How McDonald's India can grow again

The brief

Flat sales, a cheese controversy and a ₹4,000 crore target

Westlife Foodworld runs McDonald's in West and South India: 397 restaurants in 64 cities. In 2024 its same-store sales fell 5%, mostly because fewer people were eating in, after a “fake cheese” controversy that started in late 2023. Digital orders were already 70% of sales and growing, but not fast enough to make up for it.

10xer Club, a selective program for marketers, set the challenge: a marketing strategy that repairs the damage and still gets Westlife to its Vision 2027 goal of ₹4,000–4,500 crore in sales at an 18–20% margin, including growth in smaller South Indian towns.

Part 1 · Market and customer

First, understand why people pick McDonald's

We looked at the category, the competition, the customer and the communication, interviewed 25+ customers across metro and Tier 2 cities, and took the app apart screen by screen. Four findings shaped everything after.

1. McDonald's owns a quiet spot: the friend

   Mapping every chain on Kantar's NeedScope, Burger King, KFC, Domino's, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell all crowd the same “fun” corner. McDonald's sits almost alone in “friend”: family meals, comfort food, celebrations. That gives it room to make bold moves without fighting four rivals for the same feeling.

   

2. Almost everyone knows it, fewer buy it

   96% of people know McDonald's, but only 58% use it, behind Domino's and KFC. Meanwhile Burger King is growing faster, at 23% a year against 13% from 2019 to 2023, and opens right next door: 51% of its stores are within 1 km of a McDonald's.

   Domino's

   96%67%

   KFC

   97%64%

   McDonald's

   96%58%

   Burger King

   93%54%

   Subway

   83%32%

   know the branduse it

3. Loyal customers want surprise, not salads

   The people we spoke to loved the fries, the buns and the predictability. What they missed was novelty and choice: combos stuck to burger, fries and a drink, and new launches had stopped feeling special.

   • “When travelling, McD is the go-to option. It's a no-brainer.”creative director, 33, Bengaluru
   • “If McD gets healthy food items, then it's not McD anymore.”same customer
   • “If McD starts offering lamb burgers, I will start going to McD again.”sales professional, 23, Chennai

4. The app already uses smart psychology

   The loyalty screen gives you 350 points just for signing up, so you feel you owe a visit back. It shows your first reward right under those points, and locks the bigger ones so you don't want to lose out. The basics were right; the problems were elsewhere, as Part 2 found.

   

Part 2 · The growth plan

Then, five problems and 25 ideas to fix them

We split the brief into five problems and gave each its own ideas, with how it works, what it costs, what it could earn and how to measure it.

1. The kiosk: 10 minutes on paper, 19–23 in the store

   A customer at a Mumbai store walked us through a real visit, and a store manager in Vadodara confirmed it: find the deal in the app, queue for the kiosk, forget to scan the points QR, start over, hit a payment failure, then queue at the counter anyway. Our fixes: take points by mobile number instead of a QR code, show the app's deals as soon as you scan in, train staff on points, and put a short how-to video above each kiosk.

   On paper

   10 min

   In store

   19–23 min

2. The app: rated 2.8 and ranked 14th

   The main McDonald's app was rated 2.8 on Play Store and 2.9 on App Store, while the brand's own McDelivery app had 4.1. It ranked 14th in Food & Drinks, and Domino's had five times its install penetration. We planned a paid push across Google, Meta, InMobi and phone makers' app stores. In our model it doubles the app's share of sales from 5% to 10%, about ₹169 crore more a year, and sales through its own app keep more profit than orders through Swiggy and Zomato.

3. McFrieday: own one day of the week

   Make Friday McDonald's day. Friday deals across Swiggy and Zomato, a movie-night bundle with Netflix, bulk “Fun Friday” deals for offices and influencer codes; then, after four Fridays, Thursday deals that work only for dine-in, to bring people back into stores. Estimated at ₹27 crore a year.

4. Kitchen Tour 2.0: let people see the cheese

   Stores already allowed kitchen visits when customers asked, the Vadodara manager told us. We turned that into a bookable tour in the app: a chef-led walk through hygiene and ingredient checks, a live burger demo with real cheese, and a Q&A, so trust comes from what people see and then share.

What I took away

Go to the store before you go to the slides

The kiosk problem didn't come from a report. It came from a customer walking us through a visit and a store manager confirming it. Desk research said digital was 70% of sales and growing; the store showed where it was leaking.

And putting a cost, a revenue estimate and a success metric next to every idea made a ₹15 lakh photo booth and a ₹31 crore app campaign easy to compare side by side.