ryan:

We're talking to Matt Cahill from McDonald's. Matt Cahill should speak publicly more often. This dude is the perfect Insights guy. He's technically grounded, he's humble, he knows how to get shit done. He understands his business intimately, how it works, how the politics of it work. He works in a franchise model so he understands how to work that. And I'm not going to lie to you, Matt's a very close friend of mine. This dude I've been working with forever. 

We were supposed to talk about the future of Insights. The truth is Matt's current state of Insights is so advanced that we stayed there for the entire episode because what he's doing with innovation and how he's already driven change management handedly focuses a masterclass, and so I wanted to stay in this space. I've had a chance to have a few libations with Matt and zoom out on where this industry's going. And every time I talk to that guy, I leave with a completely different perspective than I have. 

Matt is the Senior Director of Insights at McDonald's US. He's responsible for a lot. Experience, app, menu innovation, food service relationships, the field marketing insights, all things primary research within McDonald's, Matt's responsible for. I also think he owns more McDonald's merchandise than anybody on the planet. Matt, appreciate you, love you to pieces. Let's get into this episode.

[Music transition to interview]

Ryan Barry:

Matthew Cahill. I can't believe they let you on this show, but I'm very happy that you're here, man. How you doing?

Matt Cahill:

I'm doing great. I'm doing great. It's good to be with you. I'm glad you finally got around to inviting me on the podcast. Took you long enough, huh? I know they probably thought it would be a bad idea to put you and I together for one of these things, but eventually, it just had to happen.

Ryan:

To my dear listeners, Matt Cahill and I have been kicking ass and taking names together for a very long time. We've innovated a lot. The truth is, we're friends, so you're going to get a little glimpse into two geeks drinking a beer, talking about consumer insights. It's going to get weird, I think, Matt.

Matt:

It might. What a better way to spend an afternoon than doing this, come on. That's going to be great.

Ryan:

Come on. Also, for the first time in Inside Insights history, we're going to have a drink during it. What are you drinking?

Matt:

I've got myself a Freedom Lemonade from Revolution Brewing Company. That's a nice Midwestern brewery here close to Chicago, so repping the locals here. It's really good, though. It basically tastes like lemonade.

Ryan:

I'm trying to will Summer. I'm over it. I'm drinking High Noon, the enemy of every beer company who tried to make sparkling seltzer with a delicious vodka-infused juice. Wow. Lovely. Now, I can only have one with you, podcast guests, because I don't want to be the drunk dad picking his kids up at school. That's not cool.

Matt:

No, you don't want to be that. You don't want to be that. My kids are on spring break right now and off at their grandma's house. I don't have to worry about that today, so, huh.

Ryan:

It's a beautiful thing. So, all of you listening, you're in for a treat. The truth is, Matt's been making moves at McDonald's for a long time. I remember, I'll share this story. Zappi was three months old and I met Matt Cahill and I'm all nervous because of McDonald's, big logo, big account. I think you were messing with me because you go, "Why don't we just automate a 60-country brand tracker?" By the way, we didn't do that, folks, but we tried.

We tried to automate a 60-country brand tracker and it made me like you, because I remember leaving going, "What did I just say I would look at?" We agreed to not do that after a few months of trying. The truth is I've always admired your ability to understand business, to be super pragmatic, super technical. We're talking to a guy who knows his stuff, but not getting stuck by it. There's always this, we always segment our surveys by early adopters or people who try things, and that's Matt. Yep.

Matt:

Front end. We're on the front end of everything.

Ryan:

You know what happens when you're on the front end, Matt? You bleed sometimes.

Matt:

For sure. Right? That tracker example's a great one. That's where we started. I've always appreciated your willingness to look at things and say, yeah, maybe we could do that. Possibilities first and foremost are out there. If you can imagine it, then, hey, you might actually be able to do it these days. A lot of times, that's right. There's lots of things we imagine that we end up not being able to do or that don't go exactly how we thought that they would, but some of them actually work out. That's most of what we're doing now, started as an idea somewhere in the last five or so years.

Ryan:

You can't innovate if you don't have a willingness to fail and try stuff. It's just part of that. Your vantage point is unique because you are mentally and probably from a capabilities perspective pretty advanced. If you look at the average insights department, McDonald's is, for those of you who don't know, I think it's the second or third-most recognizable word in the English language. Massive, massive company. If you look at operations, a company that operates like a machine, you're looking at McDonald's. 

McDonald's is also a very customer-centric organization, but it's people like you that make that the case. The insights industry, if you could take me back on a little journey, when I met you, you were a global business insights guy, now you're running US insights more or less, menu, field marketing, experience, all the good stuff. What have you seen happen in the insights industry over, let's say, 10 years since you joined the dark side of the corporate world?

Matt:

It's a great question. I've been working in insights at McDonald's for almost 14 years. I've seen it evolve quite a bit. Before that I was on the supplier side, worked at Bases, and understood the client service mentality that is necessary. McDonald's, our department has always been structured as a pretty lean corporate team with a lot of partners. That's always been our model is to work with a lot of different providers and partners, try and leverage the best thinking that was out there. In a global role, which I did for about five years, you're just a very different organization. You're looking at 100 and, what, 70 different markets, of which probably 15 or 16 have their own dedicated teams. A lot of what you're trying to do is figure out what you can scale to the most markets for the most value.

When we were doing brand tracking, I was running our global brand health monitor at the time and going, all right, how can we get this to be more responsive, more reactive, more actionable for the teams? Because for the most part, when we ran it quarterly and we went out to the markets and we reported on it, you had a little bit of a scorecard effect. You had a little bit of actionable recommendations that you could take from it, but for the most part. I think this is indicative of what was happening in the industry. You just had very limited touchpoints. We did these big studies, they had high-ticket prices, you had to convince people to fund them and you tried to find them for as much value as you could get, but there were limitations in how frequently they could run, how responsive they could be. You really had to be choiceful in where you inserted some of that research into the process.

