Esther: This is the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and I'm here today with Matt Biespiel. He is with McDonald's. Yes, that is the McDonald's right out of -

Matt: Out of Oakbrook, Illinois.

Esther: Oakbrook, Illinois. Tiny, little town, right? Right in Chicago somewhere?

Matt: Right; it's one of the Chicago suburbs. The company was started there. Ray Kroc when he founded the company in 1955 somehow ended up in Oakbrook and 55 years later here we are.

Esther: Interesting, interesting. So tell us what you do at McDonald's.

Matt: So maybe a little bit about McDonald's. I think most of your listeners and viewers know of McDonald's. We do business in 117 countries around the world. We have 32,000 restaurants. We employ about 1.6-1.7 million people around the planet -

Esther: Gosh.

Matt: And the most important statistic is that we serve 62 million people every single day. So we are a very decentralized organization. We believe that pushing decisions down towards the customer as close as possible will always result in something good. So my role is I look after brand development. So a part of that is brand strategy, looking at what the next move on the chessboard should be for our brand. It's about looking at our brand communications. So design advertising. I'm one of the architects, if you will, of a campaign that has now been running for eight years around the world called I'm Loving It.

Esther: I've heard of that.

Matt: Great. So longest running campaign in our company's history.

Esther: Very successful.

Matt: Most award-winning business building campaign that we've ever had. What's important about it is that we believe in a concept called freedom within a framework. So at a global level a group of us define what the fairways oughta' be and then the countries are able to play as much as they would like to within those fairways. So it creates a global voice with local accent.

Esther: I'm not even sure where to start because I have so many questions for you, but I think I'll start with this. What is it like to work at McDonald's?

Matt: Well, you're talking to me today not because I'm Matt Biespiel. You're talking to me because I work for McDonald's. I work for what I would say is one of the most iconic brands on the planet. Certainly one of the most recognizable brands on the planet today. It comes with a great deal of responsibility to do things right and to leave this brand in better shape than we found it in and I take that responsibility very, very seriously. We are fortunate that our business responds very nicely to marketing pressure. The more we can create bigger impressions, the greater the return on investment. So I view one of my big challenges as how do we make the machine run better.

Esther: Interesting. You talk about leaving the brand in better shape than you left it. What does that really mean? What does it mean to take care of a brand as iconic as McDonald's?

Matt: It's an awesome responsibility. What it largely means is we want people to not just visit McDonald's and to give us their hard earned money, but we want people to feel really good about that. So having people feel like they can trust us to serve themselves the kind of food that they would want and to serve it to their children. So this idea of mom-trusted, child loved, family endorsed is really, really important to us.

Esther: So my next question is because you are at McDonald's, as you said, you obviously came from a trusted background. So where were you before McDonald's?

Matt: So I have a degree in journalism from the University of Oklahoma and I thought I wanted to be in public relations and got into public relations and realized that it wasn't exactly for me. So I migrated into the advertising business because I really had an affinity to advertising strategy and creativity in general. So I started off working for several advertising agencies, a couple in Houston. I always tell people that I got my undergraduate at the University of Oklahoma and I got my graduate degree from Ogilvy and Mather in Houston. From that I parlayed that into a job at Young and Rubicam in San Francisco. From there I went to work at Visa and helped to lead one of the longest running advertising campaigns in the country's history. Visa, it's everywhere you wanna be.

Esther: Wow.

Matt: Showcasing places that took Visa, but not American Express. Then I had a chance of a lifetime I felt. I was called by an old friend of mine who was trying to reinvent marketing at the U.S. Olympic Committee. This was leading into the Salt Lake City Olympic Games. I've always had a passion for the Olympics and the ideals of the Olympic movement. I had a chance there to take that brand to a whole new level and that was probably one of the more important jobs I had because the Olympic movement and our Olympic athletes are such a role model to all of us. They make me wanna be a better marketer. So I took that position very, very seriously. Then I got a phone call from another old friend who was at McDonald's and said, "We wanna take our brand to an even higher place and we're looking for someone who can help."

Esther: It sounds like you really cut your chops at the agency level and then you moved up to this in-house brand strategist. So you're playing chess now; not checkers. So when you're talking about something as iconic now as I'm Lovin' It, where does something like that? That obviously starts as a seedling and then grows into something worldwide, but how does that happen?

Matt: It takes a constant amount of pressure and a constant amount of desire to continue to get better. It would be very easy to create an advertising idea and just let it roll, but one of the things at McDonald's which I love is that we're in a continual state of betterment. We're always challenging ourselves to get better. So part of my job is to challenge conventional wisdom and as I travel around the world and work with our markets and work with our agencies, the challenge is how do we get better. It's not about I have the solution on how to get better, but most often the solutions are already out there. So it's about listening intently for what is really working and then scale that.

Esther: Awesome. You're listening to the BusinessMakers radio show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. We'll be right back with Matt Biespiel after this.

[Commercial]

Esther: Welcome back to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld and we're back with Matt Biespiel. He is here with McDonald's and we were talking before the break about how you get an idea from point A to point Z. How do you get it seen? How do you get it listened to? What does it take?

