The latest is the McDonald’s Menu Hacks. If you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s the new McDonald’s menu that combines several burgers or other items together in one. For example, the Surf + Turf combines a Filet-o-Fish and a double cheeseburger (see).

It is a brilliant idea. And here is why McDonald’s was so ingenious in inventing this: they managed to combine the several major fast-food marketing trends. If you haven’t read about the new marketing strategies of the fast-food chains please refer to my previous article on this topic available here. So I would like to point to several key ideas that the Menu Hacks strategy manages to bundle together.

The Menu

Most importantly, the new items seem original. Yes, they use the same ingredients but simultaneously appear novel. It is mostly true in all aspects: taste, look, marketing, ordering. The sense of discovering something new is complete within the customer experience here.

Besides, they seem to be healthier. Of the 4 new burger offerings in the Menu Hacks 3 feature mixing chicken or fish into your burger. It doesn’t necessarily create a healthier or leaner or fewer calories meal but, at the same time, this approach gives an impression that you are eating better.

The App

The Menu Hacks do employ the sales-through-the-app strategy. It has been very popular among the fast food-chains recently. Employed since the COVID crisis when the remote delivery proved its popularity. Selling through the app goes both with

• expediency – you don’t have to verbosely explain that you need these particular components in this particular order, instead, you easily order and get all ingredients mixed together;
• appeal – it allows the company to gently push its customers to download the app, which is one of the key customer binding and retention strategies at the moment in the world of fast-food chains.

The “Celebrity”

Furthermore, the Menu Hacks go with the new marketing approach trying to employ the celebrities promo trend. However, here the idea is not to catch a particular person’s name, but the popularity of the idea of hacks Hack is the “celebrity” here.

The key concepts with this approach are:

• hacks – which is a code word for a particular idea or a hint of how to improve your life (mostly it’s just for entertainment, but sometimes these ideas do have a chance to make your life easier) – are a hugely popular type of online and apps content;
• a generational trend – with the millennials and Gen Z using mostly apps and social networks companies are relying more and more on the popularity in these areas;
• Tik Tok – a popular video app that many young people are using.

The Production

Finally, the new menu relies on the existing production logistics of McDonald’s. The product seems to be new, but the production process stays essentially the same. There are no new ingredients. The only novelty is to combine the Menu Hacks burgers. However, it is not that difficult especially as these meals are ordered with the app and are often subject to remote delivery.

In conclusion, the Menu Hacks idea uses all the recent improvements in marketing. At the same time it comes with a flavor of something new for customers. If it catches up, the idea of a new menu made of a mix of old items could possibly become a new marketing trend not only in fast-food-related business but in other industries.

With the pandemic and the closure of around 75% of IKEA shops, IKEA ramped up and accelerated even more as consumers turned to the internet and digital solutions. Things that would have taken years or months to complete were completed in days or weeks. Changes had to be done in flow of goods, supply mechanisms and floorpans of store.

With digital transformation, IKEA wasn’t transforming their business: they were exploring potential new offers to customers, new ways to bring offers to customers and operate business. But even then, in order for digital transformation to be successful, it must be integrated into every element of the company.

This procedure is now akin to an iceberg. IKEA has the consumer requirements and adaptability at the tip of the iceberg — they’ve revamped everything surrounding customer engagement and new purchase experiences — and they’ve made major changes to their company and operational model under the surface. The resulting construction under the surface is much bigger than it’s posiible to see from outside.

IKEA is revamping customer interactions both digitally and offline. For instance, customer can start planning the new kitchen by thenmselves on website and then personally come to store and continue the process. Another example is «Shop & Go» feature in mobile app, which allows customers to use smartphone to scan items and automatically pay for them, thus skipping the checkout line. That required a complete modernization and reengineering of all the tech landscape and the full value chain, which now has to be more flexible to create a seamless customer experience. These changes are occurring at several levels inside the organization and necessitate a multi-year plan.

The strategy’s reach has grown substantially over time, with ecommerce increasing from 7% to 31% of sales in only three years. However, all the changes were planned that way so digitan transformation wouldn’t change original vision of IKEA. In a sense, they remained to be the same company at the core and saved their identity.