I think for us, the other piece of that puzzle was, in that world where the choices about the research that you do are big choices from a dollar standpoint, there is a lot of coalition-building you need to do to get research approved. You need to get those budgets-

Ryan:

100%.

Matt:

... approved, you need to get people on board. If you're a legacy system like ours where teams are used to doing things a certain way, there's a lot of inertia. The inertia is just, I can get it approved if I do it the same way because probably my stakeholder internally has done that kind of research before, knows what they're paying for and are actually willing to sign up to do it again.

Ryan:

Even if it's not the best and right way.

Matt:

Right. The efficiency almost trumps the challenging of the methodology because the efficiency there is, in order to actually get the research approved, and I still want to do it, doing it in the way that's most familiar in the system is part of the efficiency of not necessarily having to teach new process, teach new method, teach what all is going on. 

There was a lot of inertia in the system, but I will say the case for change is really what's probably changed the most over the past 10 years. I think the capability in the industry has gotten a lot better and the capability in the industry getting better has allowed our teams, our insights managers and directors to just change the way they show up in the company. As soon as you start adopting that mentality, hey, let's pilot something new, let's see how that works, and then when you find success there, you get a little bit of credibility to try the next thing, then you try the next thing.

After you have a few wins, some of them won't work, and that's all right, but after, you start to see how you can show up differently, how some of the old barriers around cost and timing and the way we held up the broader business processes really inverts where we can catalyze them and move a lot faster. That shift, that flip from research as a gate that you have to get through to research as a catalyst from the beginning that can really get the right projects going and accelerate them, I think that's the biggest difference. Really, it's fueled by the capabilities that we have that we didn't have before.

Ryan:

It's interesting because you're a humble dude, so you're attributing technology. Let's say we have 500 customers. A lot of them have technology. What do you do with it? One of my questions for you, and I know this about you, but I think it would help everybody listening, you have a really unique approach to, is this good in introducing things into the system without, and it's not like you work in an overly bureaucratic organization, but without getting slowed down into politics. Could you reflect on that a little bit?

Technology is an enabler, but you're still having to drive change, and that's people and process. How do you approach that with people to get people to go on the journey? I'm thinking eight years ago before rapid prototyping, which we'll talk about in a second, it was cool. You were trying it and we were doing it and we were making it up as we were going, but how are you getting people to come on that ride with you?

Matt:

It's a really good question and definitely the right observation. It's not just the technology, but you need the technology to enable the change, I think, because that is the key enabler that allows us to show up differently. I've worked on a number of groups that are all about change management and change in an organization and how do you incite change. For the most part, I've never really thought of it as its own separate activity. All of our teams, I think, can do it within their own accountabilities, within their own ... They have the teams they support.

If you take menu innovation as an example, which is where we started revising our approach to how we assess innovation in progress as we're developing it, it's just a great example of how we had a process in place. That process was working. I'm sure that's common for many who may be listening to this. We've got a way of doing it. It's well-known. It's working pretty well. It might be able to be optimized, but we're not sure. I think for us, it was always bringing the teams along before they knew they needed to be brought along. We would pilot things in parallel. 

We would say, oh, I'm not going to switch from A to B. We're now going to do A and B and we're going to design our entire process that incorporates both A and B. If A is really better, it will become more prominent, B will fade, and then all of a sudden everybody's just used to A.

It's this sleight-of-hand trick of letting people live in the old world, but then showing them a new world, and as the new world has its advantages, that will just become the dominant process that we use. The key there is process design. We went to our stakeholders, what is it you need? We know this new thing is going to give you what you need, but we know there's also some attachment to the old world as well. That's the happy medium of let's not sensitize people to the discomfort of transformation by getting rid of what they're used to, just like let's show them the advantages of what we're building and what's new. In the case of our rapid concept prototyping, that's just language we started to use to be like, hey, we can do more tests more frequently. We can do iterative tests on the same idea to understand what really matters in an AB fashion as opposed to getting only one shot to understand what's going on.

That actually allows us to get smarter to tell our teams, hey, it's not only about is this a good idea or a bad idea. Now it's all about, what kind of idea do we have? How should we actually go about bringing it to market? What are the elements of it that we should actually be paying attention to more broadly? What are some of the things that we might have debated before that really just don't matter? We're just wasting time if we have those first and foremost. When you have some teams in menu innovation that are having that conversation and you have others that aren't, the teams that aren't go, "Why aren't we having that conversation?"

Ryan:

That's what I want.

Matt:

Yeah. This is the sleight of hand. I'm promoting the advantages of a new method with the old still as an option, and you just see that change start to happen. The ability to demonstrate the added value you get from the new process by getting a few early adopters to start utilizing it, then they show up differently, then their hit rates start going, then just honestly if you're doing it right, that interaction should just be much more enjoyable and effective. That's when more broadly people start to see it and go, why don't we do it that way? Then, like I said, that becomes more prominent. Then all of a sudden, even without ever saying we're making a change, you've made a change because the benefits that you're trying to bring to the forefront really come out. That's the first part.

I think the second piece of your question is we have become almost maniacal about predictability. Predictability, it's been a buzzword forever. We all want to be predictive of future outcomes. That's a real thing that everyone is always aspiring to, but we really in the last four-ish years really started to say, hey, I've got some real clear business outcomes that I want to be driving. Let's just see if we're actually predictive of those outcomes.

