It’s here. McDonald’s is now selling its much-anticipated “Famous Meal” with Korean pop superstars BTS. Fans in about 50 different markets around the world will be able to order the BTS Meal, a 10-piece McNuggets, medium fries, medium Coke, and, for the first time ever in the United States, Sweet Chili and Cajun dipping sauces adapted from popular dips at McDonald’s South Korea.
Following the lead of its Travis Scott partnership in September, McDonald’s has also partnered with the K-pop superstars on a line of limited-edition merchandise that includes T-shirts, hoodies, flip-flops, as well as more quirky items like a robe and an umbrella. The collection will drop at 7 p.m. ET today, and fans must download the Weverse Shop app to access the goods. Over the next four weeks, McDonald’s will also be rolling out digital content featuring BTS, exclusively on the McDonald’s app in the United States.
https://youtu.be/3Ou8WmrZ0Pw
The BTS partnership, and its global scale, is a result of the success the brand found in the United States with its previous signature meal deals with Travis Scott and J Balvin last fall. McDonald’s U.S. chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley says that after she presented the results from those previous Famous Meals to her fellow marketing heads from around the world (she declined to share specific data), everyone wanted in, resulting in 50 different markets getting involved in the BTS partnership. The BTS collaboration signals how the company plans to continue pairing famous names with its food and branding as a marquee marketing franchise.
“We thought Travis would be really big, and it was much bigger than we expected,” Flatley says. “We learned that people want to create content with us. With Travis we saw consumers posting videos of pulling up to the drive-thru blaring one of his songs, and saying, ‘You know what I want…’ This whole phenomenon was created with consumers making content with our brand, which we hadn’t seen to that degree (before). So with BTS we’ve really leaned into that. Every week there will be new opportunities for customers to create their own content with the meal, with BTS, and really be able to engage in that way.”
Still, if the brand was going to reach its goal of becoming more culturally relevant, Flately says it needed to get out of its comfort zone. For Flatley, the Scott collaboration, and the excitement around the new BTS partnership, illustrate the benefits of loosening up.
In December, McDonald’s decided to see what fictional Famous Meals would look like by creating signature meals for holiday movie characters like Rudolph, the Grinch, and Die Hard‘s John McClane. Expect the brand to continue to push that kind of experimentation.
“The insight of, even the most famous people have their favorite order, is so wide open,” says Flatley. “This has shown us this rabid fandom that exists if we can find the right ways to unlock it. I kind of knew it was out there, but to see it in action, it’s helping us understand that this fandom exists, we just need to find creative, interesting, unexpected ways to unlock it.”
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