As a brand, McDonald’s is predictable. It’s built its whole positioning around consistency and people knowing exactly what they’ll get. Everyone has their go-to order – no matter where in the world they are, how far from home, they can walk into a McDonald’s and choose their favourite burger. It’s a masterclass in consistent branding. But reliability isn’t exciting. McDonald's recent moves to inject some excitement into its brand have included Adult Happy Meals, a free pair of Grinch-themed socks with a Christmas Big Mac meal and a Friends figurine. The latest promotion to add some pizazz is collectable cards.

This is a clear nod to nostalgia, a trend so many brands want to hook onto, and the viral blind boxes that the likes of Labubu and Sonny Angels have made popular. In an overloaded world, brands are trying to find new ways to get people talking beyond the standard product offering, to revive a typically predictable brand without having to shake up its core product range.

But as a brand strategy, it comes with inherent risks. Activations designed to create excitement offer temporary entertainment rather than long-term brand building. These add-ons can water down rather than build brand positioning. It is possible to breathe new life into a brand without changing its core product range, but it must remain truly relevant to the brand so it builds brand equity at the same time as bringing freshness and a bit of excitement.

The idea at the heart of McDonald’s is to feed and foster communities by making feel-good moments easy. Adult Happy Meals immediately takes long-term brand loyalists back to the Happy Meals they loved as kids. Combined with the added surprise of the giveaways, it delivers a nostalgic moment of joy in keeping with the brand position.

It got me thinking about how other brands do this. So often, activations are about short-term fixes – they drive immediate sales, they entertain and deliver some news to a brand, but they aren’t connected to a brand idea; they lack relevance and they don’t build equity. The generic ‘golden ticket’, for example, that so many brands introduce is a nice boost  – and it might, at best, create warm fuzzy feelings about the brand in question – but it doesn’t build brand equity.

To build brand equity, the activation needs to marry with the core brand idea. Every move must reinforce what the brand stands for in consumers’ minds; the idea should be the red thread which runs through every expression and behaviour. I’d argue that the more differentiated and stronger the idea, the better it is at providing a springboard for interesting and unique ways of bringing a brand to life.

There are clear examples where this has been achieved. Coca-Cola’s ‘Share a Coke’ personalised bottles is one I often come back to. Coke’s brand positioning is about bringing people together. Here it delivers the same classic Coke product with just one simple, yet effective, change – adding people’s names on its labels. So successful, it’s been reintroduced in different iterations over the years. It’s proven brilliant for brand equity because of its close connection to the brand’s promise – while simultaneously entertaining and exciting customers. In the three months after the initial campaign debuted in 2013, the brand’s volume sales grew almost 3% year-on-year to $272.17 million.

Similarly, Cadbury’s ‘Hunt the White Creme Egg’ in 2019 created a nationwide Easter Egg hunt that saw its White Creme Egg become highly sought-after. Seeding clues across other brands’ ads, participants could win up to £10,000 by hunting down a hidden egg, snapping a picture and uploading it to a dedicated site. Cadbury received more than 635,000 entries in just three months and increased Creme Egg sales by 45% compared with the previous year – a significant growth for a brand that is already number one over the Easter period.

In the case of Creme Egg, the brand massively improved engagement and transformed ad-skipping behaviour into participation – encouraging people to rewatch and search for the content. The activation tapped into traditional Easter behaviour – who doesn’t love an egg hunt – reinforcing Cadbury’s brand equity, and ownership of this date, injecting fun and frivolity while boosting sales.

But it’s not just traditional consumer brands that can use these activations to build brand positioning. In the digital space, Spotify Wrapped has been much emulated – not always successfully – for the genius of the idea. Introduced in this guise in 2016, Wrapped ticks so many boxes: it fits with the core brand position; it is annual, exciting, personalised (with often unexpected insight), and it is highly shareable. Music choice remains at its heart, but with the uniqueness that only Spotify can bring – access to the listening data, which it must collect to pay artists. In this case, the data is bundled up in perfect bite-sized graphics, designed to be shared and talked about. There have been many Wrapped imitators, but none touch the original.

Not every brand looks to limited-edition activations to boost interest. Perhaps the more classic approach is to refresh their identity to generate interest. This may not elicit the levels of excitement prizes and activations can, but it’s often vital for brand equity and can be achieved without fundamentally changing their products. I’m not an advocate for redesigning identities and packaging without good reason, but refreshes are often vital for a brand to remain feeling current, or to reflect market or brand position shifts taking place – a repositioning or a new product range, for example. 

For instance, the work we did with Martin Guitar – a brand that had been around for more than 100 years – was to refresh the identity of this heritage guitar brand while refocusing on the craftsmanship and quality of the beautiful guitars in its range. It wasn’t about changing the product – that stayed the same – it was about finding a new Unordinary Idea at the heart of the brand, ‘Unleashing the Artist Within’ to help it appeal to a whole new generation.

By putting the player rather than the product at the heart of the brand, it allowed Martin Guitar to talk to people who had just started playing as well as experienced guitarists. It was the springboard to activations to bring the brand further to life through a New Artists Showcase, online guitar lessons and partnering with other creator brands, Crayola, for example, all designed to unleash the artist within.

Ultimately, looking to boost a brand must involve finding a layer of excitement that complements what is already there, rather than competing. It’s why the best examples – whatever form they take – fit with the brand idea. The more unique the brand idea, the more unordinary it is – the better the activations will be. Unordinary brand ideas provide the foundation to tell better stories, to bring brands to life across multiple touchpoints and experiences in a way that elevates and inspires customers and builds brand equity – in other words, paying back in the long term and the short term.