For the most part for us, we're trying to predict return on marketing investment, which in our system we call roaming. I spent a lot of years trying to predict overall business performance, sales performance, traffic performance. That's a lot harder to do because there's so many variables that go into it, but when you can get a layer down, you can really say, what kind of incremental business am I driving through some of these new products or promotional activity? You can actually isolate that. It becomes a little easier to say, wait, I can actually understand more granularly what is predictive of that and what is not.

That actually, when you actually have the evidence, helps us take out tools that prove out not to be predictive and then turn to the ones that are really adding some more investment behind those. It's a combination of this to show internally the benefits of new tools and wire processes to emphasize those, and then also on the side run some pilots on what's really predictive of the overall business measures you want to drive. Many of those won't pan out. When you have something new, that's a huge catalyst to those tools being adopted, and then you build up teams underneath them to say, ooh, all right, this is one we want to emphasize, so now I can actually build up a team underneath that in order to start to drive that emphasis.

Ryan:

It's a masterclass in change management. I've seen you do it, so that's why I wanted you to share it with everybody, but people don't want to change. It's just a human thing. We don't like change. I'm personally running a disruptive technology company. We put a notion in. It's an internal internet. I think I was the last jackass to start using it. It's a natural human thing. I think what you're doing there is you're taking the sting out of change and you're focusing on the benefit. I only realized this while you were talking. A lot of times people will come in and replace an agency service with a technology service because the technology is usually smart, predictive, easy to use now. If it isn't, probably the wrong tech. Anyways.

But then they don't teach people how to use it. If you're used to, let's just pick on quant ad testing, if you're used to a composite red, yellow, green score and then you're going into a early often learning tool with a shit ton of diagnostics and you just throw that at the CMO, they're not going to know what to do with it. Even parallel pathing for results comparability, which is your second point, it only takes you part of the way there. You need to show them how to use diagnostics because they're not used to ... To your point a few minutes ago about your global role, they're used to, this is my shot to do a test, and then that's it, I'm done after this.

Matt:

The only one I get. That's a big part of the story, and it's not just education. I don't think it's just teaching the tools to the teams that we support. That's not enough, frankly. Nobody likes sitting through a 30-minute lecture class and internalizing everything that they talk to you about. You gotta do it. Sometimes you've actually got to lean a little bit on the ways of working for the teams that we work with to say, hey, you guys can't actually function the same way. The decisions that you're making need to change a little bit. Our goal is to wire this knowledge in so you're making better decisions. What are those key decision points? The way you have it structured now, you're just getting knowledge too late. You need knowledge earlier. How do we wire the team together so that you get the knowledge you need earlier?

This tool that we have that's now a new solution in your world, now it's a tech-enabled tool. When is that coming in? Are we getting it in at the right spot so that you can use that insight in the right way? That's harder to do. The first level of it is probably wired in as best you can in the decision-making processes that exist today, but if you're really doing that, you feel like it's a bit dysfunctional, you got to call that out. I think that's our role now to say, if we were to insert what we know at a different point in this process, we would get a better outcome. How do we design the overall process in order to be able to do that? I think that's a really important piece.

We've all used research in our companies for a long time. There's lots of really positive and constructive uses of it, but there's some uses of it that may not be as positive and constructive that may actually be counterproductive. When you see that happening, I think oftentimes we feel like, oh, we might just not have the right tool or we might just not have the right report, or maybe we didn't simplify it enough for that audience. No. That process is just broken. We can bang our heads trying to facilitate a broken process or you can just say like, this process is broken. Let's design a better process where you can actually take advantage of the knowledge that we have.

I think there are many out there, and maybe, I don't know, I've never felt shy about doing that if I see it calling it out, but I think that's one of our biggest issues as a function is just reacting to the way the company is structured rather than saying no. If this is working well, you're going to use the insights that we have in a much more effective way, and then using that to think about, how do we design a broader business process to enable that? Sometimes that means, all right, I need different audiences at different times. I need certain pieces of work to go to certain groups and not others. If you're really talking about, I'm going to take an idea and make it better, you probably don't need to take that piece of research and shoot it up to the leadership team. You just don't. They don't need to see it. If we're just going to make it better, let's use it to make it-

Ryan:

And make it better.

Matt:

...Otherwise, we're not going to be as efficient as we could be. I do think there's an element of organizational design and process design that goes into this. When you see the new tool and what it can do, if you really want to brand the benefits, some of that is provoking your company and saying, we wanted to maximize the value we can get out of this thing. Maybe we need to tinker with just how we're doing things more generally.

Ryan:

You're right. I guess the question back to you is, do you slow play, show benefit, drive prediction, correlation, then make that assertion? Is that the order of operations? 

Matt:

Yeah. I think it varies. I think it varies depending on the situation and the existing state of the team that we're supporting. I like to say we do a lot of work on effective decision-making at McDonald's because it's a big company and it's very familial and we have lots of decisions by consensus where lots of stakeholders need to weigh in. 

We talk a lot about how we efficiently make decisions. I think culturally that benefits us because that's always something that we're talking about. We're not wired into like, nope, this is the way it is, the way it's always been. That willingness to listen is true in our company. I know that's not true everywhere, but it's a benefit of McDonald's, I think, that I've been able to appreciate and take advantage of. There's a willingness to do that more generally.

Then I think it's also just a function of this team that I'm advising, this team that I'm supporting, how are they functioning today? What are their biggest pain points? How well do you actually know the decisions that they're trying to make and how empowered they feel to make those decisions? Even before anything, there's a map out your stakeholders and who's making what decisions and what do they actually need to make that decision, and can getting smarter at a certain part of that process help them. That, I think, is in parallel. As we're developing tools and trying to get better information, better insight in a lot of different areas, we're also trying to get closer to how the business runs so that you can put those two together in the right way.

