Challenge
McDonald’s Canada needed a smarter way to evaluate the success of new products and promotions—beyond just sales numbers. They wanted to understand which consumers innovations were resonating with, why, and how to improve in real time.
Solution
Dig Insights built an always-on innovation tracker and custom dashboard that delivered weekly insights on awareness, trial, repeat, and guest perception. The tool democratized data access and empowered strategic decisions across teams.
Impact
The innovation tracker helped McDonald’s optimize pricing and SKU strategy for Summer Drink Days, identify the true audience for high-ticket items like the Big Arch, and make smarter in-flight adjustments. The tracker is now a critical driver of innovation performance and future planning.
You know, the global restaurant powerhouse.
Background
In most organizations, the innovation process ends where it should just be beginning—with the launch. Success is typically gauged by sales data alone, leaving little room to understand what really worked, what didn’t, and why.
For a brand like McDonald’s that simply wasn’t good enough. Innovation isn’t limited to new menu items—it spans packaging, promotions, positioning, and even pricing. Every one of these changes can shift consumer decision-making, and tracking the true impact of those shifts is critical. It’s not just about what sold, but about how people felt—who bought in, who didn’t, and what might drive them to try again.
The challenge? Getting those insights into the hands of the right people across a large, fast-moving organization. Marketing, operations, supply chain, and franchisees all have a stake in innovation success—but without shared access to timely, relevant data, decisions get delayed or diluted. McDonald’s needed a solution that connected insight to action—and Dig helped build exactly that.
The Challenge
We saw an opportunity to build something future-focused—something that empowered Catie’s team to go from reporting to real-time strategic influence.
As one of the world’s most iconic brands, McDonald’s is known for delivering daring innovations—from the Chicken Big Mac, to merch drops, and global crossovers like the Grimace Shake. Their product and promotion launches are bold, craveable, and designed to generate buzz. But with boldness comes risk. McDonald’s couldn’t wait until the post-mortem to understand how changes were faring in market – insights had to fuel faster, smarter decisions while innovation programs were still live.
That’s when the insights team at McDonald’s Canada turned to Dig Insights to develop a method for tracking innovation effectiveness and capturing the voice of customers iteratively. Some of the questions McDonald’s Canada wanted answered:
- Who is this innovation resonating with?
- Why are people making, or not making, a purchase?
- How does our innovation compare to our competitors’?
- Is our innovation driving incremental visits?
- What are barriers to re-trial?
- How does this ladder up to our brand perceptions?
The Approach
We’ve always believed that innovation isn’t just about the new thing—it’s about whether it changes behavior. That’s what we needed to understand through regular tracking.
Dig Insights and McDonald’s co-developed an always-on innovation tracker: a weekly measurement tool and dynamic dashboard that delivers insights on awareness, trial, repeat behavior, perceptions, barriers, and audience segmentation.
The innovation tracker starts with the level of awareness each product or promotion has.
From there we look at what triggers someone to purchase – or alternatively, what their barriers were. For triers, we go deep – we want to know when they purchased, for what occasion, how they perceived the promotion, how satisfied they were with their purchase, and if they are likely to be repeat buyers.
We also analyze who our triers are – do they skew to a specific age? Is this attracting low income folks? Is this reaching out to light frequenters of McDonald’s? How does it appeal to heavy buyers of our competitors? We going deep on all facets of the purchase, including a forecast on if they would recommend it to friends/family.
Dig’s tracker is structured to reflect how consumers actually make decisions—by channel, occasion, trigger, or barrier. That’s what helps us advise on real-time adjustments, not just hindsight reporting.
The Impact
The innovation tracker has become a critical component of McDonald’s go-to-market playbook—powering smarter launches, cross-functional collaboration, and deeper brand understanding.
By extending our understanding—by creating that direct line to the consumer—we’re able to see how an innovation is really landing. What’s working? What’s not? And more importantly, how can we make it better next time? This kind of feedback doesn’t just help you track performance—it helps you evolve, faster and smarter, over time.
Beyond in-market optimization, the innovation tracker dashboard has redefined how insights are shared across the McDonald’s Canada organization.
Our goal was to democratize data for McDonald’s. Now insights aren’t just living in research decks—they’re shaping decisions across marketing, operations, and supply chain.
Deep Dive: Summer Drink Days
As one of McDonald’s Canada’s most iconic annual programs, Summer Drink Days had enjoyed longstanding popularity. But after nearly two decades—and amid economic shifts—Catie’s team needed a fresh look at its performance.
Using Dig’s innovation tracker, McDonald’s discovered:
1. Value Perceptions Were Slipping
Gradual price increases were beginning to impact how consumers perceived the value of the promotion. Tracker data showed that even small price shifts had started to weaken emotional connection and perceived affordability.
“It gave us the evidence to ask, in this economy, is this still the right decision?”
2. Hidden Heroes Were Driving Quiet Wins
One surprise: the iced frappe, a lesser-promoted item, was overperforming. Despite minimal marketing, it showed strong trial and satisfaction scores—especially among younger, Gen Z consumers.
“The tracker let us spotlight products we weren’t even prioritizing in media. That’s a huge unlock.”
3. Stakeholders Got Aligned Around Data
Because the tracker fed real-time results into a shared dashboard, multiple departments—marketing, ops, franchisees—could rally around the same story and make quick, confident adjustments mid-flight.
“With this depth of data, our team could shape the narrative across the business—not just answer questions after the fact.”
What's Next
Looking ahead, McDonald’s Canada is exploring several enhancements to further evolve the innovation tracker into a predictive, globally scalable tool. These include expanding the tracker to other McDonald’s markets, triangulating media spend with awareness lift to refine marketing efficiency, and conducting meta-analyses to distill the attributes of high-performing innovations. The team is also considering adding AI-driven summaries and insights to the dashboard, offering users a faster path to interpretation and action. Each of these developments reflects McDonald’s ongoing commitment to embedding real-time consumer insight deeper into the heart of their innovation process.
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