2011 was a breaking point for Tencent. It was the year when a heavy diversification has began. Firstly, a WeChat was launched, which later became one of the most popular social media apps with the most wide list of functions. Then, company has started acquiring majority or minority stakes in a range of large video game companies, from Riot Games to Epic Games and Activision Blizzard. At the same time, Tencent started looking for popular video game concepts and creating multiple similar games in the same niche to profit from the most successful one.

In 2014, a new wave of diversification has started. Tencent has started investment in new areas,e-commerce, logistics, taxi,banking, cosmetics, cloud, social media etc.

Has presence

However, in 2011 Tencent has started investment in new areas, ranging from education to autonomous vehicles and fintech — now those areas are representing 25% of company’s revenue. Those measures helped Tencent to become the first Chinese company to surpass $500 billion in market valuation.

In 2019, the company refined its mission once again, in response to the growing global backlash against technology’s dominance in our lives, boiling it down to: tech for social good.

“Rather than the techno-optimism of the past, people are becoming increasingly cautious of technology,” the company announced. “We should make careful choices instead of being blindly optimistic.”

Despite all that, things started to turn around for Best Buy. Sales began growing, stock hit $90 in February, and $120 in November, despite COVID-19 pandemic. Why? The company changed the way it works.

Amazon destroyed a lot of old-fashioned brick-and-mortar competitors, as it provided much better prices. However, Best Buy have found one thing that e-commerce giant couldn’t provide — heavy personalization. E-commerce is perfect for the people who know what they want, but there are a lot more people who actually don’t have any ideas. In fact, according to 2018 Kantar survey showed that 50% of consumers can’t understand what’s going on with consumer technologies. So, Best Buy remade its website to make it more approachable for overwhelmed customers and launched a service which provides free home visits to help customers figure out exactly what they need. Also, it introduced a Total Tech subscription that offers unlimited technical support in-person, over the phone or online, for an annual fee of $199. It was a huge success: in two years since the start of the program Best Buy sold more than 2 million memberships.

The other measures are linked with health care. As senior population is growing fast, Best Buy tries to profit from demand for smart home technologies that lets seniors remain in their homes. So, Best Buy bought tech firms like Great Call that gave it tools to get in touch with senior health issues.

The pandemic hit Best Buy hard. First, they had to close all stores, then meet with customers only by appointment for in-home advisory service. This format helped customers somewhat, but then management was able to reopen stores and again be fully operational by June 22. At that time, half of the 51,000 associates who were furloughed returned. While management expected fewer customers and held back on recalling all furloughed associates, they soon saw the need for more customer service and recalled 80% of their sales forces.

Of course, customer shopping changed during this time. The e-commerce sales jumped 242% over the previous year as customers stayed home. 44% of the merchandise was picked up in stores, and many stores now have sophisticated pick-up service in front of the store that includes scheduled time slots to help customers know when to pick-up.

Despite the pandemic, Best Buy’s stock valuation grew even larger than ever before. It was only possible thanks to the earlier measures.

The company, which encompassed all IT revolutions of past century, came to the choice: innovate or die. The decision was to abandon the very core of IBM strategy – hardware. Now, instead of building and selling PC, printers and other devices, IBM focuses on providing IT expertise and computing services to other companies.

IBM bought hundreds of IT companies and invested in server business, becoming one of the biggest seller of enterprise server solutions. Most of the workforce is also new to the company: 50% of IBM employees were hired in last five years. In addition to modernizing its workforce, IBM has adopted the new way to design new products. The new approach to creating enterprise solution is similar with consumer products. As such, designers were moved to open space and their work is now judged by internal net promoter scores.

One of the biggest later failures of IBM is the complete disregard of cloud computing, which greatly improved Amazon and Microsoft. To prevent this from happening again, IBM became a pioneer in blockchain and quantum computing.

As the result, the company basically reinvented itself — its organizational structure was radically flattened, which significantly sped up internal processes.