I don't think there's a step-by-step guide like do this one first, do that one second, that you can follow in every situation. It's more once you have a pretty good sense of like, this team could really benefit from us being able to do X and Y and Z, go faster, get more granular demographic insights, get a qual layer in there so they get some more detail, co-creation on how they might address an opportunity, any of that stuff could be something that you flag. Then it's like, what have we got in the toolkit that we are starting to develop that might address that? Then you put those together. It's a give-and-take, actually. We're constantly interrogating what the business needs, then trying to identify tools or build tools that address that. You're trying to sync those up in a way where they come together, which, sometimes it happens and it works great, sometimes it doesn't happen and you have to keep working on it.

It's this whole spirit of iteration that we talked about. It's a little bit of creativity, too. You got to see what's going on in the business and get creative about how you might better start to address that. Sometimes it's leveraging something that may already exist in your toolkit. Sometimes, we've done this with you a number of times where it's like, doesn't exist, we have to go build it. Let's see if we can actually build a thing that is new and cool and that we can then use to address one of those issues.

I think it's more that give-and-take between understanding a bit of where we could add value based on where the business is today, then seeing what we have in the toolkit, and then going back and saying, now that we have this, are we equipped to actually take advantage? Then you just start looping it in different parts of the business. We've pointed to that same process as everything from creative development to calendar development to innovation. We've done a bunch, strategy development, and all our planning cycles. Some of them have been more successful than others, but you just keep trying. You just keep trying.

Ryan:

Keep trying. What I love about this is it's super empowering messages for insights people. I can't tell you, Matt, how many times insights executives, corporate insights executives that I admire call me with some variation of, "Dude, I've brought in a lot of modern tools, I've got great partners, I've got great consultants, but I'm going to quit." I'm like, "Why are you going to quit?" They're like, "Well, my partners won't change how they work with us."

I don't know if you ever saw this, Gartner put out this data, 10 years old now, and it was actually about B2B sales, believe it or not, and it was basically saying good service, table stakes. Whether your customer likes you, table stakes. Whether you have a good product and a good price, table stakes. This is about B2B sales, but people buy from people who show them a unique perspective and a clear path forward to achieve their goals. It's not similar to an internal service partner. What's the job of insights? Our job is to help companies make customer-centric decisions that make money. Let's not kid ourselves here. We're all here to help sell more burgers. That's what we're here to do. I commend you for the boldness to provide that clarity because rapid prototyping is only cool if you're able to actually discuss the prototypes.

Matt:

Focus on the areas where you're like, if you approve these areas, this will be a better idea. If it just falls on deaf ears, then we didn't accomplish our goal at all. I don't know, you're right. We're in the business of selling cheeseburgers, hamburgers, and we've been selling cheeseburgers and hamburgers since 1955, so we know a lot about how to sell cheeseburgers and hamburgers. Part of it is like, how do you create additive new learning that's not just a repetition of what folks have heard repackaged seven times before? I've been here long enough to see us repackage some things and go, oh, all right, that study told us exactly what this study four years ago told us. It's a new study. Yes, you have to modernize it a bit, but the real value comes in unique thinking, like you were saying.

Where's that unique perspective you haven't had before that allows us to operate differently, that allows us to get smarter than we've been before, that's appropriate for this time right now? The reality is, I think this is probably true everywhere, but certainly in our business, the world changes really quickly. There's lots that you could study. There's a ton of stuff out there where it's like, what is the impact of interest rates? Inflation, worry over the geopolitical state of the world, climate change, sustainability. I could probably list 20 right now that all would have an important learning agenda next to them. A lot of the role now is just, yeah, there's a lot of issues, but which ones matter right now? Which ones do we actually need to pay attention to and sort through?

That's actually a bit of a different role where it's a, yeah, we know how to sell hamburgers and cheeseburgers, but we can actually be better at that in the context of the given situation right now if we actually pay attention and have a point of view on which things we should react to and which things we shouldn't react to, or at least shouldn't react to right now. That to me is a big part of it. It's a part of the whole story, but that idea of however long ago that Gartner research was that you need to have a unique perspective that everybody wants their thinking stretched. You want partners that stretch your thinking.

Ryan:

Don't want them, yeah.

Matt:

That's the whole role of an advisor. I embrace our role as an advisory function in the business. The reality is you give good advice, it's going to get followed, and that should make things better. To be able to do that, what does it really mean to be an advisor and to give good advice, you've got to take it pretty far down the road. Let's have some imagination about what we can use to answer some of these questions. What data or insights might give us a unique perspective on some of these questions? Because otherwise, Fast, powerful diagnostics & detailed consumer reactions resulting in actionable recommendations to help you optimize your campaigns throughout the development process, leading to higher creative effectiveness. too often it's like, we did a new study, we learned something we already knew, but we're going to try to sell it as a great finding. Don't do that. Just say this is confirmed, it's been confirmed a bunch of times, boom, on to the next thing.

At least for us, we're hunting for new learning. The more you can both appreciate the body of knowledge you already have so that you can identify what's really new and then also identify what might be new learning for a new team or someone who's new to the company where you can blend together what you already know and the new things that you're learning, that's where it gets I think really effective. That's where this whole idea of moving from, and this is what we're talking about now, insights on the business to insights on the consumer, to insights on the customer, to meta-analysis on historical, the product insights and menu insights. No, you know what? All that needs to go together. It has to be holistic. Until it gets to be holistic, we're not going to maximize the benefit that you get out of that. I know it's hard to do. I wouldn't say that we figured that out entirely yet, but that's the vision of bringing all of that together so that you can start to, in our world, actually consult at a different level.

