The idea seemed like such a good one. I was VP for Coca-Cola in Vienna, looking after the McDonald’s business in 30 countries. Germany was our biggest market and we were having issues getting their operations dept. to cooperate with focusing on selling more soft drinks. The strategy, agreed upon at senior levels of both organizations, was a win-win. More volume for us and more profit for them. Coca-Cola was, and still is, the most profitable item on the McDonald’s menu.

The strategy revolved around encouraging customers to purchase beverages more frequently (incidence) and in doing so, buy larger drink sizes (ounces). Soft drinks are a high impulse purchase item and therefore have to be merchandised so that customers order them. One of the reasons that soft drinks are now bundled into meal combinations is that the most profitable item in the restaurants becomes a compulsory purchase when buying a meal, as do fries, the second most profitable item.

We had noticed that in many of the restaurants in Germany, merchandising guidelines, provided by McDonald’s Corporation, were not being adhered to. As a result, our sales were flat.

However, it was difficult to prove this and so we discussed how we could bring this to McDonald’s Germany’s leadership attention and get it changed for our mutual benefit.

After various ideas had been brainstormed we came up with an idea that would both educate us as well as McDonald’s management about the state of the merchandising in the restaurants.

We decided that we would do a road trip and visit a number of restaurants over a week in various parts of Germany. We divided my team and the German team into three and chose various areas that we would focus on. The goal was to cover at least 20 restaurants a day thereby giving the combination of the three teams a total of 300 restaurants surveyed in one week.

We designed a quick and easy survey form that would provide the data that we needed from each visit we would make in a McDonald’s. We felt that the most reliable data we would get would be by not letting the restaurant know we were undertaking the survey. That was our first mistake.

We had set the week to do the survey two weeks before a scheduled board meeting at which we would present our findings and make recommendations. After the survey had been completed we put the data together and then summarized it in a PowerPoint presentation ready for the big day. What the survey proved was that the merchandising in the restaurants was haphazard at best, and nonexistent at worst.

The big day came and we had rehearsed the presentation many times and were convinced we could carry the day and convince McDonald’s to change their merchandising strategy which would benefit both companies by selling more of the most profitable item on the menu. We had addressed merchandising in the restaurants in all of the five zones; exterior (outside), lobby, front counter, drive-through, and dining.

As we worked our way through the presentation it was evident the two people in the room were very uncomfortable. The CMO and the VP of Operations. The VP was far more vocal than his counterpart. He didn’t even engage in the survey results, his comments were more about how we in effect spied on his operation without any partnership or prior communication. That was our second mistake.

The meeting did not conclude the way we hoped it would as we were accused of being underhand and not being partners. Something we did not see at all. If anything the whole point of these projects and surveys was become better partners and focus on what could make a big difference to both of us.

But, we had failed to put ourselves in their shoes. So what did we learn? First, that we would have got better data and some feedback from the restaurants if we had come clean about the survey and got approval and permission to carry it out. Secondly, we had not engaged with two of the main players on the board and we were in fact hoping to catch them out instead of partnering with them. We turned potential partners into virtual enemies.

We had failed to put ourselves in their shoes and not imagine how we would have felt if the roles had been reversed. We had embarrassed them in front of their peers and the leadership team because by exposing faults in the system that they were directly responsible for. How would we have felt in that situation? It had never occurred to us.

The situation was diffused but for several months there was a cloud of distrust and perceived lack of credibility about myself and my team, even though the project was plausible, professionally carried out, and the data sound.

It didn’t matter. Perception really is reality and we had not foreseen the negative side of this. Personally, it made me realize that only too often I look at one side of the equation…mine! Do you stop and think and put yourself in the other person’s shoes? How do you do that?

 

 

Featured Photo by Md. Zahid Hasan Joy on Unsplash