Taiwan, the origin of boba tea and Din Tai Fung, is full of delicious food choices. Not only restaurants but also street vendors and night markets are all competitors to McDonald’s. Therefore, McDonald's regularly introduces special flavors to keep customers fresh and engaged, and annually updates its menu mix. Products that sell well are often re-introduced or can even become permanent. Those that don’t are discontinued. In these cases, however, passionate voices online often lobby for their return.

Grilled Chicken Burger (GCB) is one such product, discontinued in 2018. In recent years, it is found that consumers miss GCB so much in our daily social monitoring. Therefore, McDonald's decided to respond to the social repeated calls for its return and brought it back for a limited time this year. However, the challenge was we need to make sure all the netizens stepping out and turn the online chatter into sales.

It was very successful return for GCB. Via this simple and unexpected strategy – partnership with classic publisher “Sharp Daily”, we created flourishing social buzz including 163,000+ social engagements and 1000+ comments and additional shares that generate into sales. McDonald’s operation system can focus on producing burgers without any effort to support marketing campaign.

With the huge discussions, even Wikipedia was changed by consumers that Sharp Daily had released a one-day limited edition and featuring McDonald’s GCB as the front page. Social engagement was high and generated more than 206 million impressions, and we earned media value more than 12 MILLION US dollars.

Most importantly, we drove great BUSINESS result! Total sales for Day 1 were up 51% versus year ago, exceeding target by 207%. And we SOLD OUT the whole month’s stock in just 7 days.