Ryan:

It's at a different level because if you understand market orientation, culture, what you've already done, and then your creative people understand that, then it gives them a different basis point to innovate. There's a dude at Pepsi, he's one of my favorite marketers, Fernando. I was talking to him once. I think I was actually on this podcast and he was just like, "I don't care if I'm watching people go by in the subway doing a Zappi test, doing a focus group. All of it's just data for me that's forming ideas that I come up with." I love it. It's like the most modern thing I've heard a marketer say, like, all of it is just data points to help me understand what's happening in the world.

If I think of two big innovations McDonald's has done, they're very different. One is we're not going to drive new menu stuff right now. We're going to tell you what your favorite hip-hop artists eat. I bet you sold a shit ton of burgers when all of a sudden people started realizing this is what Travis Scott orders. Completely different strategy to, oh, my god, there's a big opportunity in chicken that we can reinvent. Both completely different growth angles, both inspired by a whole lot of data, not just one data source, I would imagine.

Matt:

Yeah. Those are great examples. Obviously the Famous Orders platform has been successful for us. We've run a handful of different iterations of that and have seen a number of copycats pop up over the last few years.

Ryan:

I have noticed that, by the way. I'm not going to give you shit about that.

Matt:

If you look around, you can see a few of those, which I think is a testament to how it's worked. It has, and has worked very well. Those programs have had some of the highest return on investment of programs that we've had. I think the reason for that is ... We started that in September of 2020, so about six months into the COVID-19 pandemic. We really knew as we studied the situation over those months that there were a few things that people really wanted McDonald's to do in that situation. One was to reinforce that we're still open. It meant something to people that McDonald's was open. 

The world's not ending, McDonald's open, I can go to the drive-through, so reinforce that we're still open, reassure people a bit that, hey, it's safe to go, here's the precautions we've taken, and then just respond. What's your response going to be to the crisis?

That response piece I think is one of the more interesting ones because that was one where, when you're talking about what people really wanted, it was, hey, you know what? I need my food experiences to give me a sense of comfort. I want it to be more familiar. I just need something that is going to give me a bit of that comfort blanket in the face of a lot of volatility, a lot of disruption, a lot of uncertainty relative to what's going on in the world. That piece, we're all sitting there going, oh, my gosh, what are we going to do? Number one, you don't want it to be small. You want it to be a little bit big. Come September of 2020, we're not just open anymore, we're back. You want it to be-

Ryan:

Yeah, we're back and better than ever.

Matt:

But you also wanted it to reinforce this familiarity, this familiar craveability of our core menu. We knew at that moment people wanted familiar favorites when they went out to eat. They weren't as prone to new items, which we're actually seeing continue. It's this perfect marriage of, I need to make a splash, plus I need to reinforce core favorites and familiarity, and I want it to be somewhat tied into responding to this whole situation. At the same time, internally the strategy was to try to create more cultural relevance among youth culture. It was really those things that came together when we said, you know what? This idea, we hadn't done a celebrity-endorsed meal since the 1990s when we were doing Michael Jordan and Larry Bird. It'd been a long time since we'd done a celebrity endorsement. The timing was right.

It was a bit controversial in the system because we hadn't done it for a while to do it again and to do it with Travis, but we made the choice to do it. Conditions seemed right and the response was right. The amazing thing about Famous Orders is you're looking part contextual what's going on in the country at the time, what's going on with the pandemic, what people want McDonald's to do in response to that, and in part looking at, how do we authentically connect with younger folks and youth culture? The truth is, everyone does have a McDonald's order and Travis Scott's no exception. The order we served was the order he gets when he goes. There's an authenticity to that that is magical in that moment of just bringing us all back together and reminding us of some of the things that we have in common. You look at that, and then that plays out in some of the other Famous Orders as well. The combination there was a lot of different places that worked.

The other example you used, just the chicken sandwich wars, chicken sandwich wars is something obviously we pay attention to a bit. We sell quite a bit of chicken. The majority of it is McChicken sandwiches and chicken McNuggets, but we really thought there was a place for us to play in this more premium chicken sandwich space and we've worked on it for a number of years now. Part of that is understanding what's really going on with the customer behavior in the chicken wars, looking at that longitudinal behavior over time and seeing, all right, what's really happening here and is there an opportunity for us to participate in it? That's looking industry-wide and at our data as well. Who exactly am I going to get to change their behavior to enable this new platform? Who's trading from their existing item into this? Where's the volume going to come from? All that, you can assess a little bit.

Then it's like, what really matters in a chicken sandwich? We did a ton of that through the iterative prototyping we were talking about earlier from a concept standpoint to say how much is the ingredients? How much is it this attribute, how much is it that attribute? How do you really get people excited about this sandwich? I'll tell you, one of my all-time favorite Zappi studies that we did was we did the exact same concept board. It was a chicken sandwich, a pretty generic chicken sandwich concept board, and we just stuck different brands on it. We stuck to about eight different brands.

Ryan:

Different QSR brands?

Matt:

Different QSR brands. What we found was that the scores there put McDonald's serving that chicken sandwich about seventh out of eight. We just didn't have a lot of credibility to sell a good chicken sandwich compared to a lot of the other QSR brands that were doing it and that were front and center in the chicken sandwich wars. It's just such a good example of where iterative prototyping can get you because as soon as we learned that, we said we're not doing any more concept testing. That's a waste of time. This is going to be a trial challenge. That's an agency challenge. We're going straight into creative development. We need a really good creative approach to get people to try the sandwich, and then we need a ridiculously good sandwich. It's got to outperform every benchmark that we have because you're going to have to change your mind. When people have it, every beat's got to be really hot.