Matt: Everybody thinks that the creative process is very simple and they think it's a very clean process that you go through certain checks and gates and out the other end pops an idea. It's really not so clean. It's a very, very messy, messy process, but there are some things that you can do to make the process less messy. Number one, be very, very clear about what your brand stands for and ensure that all the stakeholders are aligned around that brand direction. The second thing is is to simply listen to your customers. At McDonald's we spend much more time listening to our customers than we do watching our competitors. That gives us insights about what makes people tick. Then the third part really is then how do you bring that to life and my experience has been there's two major ingredients. One is the best ideas are always driven by a strong leader on the marketing side; very clear, very bold, set high expectations. On the agency side of the world, it then takes what I would call the X factor, which is talent. You need people there that are truly, truly talented. I've had a chance to work for some great advertising agencies. I worked for Ogilvie and Mather. I worked for Young and Rubicam. They don't make advertising. The people there make advertising. At McDonald's we work with some of the greatest ad agencies on the planet today. We work with Leo Burnett. We work with DDB. We work with TBWA. Again, they don't make ads for us. The people there do. So part of the job as a marketer is how do you inspire people to greatness and what I've learned is the more clear you can be, the more focused you can be and the higher you set the bar, the better the chances are of jumping over the bar.

Esther: That sort of spills into the next question that I wanna ask you. Your franchisees are the people who sell your product. They're on the front line selling your product. So how do you inspire those people? The same way you inspire the people within the global headquarters, within the agency world that you work with. How do you inspire those people?

Matt: It's not as much about inspiring those people. It's about having real alignment about what the direction is of the organization. So Ray Kroc who was our founder, Ray Kroc established this idea of the three-legged stool. Ray felt that if the franchisees were strong, if our suppliers were strong and the company was strong and if all those legs of the stool worked together, success all around. If one of the legs of that stool was a little bit wobbly, everybody was having a problem. So the foundation of the company really is built on partnership and partnership requires a lot of work. It's about building relationships. It's about fostering and most importantly it's about listening. If there's anything that I've learned that you don't always have to have the right idea, but you have to recognize an idea when you hear one.

Esther: So when you're talking to franchisees or whether you're talking to an agency, how do you listen? What does McDonald's do that's so different or out of the ordinary to really hear those customers?

Matt: All around the world we have co-op groups that are formed between the company and our franchisees. We meet on a regular basis. We're very clear with them what our expectations are. They're very clear with us what their expectations are. Where it's working the best is when we build, in the marketing world, when we build marketing plans that are truly taking everyone's interest in mind. After all, in the marketing world we're investing their money, their hard earned money to drive sales into their stores. So when you're spending somebody else's money you better listen to what's on their mind.

Esther: Correct. So there's so many touch points along the way. There's a wrapper. There's a logo. There's a kiddy toy. There's just so many points where somebody would come in contact with your brand. How do you control that and how do you change? How do you be a nimble organization that is open to changes that could be detrimental or hugely successful to the business?

Matt: That's a great question. The secret sauce for us really is about alignment. It's about alignment on where the brand should be going. So some of your listeners and viewers will remember a line from the United States where we talked about McDonald's being a happy place, a hap-hap-happy place. Today we're still a happy place. We use different words, but we are very clear about where we want to go. So the challenge is then how do you bring that to life across multiple customer touch points. So we bring it to life first and foremost with our restaurant design. We are modernizing that customer experience, modernizing our design to make our restaurants places where people really want to come and relax and enjoy a meal. We're looking at our menu. So how do we ensure that we have choices that are truly enjoyable choices for moms and families and for young adults and bringing out new menu offerings. So whether it's spicy chicken wings in China or shrimp burgers in Japan or new artisan breads in Europe or in the United States, smoothies, specialty coffees, oatmeal, offering people the products that they really want and of course serving some of those good old standbys like the one and only Big Mac, our world famous french fries, Egg McMuffin. So it's about balancing all of that and it's really looking at where do you wanna go and then putting the plan in place to get there.

Esther: Amazing. You're listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld. We'll be back with Matt Biespiel after this.

[Commercial]

Esther: We're back with the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. I'm Esther Steinfeld. We're back with Matt Biespiel with McDonald's. Two more questions for you. The first is what would you say was your first job?

Matt: Well my first job had nothing to do with marketing. My first job, my father - I was raised in Houston, Texas and my father had a refuse business. So my first job was oiling up trucks, gassing up trucks and putting air in tires. My dad and my mother insisted I work for a living. My first real I guess break in marketing, again in Houston, I was a gopher for Pace Concerts -

Esther: Awesome.

Matt: -- and it was a great job for a high school kid. I earned what I thought was a lot of money in those days and I got to see great shows. It just gave me a real sense that there's something about marketing. I didn't even know what the word meant, but I did know that there was something about how you attract people and how do you encourage people to buy things that they want and help them understand things that they may not know that they even want yet.

Esther: I understand about that. So what about for someone who is listening to this right now thinking man, that sounds awesome. I wanna work for McDonald's. I wanna work in the marketing department at McDonald's. What would you tell that person they need to do to make sure that happens?

Matt: Well there are certainly no guarantees about employment, but I'll tell you this. That what I found no matter what the business is that you have to have passion. You can always learn the tangible skills that you need to succeed in any business, but the thing you can't learn and the thing you can't teach, you can't teach passion. So if I was to find a young aspiring marketer I'd tell them, "If you don't really, really love the idea of working with people, understanding people and motivating them, you should find a different line of work."

Esther: That's great advice. Thank you so much, Matt, for being here. This was wonderful. I know it was very informative for our audience.

Matt: It's my pleasure, Esther. Thank you.

Esther: You've been listening to the BusinessMakers Show heard here and seen online at theBusinessMakers.com. We'll see you next time.