McDonald’s, the world’s largest foodservice retailer with more than 40,000 locations in over 100 countries, reported better-than-expected second-earnings results on July 27, thanks in part to TikTok.
For the quarter ended June 30, 2023, McDonald’s reported revenue growth of 14% to $6.5 billion and adjusted earnings per share growth of 24% to $3.17 compared with the year-ago period. The strong performance was helped by a viral TikTok trend, inspired by its beloved Grimace character.
On June 12, McDonald’s began offering the Grimace Birthday Meal, which gave customers the choice of a Big Mac or 10-piece McNuggets with fries and a purple milkshake. The day after the promo launched, TikTok user Adam Frazier posted a video that ignited the new trend.
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In the video, Frazier takes a sip of the Grimace shake and then ends up lying motionless on the ground next to the spilled shake. Soon afterward, other users jumped on the trend by taking sips of the shake and coming up with their own creative endings.
In its earnings release, McDonald’s said that its U.S. comparable-store sales benefited from “strategic menu price increases and positive guest counts,” as well as “culturally relevant brand and marketing campaigns.”
Viral trend amassed millions of social media mentions
A recent LinkedIn post by Guillaume Huin, McDonald’s marketing director and social media manager, gave some insight into just how viral the Grimace trend on Tiktok was. The trend had “billions in reach, millions in engagements, millions of mentions,” he said. It was also a top trend for at least eight different days on Twitter, the top three hashtags on TikTok and was a trend for multiple days on Snapchat, he added.
Huin said that McDonald’s and the marketing team had nothing to do with the initial launch of the trend.
“If you think we planted the Grimace shake trend, thank you. So much. But you think way too highly of us,” he said. “This was a level of genius creativity and organic fun that I could never dream about or plan for.”
The virality of the Grimace Birthday Meal trend follows several recent successes of McDonald’s marketing team, including the Travis Scott Meal in 2020, a summertime loyalty program in 2022 that gave away Grimace pool floats, and an Adult Happy Meal promotion in the fall of 2022.
By mid-day July 27th, the Grimace and GrimaceShake hashtags on TikTok had 2.9 billion views. The Grimace Birthday Meal promotion ended on July 9.
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