We spent a ton of time on product development, what can work within our system that we can serve consistently that gets us to as good as we can do. That really is the story of one learning, and then you had two things you had to solve for and everything else flowed from that. The reason I think McCrispy is successful is we have a damn good product and we launched it-

Ryan:

Good.

Matt:

That might seem like that's the only thing you ever need to do, but in this case, being able to focus in those areas early and just strip out the rest of the stuff that we might have done helped us, I think, get you there. There was a lot of insight that came into it, but there's also a very clear point at which we had, all right, early learning gives us a really clear roadmap for how we bring this thing to market, hopefully bring it to market successfully.

Ryan:

I love both examples because it's a clear indication of intention of what your learning system is, the ability to ingest multiple viewpoints to then innovate and create. I can't tell you how many brands during COVID were calling us asking if the methodology was wrong when their ad used a violin and said, "In times like these," and it was the same thing with Super Bowl ads this year where it was like, it's times of recession. People are like, "No shit. Make me laugh, dude."

Matt:

“Don't remind me.” 

Ryan:

Yeah, no shit. What I love about the insight behind Travis Scott, sorry, Famous Orders, is we're back. You want comfort, we all have an order and, oh, by the way, this is an audience that resonates with you, but I think the key thing here was it was an authentic message that the brand could deliver. I think this is where a lot of organizations are fucking up now where it's like, no, this is no longer the day where you can talk at people. You have to credibly be able to be in a conversation, which then brings you to your chicken sandwich example because what you learned on the Zappi test was like, yeah, right. You're like, okay, now I got to convince you I can-

Matt:

I'll believe it when I see it. 

Ryan:

Exactly. Then you show up with the marketing to cut through and then the experience. It was funny because I had to convince Jill, same story, you got to go try this and she's like, I don't know.

Matt:

Yeah, I don't know.

Ryan:

Then she was like, "It's really good." It's a really good example of how all the viewpoints of culture and data, if used correctly, can cut through and make money. Kudos to you.

All right. I have to tell everybody this. We had an agenda today. We have followed zero bullet points of it and you haven't even had to have a sip of your beer yet. I'm very sorry about this. You've been dropping dimes on us today. He's a Chicago Bulls fan, so he doesn't get to see too many dimes get dropped these days unless he's watching the Celtics play. It's really sad for Matt.

Matt:

We have now clinched the 10 seed in the playing tournament. What you're telling me is there's a chance. You might have to eat your words over there, Mr. Celtics fan.

Ryan:

I know.

Matt:

I don't think it's likely, but I don't know what I've predicted, but you never know.

Ryan:

We haven't been able to correlate the predictability, but the Bulls have had the Celtics' number this season, so we'll see what happens. All right, I want to ask you to explain your innovation system, and I'm going to tell you why. Your system for innovation, and I know you have systems like this for everything, but I want to focus on innovation, is what I'm running around the world telling people insights departments need to be doing by 26. Matt starts with what he knows, then innovates, then prototypes, then validates. How do you pull that off? Talk to us about that.

Matt:

I think it took a while. It took a while to build that.

Ryan:

With the Ray Kroc quote. "I was an overnight success, but 30 years was a lot of nights."

Matt:

A lot of nights, yeah. It seems like it happens all at once, but it really doesn't. I think it was just probably a combination of a few different things. I think in our category, when you're in QSR, McDonald's, you sell a lot of the same things and a lot of the same categories. You're constantly trying to innovate within some of the same territories: burgers and chicken and chicken sandwiches, fries and beverages, desserts. We work in a lot of the same spaces because that's what people want to eat. That's actually one of my favorite Kroc quotes. He was asked in the '60s, do you think McDonald's will still be selling hamburgers in 50 years? He said, "I don't know what we'll be selling, but we'll be selling more of it than anybody else." We react to demand. We sell people what they want to eat.

I think in our innovation system, the first thing we realized was, because we're in a lot of the same places, the easiest way for us to get better is to learn from what we've done historically. I'll tell you that we didn't really do that very effectively. The easier it became for us to look at, what have we done recently and how has that resonated? If we're going to go back to a certain idea or a certain grouping of ideas or a certain category, let's at least know what we've tested in the near recent past and be smart faster. First thing is to learn from where you've been and force that step. If you don't force that step, it won't get done. It's easy to skip because everybody wants to have the new greatest idea ever and you don't want to acknowledge that someone is probably had a similar idea before, but they have, so force that-

Ryan:

When we were setting this all up, that was a big behavior change for us all the work through is like starting here, because you got to actually invest time in that stuff.

Matt:

I always call that getting a head start. Why wouldn't you want a head start? Why wouldn't you want a headstart with all this knowledge that we had before? It's going to make your outcome better. No one's going to care that you got to a great outcome because you used what people did previously and it wasn't all new to the world thinking. No one cares. They just care about the outcome. Give yourself the head start. I was on that soapbox a ton early on when we did innovation.

Then the second thing is, get smarter faster and move some of the decision-making earlier in the process. We used a number of different tools to do that, but prioritize it that we help build with you guys is probably the main one to say I can get a pretty robust read on an early stage idea early enough that I can prioritize what I'm going to un-gate in my system, which de-stresses people a little bit because you're like, I already know the core idea is pretty good, so now I can just build out from there. If it's a real dud, I can get it out of the system early on. We built that up so that you could do that not only amongst the general market, but more and more we're looking at specific consumer segments, whether that's by ethnicity, primarily for us it's by ethnicity or by age that we look at to ungate things into the system.

