In Tune With The Digital Age

As a world leader in catering, McDonalds has a quite particular obligation to keep up with technological progress, if it is to be seen as a modern business. In this respect the French market was and is the European wide pioneer. Jean-Nol Pnichon, in charge of realising McDonalds digital strategy in France and southern Europe, explains the major stages of innovation which the business has undergone over the last few years and the challenges which the future is still to bring.

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“The journey began basically with the introduction of wireless internet access in our restaurants from 2005 onwards,“ Pénichon remembers. At that time, though, no-one was talking as yet of a digital strategy. The task, using Wifi technology – with which the general public was then relatively unfamiliar – was rather to satisfy the growing expectations of a clientele which had grown up with the internet or was increasingly used to spending time ‘online.’ In those days people still went online while on the move or in a restaurant by using a laptop, for mobile surfing only became popular from about 2007, when iPhones and other smartphones were launched. McDonald‘s recognised the future potential of this technology early on: “We knew,” says Pénichon, “that we should either go the whole hog – free of charge and without limits – or we shouldn‘t do it at all.” The service concept was well to the fore, but so was the aim not to miss the technological connection – at a time when, for a growing number of consumers, free Wifi in restaurants was a major criterion when distinguishing between competitors in the catering sector.