McDonald’s Spain has over 500 stores and collects millions of sales transaction data from them. The sales data is extremely useful to benchmark performance across stores.
Using Graphext, we helped McDonald’s to categorize their stores based on their typical customer profiles. We started by plotted a map of all the McDonald’s stores across Spain using their location coordinates. Graphext is able to draw visual comparisons between stores with similar profiles using color mapping.
We all know that McDonald’s offers a diverse menu to meet a range of preferences. This is well reflected in how people choose their food items across different regions.
The red cluster on the map shows stores in the coastal areas of Spain. If you look at these stores performance, they sell a lot of individual drinks, individual fries, and people go there for early dinner - it's possible that these customers are tourists, not yet used to the 9pm Spanish dinner time.
By comparison, examining the orange cluster representing stores from Southern Spain, you can see they sell a lot more local menus and coffees - yes, McDonald’s offers croquetas and tortillas in Spain! You can just imagine locals from the small town of Granada go to McDonald’s for a coffee, a snack and to enjoy an afternoon break.
After analyzing the clusters of stores according to their geography, our team moved on to perform a product basket analysis in an attempt to discover which products are being sold together. Finding out how products are associated with each other is a useful way of building deals, product bundles or designing promotion strategies.
We know that McCafe is a very popular new product line from McDonald’s. Last time I went to a McCafe, I was impressed by the fancy pastries they offer, from croissants, cookies to chocolate macarons. So we took a look at some of the most popular items sold with a cappuccino. The team had hypothesized that other coffees and croissants must be very popular in association with cappuccinos. Surprisingly, we also found out Kit Kat chocolate bar goes well with cappuccino too! Next time when you go to McDonald’s, perhaps try the cappuccino and Kit Kat combo to see if you like it.