Now you've got prior knowledge, early feedback on a specific idea and the consumer target in mind. Once we had that, it allowed us to take what would largely be seen as traditional concept testing and say it's not about gating or un-gating anymore. We know the idea is good. Let's make that all about prioritization, which was really effective to say the stress is out of it now because now I don't have to worry about what score did I get, did I meet the hurdle, do I get to advance? It was like, no, we can make this thing really effective. The more we learn, the better it will be, so let's design all that testing to learn and to get us to ... The outcome there isn't a pass-fail, should we do it, should we not do it. It could be if it really took a U-turn from what we learned early on, but…

Ryan:

That's way downstream.

Matt:

…That very rarely happens. More so the outcome of that process was, how do we bring this thing to market? Let's learn as much as we can about how to do it effectively. When we get to the restaurant, what kind of media do we need? What's the role of retail? How should we be pricing it? How should we be thinking about competitive flow? All that's what we're learning in concept so we can give that to the team that's going to take it and do a market test with it and actually try some of that stuff out before we launch it.

That was the sequencing of it: learn from what you're doing, get that early learning early on so we know we're in the right spots, and then rewire that traditional development process to be more about optimization. What can we learn and how do we enable our go-to-market team to really be set up for success as opposed to just previously they'd get a one-page scorecard and be like, yep, this is a good idea, you figure out the rest. That transition was terrible and it didn't work. There was a lot of rework when we got into actually bringing the thing to market. Making that transition a lot more effective and seamless was the last piece of how it works.

For anybody out there listening, I would say there's three things in innovation. It's definitely mine what you know. Even if it's clunky and time-consuming initially, take the time to do it and figure out the things that you're getting asked most frequently and focus on those, but take the time to do it. See how quickly you can get smart on specific ideas like that early stage stuff. It helps the time in just un-gating and putting the right ideas into the system and giving the right resources behind them. Then think early on about how things flow through in your go-to-market plan and how you're going to activate, and what that might mean and what decisions are going to get made as you bring the thing to market design either a market test or a launch and how do we make those decisions better with the research that we're going to do.

Those three things, it definitely changed the way we work with our innovation partners. It puts us more holistically in the process end to end, and I think, to what we were talking about earlier, just helps you give good advice at each stage in the process.

Ryan:

Everybody, you're going to be sad to hear me say this, but Cahill's four minutes late for his next meeting.

Matt:

Oh, no.

Ryan:

Matt, I appreciate you more than you know. This was fun, man. It was good to see you. 

Matt:

It just flew by. I was like, I thought I was going to just do an intro. That was amazing.

Ryan:

Everybody, thanks a lot. We'll catch you next time. Thanks, Matt.

[Music transition to takeaways] 

Ryan Barry:

That was fun, wasn't it?

Patricia Montesdoeca:

Matt, I mean, I've shared work with him, not as much as you. I've shared libations with him, not as much as you. I've shared boat rides with him, not as much as you, but he's a special human being. I've done something very different for the recap. 

I usually, I mean, because you guys talk about the interviewee often and what we're trying to give our Insights listeners and everybody listeners things to do on Monday morning, I don't focus so much on the person. I focus on things they can emulate. Here, I'm going to turn it around. Why? Because in my opinion, similar to something you said, Matt is somebody that we should all emulate. We should all aspire to. We should all... I mean, because he is a, what is it called? A trailblazer? There's a word.

Ryan:

Trailblazer. Yep.

Patricia:

He's a trailblazer. Somebody I want to... I mean, I'm much older than him, I have my career, but still, every time I listen to him, there are things that I think, oh, I want to try that. And because he's just a unique and also very humble, brilliant, brilliant genius. 

I know that's a redundancy, but he is. He's a redundancy of all things good. 

I'm going to turn it around. I'm going to start with Matt's superpowers. Why? Because similar to the way he approaches life, liberty and the pursuit of work happiness, he likes to take things and tear them apart to make them simple so that he can fix them and he can make them better. Let me do that with Matt's superpowers, his ability to understand business. That's where he starts when he describes himself that he works on understanding the business. He's incredibly pragmatic. He doesn't over complicate things in his speech. I mean, can you imagine if he complicated his speech with the way how fast he speaks? It would be impossible. But he's very practical and very pragmatic. He's very technical.

Ryan:

Good point though, Patricia. For somebody to be that intelligent and speak in plain English is so refreshing.

Patricia:

It's amazing. Especially, I mean, I remember we were sitting in a meeting once and we had been playing with some new tech and he's like, "Can I take that home this weekend? I've got some free time tonight and I want to play with that." And he went home and he totally took apart the technology. He understood it. He came back the next day, "Okay, I understand this now." He's just that way. He's amazing. His brain fits so much, but he's also about being on the front end of everything. He likes to be on the front end. He likes to try things because he has a willingness to look at things and say, "Could we do that? Could we not do that? Let's turn it around. Let's turn it upside down. Let's turn it on the head. Can we try it?" Because he has advanced mental capabilities which are available to all of us if we put ourselves out there, if we're understanding the business, if we use our technical prowess in another way, because that leads to a better vantage point.

Now, this all leads to failing fast together. He talks about partners, he talks about vendors and suppliers, but he talks about business partners. And I know that when we worked together with him at Zappi, when I was at Zappi, and still now, he truly brings all of his partners. He uses all of his toys and brings them in so that he can get better. That's why the tracker didn't come to fruition and you guys decided that fast because he wanted to try it. You both looked at it, you both Rubik's cubed it and then you put it back. Nope, it's not going to work. Next. And that's the only way to do that is if you have the superpower of having a different vantage point, trying and failing.

