Title	PHONE CHARGING LOGO
Brand	McDONALD'S
Product/Service	PHONE CHARGING
Category	C02. Point of Sale & Consumer Touchpoints
Entrant Company	LEO BURNETT LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Advertising Agency	LEO BURNETT LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM

Name	Company	Position
Darren Keff	Leo Burnett London	Creative Director
Phillip Meyler	Leo Burnett London	Creative Director
Alex Moore	Leo Burnett London	Copywriter
Lewis Beaton	Leo Burnett London	Art Director
Marc Donaldson	Leo Burnett London	Head of Art

Brief Explanation

With over 1200 restaurant across the UK, McDonald’s prides itself on being an inherently democratic brand that delivers the same quality experience to each one of their customers. But this experience is now beginning to evolve, as our dependency on technology changes the way we all behave. Today the average Briton spends up to 195 minutes a day using their smartphones, co-ordinating how we shop, socialise, and even how we eat. So McDonald’s are making sure that their restaurant experience reflects these changes, so that they can keep up to date with how their customers lead their lives.

The Brief

To hold their position as the UK’s ‘restaurant of the people’, McDonald’s are introducing new features to make sure their restaurants stay relevant to our fast-paced society, like automated ordering kiosks and touchscreen tablets for browsing the internet. One of these new features is a free phone charging service in McDonald’s restaurants that anyone can use, which McDonald’s are gradually unrolling into each restaurant as they are renovated. The brief then from McDonald’s was to deliver a visual identity that seamlessly and naturally cemented McDonald’s as a destination for consumers to come and recharge, both themselves and their devices.

How the final design was conceived

We began the process setting some self-imposed rules. Firstly, aware of the opportunity for this service to grow affinity for the brand among general consumers, we needed to find as clear and straightforward a solution as was possible, to rule out any suspicion of deceit. Secondly, we needed for the logo become iconic. We were looking for a design to become as recognisable as Wi-Fi symbol. So, taking classic iconography from McDonald’s and their menu as well as from mobile and tech design we began a search for ways to combine these two two worlds. Thirdly, with the task being to produce a logo that would link phone charging with McDonald’s restaurants, we needed a simple graphic image that would not only be extremely recognisable, but that would be understood in an instant by anyone, no matter where they lived or how old they were. And lastly, due to the nature of how this logo would be viewed, it needed to be very flexible. This meant clean, simple lines and the versatility to be stretched out into very large formats like vinyl window stickers, or shrunk to the size of a smartphone icon.

Indication of how successful the outcome was in the market

Using simple graphics and clean lines, the resulting logo succeeds in combining the iconographies of smartphone design and of the McDonald’s brand, using the universally recognised hamburger as the bars of a charging battery to announce an exciting and useful new service from McDonald’s. But also, it announces a new reason for consumers to want to come to McDonald’s. It shows that McDonald’s have identified that in a country where 7/10 people own a smartphone, there are new ways to make consumers feel welcome, in this case by offering a place of refuge to those who need to charge their phones. It also presents the brand in a new progressive light, refreshing the role of McDonald’s as a sympathetic helping hand that understands the needs of its customers. When we asked McDonald’s customers, 75% of them who have seen the work agreed, expressing a desire to use the phone charging service as well as an improved and favourable impression of the brand.