Now, he talks about the secret to innovation. He says, "You can't innovate successfully if you're not willing to try and fail." That's why you have to have a consumer-centric, customer-centric organization so that you know where you're going, who you're going for. And so that's what it was like, those are his secrets and his superpowers, which are the same thing. Now you asked him, "What do you do with technology? How do you approach it? How do you get people to come on?" And that's where I log into what you were talking about, a masterclass in change management. You know how I feel about change management? Julio once in an interview asked me, or somebody asked me, "What is your type of change management?" I'm like, "Baby steps." That's not technical, that's not fancy, but it is. That's exactly…

And we share that thinking. He's much more advanced and he said it so many times, but I share that with him as if to slice that elephant really thin so that we can do it baby steps. And that's how he does it. And he takes and he shows us, shows us how he gets people to come on the ride with him. The first part, the enabler. Use technology to change, but don't use it to be the be all and end all. And he talks about AB testing things in parallel. I've done this with packaging. We've done this with commercials, we've done this with many other things. But he's like, "Leave them what they've got, whether it's the test that they want or the sandwich that they want or the beverage that they want, and then add the new one. Add the new methodology."

If you're going to have the new methodology and all, quote unquote, it does confirm, then be honest. We've confirmed what we had before. We didn't learn anything new, but we did it, and half the time for a third of the cost. I didn't reinvent anything. I confirmed. Then we can dump that. Or I've got something new, oh, and half the time at a third of the cost. Oh my God. Because it's iterative. Something that we just did with other customers at McDonald's. He would do that consistently, and he would get something that we've talked about a lot. One person on his team, one stakeholder to do it. "Let's do this together." He would convince them, a trailblazer like himself, and then he would share, "Oh, look what we did." And everybody's like, "Oh, I want to do that." Because after something's improved and everybody wants to, so that's change management at best. Absolutely.

But the way that he did this is to know who the stakeholders were and what they really wanted. What is it that they really need? He was really good about being that person. That person, but tell me what you really need. More tests more frequently. And he was able to get his whole corporation to get smarter, better, easier, faster. And it's not only about having a good idea or a bad idea, it's about what kind of idea we have, he talks about. And he got his team to think this way in this AB fashion and come along with me for the ride and ask how we should bring it to market? How should we present it to the consumers? And then much further along, he gave us the example in the interview about the chicken sandwich.

Anybody who spent half an hour in the United States knows about the chicken sandwich wars. Everybody. And consumers, those I can't eat. And so he's like, "Okay, McDonald's wants to be part of the chicken sandwich, so I'm using all of this masterclass and change management." And he approached it in that way and they tested it and they're like, "Okay, we got this. We kept trying. We got the right chicken sandwich for McDonald's. And what are we going to do? We look at the industry, we look at this. We produce our chicken sandwich and put everybody's brand on. Well, what are we going to have a chicken sandwich anybody can put their brand on? That's not good." Assess a little bit more.

I know this is weird, very weird, but one of my favorite sentences in the whole interview is "What really matters in a chicken sandwich?" 

Only a researcher can take that sentence seriously, but he does. What really matters in a chicken sa- I mean, that's Picasso level intelligence. Because you know how Picasso was, right? And then he started prototyping. And then when we finally got, he finally got, they finally got the right chicken sandwich, he went to ask, "How do we market this thing?" And they created the agency wars. They created the wars. Let's put them together. We know that they go better. And so all of this with this little simple baby step AB technology, and this just made everybody goes, "I like that. Can we do some of that too for my brand?" It was fantastic.

His superpowers of being vulnerable, being authentic, being intelligent, but being simple and pragmatic at the same time, helped him bring the company along for the ride. But he's got a secret superpower that I don't think we can bottle. He's just a glory to be around.

Ryan:

True.

Patricia:

But I think that it's because he's so passionate about what he does. He loves what he does, and he's able to ask questions about what's the most important thing in a chicken sandwich without anybody thinking, “What drugs are you on?" And so that passion comes through and people want to come with him. 

And then he says, "There are three things in innovation." He wraps it up beautifully for me in a bow at the end. And he says, "Take the time to do it right. Figure it out. Figure out what it is you're getting asked most frequently and focus on those, but take the time. Number two, see how quickly you can get smart." I mean, that sentence is another fantastic one. See how quickly you can get smart, entry stage stuff and get people along for the ride and ungating things and just putting the right ideas in the right moment and giving everybody the right resources. And then three, think about how things should flow through your go to market so that you can take an insight, a problem, bring it through, get the idea, and then immediately activate it. Because sometimes it gets stuck and there's no... What is it called in golf and tennis? The follow through swing?

Ryan:

Yeah, follow through.

Patricia:

The same thing. He does the whole entire swing from the beginning of prepping the ball all the way to the end of activating it. That's how he approaches life, liberty, and the pursuit of insights. And that's why he takes all of his iterative thinking and all of his superpowers and it turns them into something that's just so natural and fun to go with. And that is him in a minute or two.

Ryan:

I love it. Thank you, Patricia. A great recap, and that is the wrap of season six, everybody. What a great way to end it with one of my very favorite people, Matt Cahill. We're going to get him back because the truth is we didn't get to talk to him about the future because his current state's still pretty cool. 

Season seven, we will be back roughly around September, but don't hold us to that because we're going to take a little time off here, take a break. I hope you have a wonderful summer, and well, winter if you live in a part of the world where it's cold, where it's warm here. And thank you for listening. I really appreciate all the love you give us on social media. 

For those of you who reach out and give us feedback on episodes, it means a lot to us. We obviously have a lot of fun doing Inside Insights. And Kelsey, thank you for putting on all this amazing production. It's been a hell of a ride and I can't wait to keep doing it. That's a wrap everybody, have a good summer.