this is a Big Mac each year McDonald's sells over 900 million of these Bad Boys Around the Globe but what you don't see is how these fast food companies are taking advantage of our weaknesses and brainwashing us to consume their products I'm going to be investigating the dark secrets of the world's most beloved restaurants in real life and exposing the dark tactics that they use to keep you coming back for more starting with the first of five dark tactics like McDonald's use which brings me to my first question where in McDonald with the do I don't know the M where the hell is Ronald McDonald what happened to this dude because it feels like not so long ago he was absolutely everywhere I had to do some digging and go out into the field to find out what happened to this guy do you have any Ronald McDonald sorry Ronald McDonald no sorry you see when they rolled out Ronald McDonald as the mascot to their company clowns were at their alltime peak in popularity but as times changed so the ethics behind using mascots to sell such unhealthy food to children and then in 2016 there was the famous clown apocalypse where creeps were dressing up as clowns and terrorizing children McDonald's released an official statement explaining that Ronald would be taking a break from the linelight and then magically and mysteriously Ronald just disappeared this forced them to start marketing in entirely new ways some even more Sinister than the clown that left us one of the sneaky strategies that McDonald's uses is social hacking they take a huge rapper like Travis Scott that is obviously very current and then they Market his meal as his goto meal they very strategically pick all of the people that are trending and they cycle them in and out which allows them to reach all the different customers and all the different demographics and this is a rinse and repeat strategy because it works but it's not just celebrities they've also been able to use their own Brands history and law launching viral social media campaigns like the 2023 Grimace shake so who is this Grimace dude do you remember the big purple dude they went super viral on Tik Tok what's up guys we just got the Grimace shake from McDonald's Happy Birthday Grimace we're going to give it a try oh [ __ ] just got the new Grim Shake we're going to give it a try this is terrible but I guess look any press is good press even though these guys are clearly making fun of this [ __ ] that's got to be good for sales so everybody knows do you want fries with that but when was the last time that someone actually asked you that when you went into McDonald's so what did McDonald's have done they have built the perfect upsell Engine with their selfservice kiosk and when you go in and you use this thing it's going to ask you every single time immediately right on the ux they show you the highest price item that is called price priming when you see a Big Mac and it's 722 and then you look at a cheeseburger and it's $1. 99 and you're like oh that's like so cheap I may as well get two of those things do you want it in a large medium small do you want it in a meal they will have an entire team of data scientists combing through the data split testing if they put this item here since they have deployed this they have increase their average order in store by 20 to 30% hundreds of millions of dollars in additional profit this is a genius strategy by McDonald's and they never forget to do it because it's their kiosk that does the asking but one of the sneakiest tactics that they use comes down to their soft serve machine I have been going down the rabbit hole to find out why are the soft serve machines at McDonald's always broken this is a phenomenon that has taken the Internet by storm MC broken. com that tracks broken MC flurry machines even as I was ordering at the kios in store the cashier handed me my money back from my ice cream cone because the machine was broken what is that the Recon toor why is it reason when will it be back we defitely this is one of the sneakiest strategies that McDonald's uses because they get you going out in store hunting and searching for a saucer let's go call up some other mcdonal to see if we can actually go and find a Sofer because right now I have been turned down 9:30 on a Wednesday your boy calling McDonald's just to get a sauc it's all these chaos they don't have there's no one in there anymore that makes you want it even more but heck I've just driven all the way to McDonald's so I'm not going to leave empty-handed yeah I'll get um soft the $1 Frozen drink the $2 hamburger the MC pops and apple pie the chicken and cheese ham and cheese pocket did you get me a mix pop thank you $1850 you go in there for their cheapest item and then they upsell you all types of other crazy [ __ ] there's nothing wrong with two grown men getting a Happy Meal and then you still haven't scr the itch of wanting to get the saucer and you're stuck in the cycle of coming back again and again and again yes could I please get um one of each item off your $1 menu McDonald's spends $4.
5 billion per year on advertising and they push the bulk of that advertising on one type of product and that is their Loose Change menu that is a offer that they can go out to the coldest of all cold traffic and they know that the response from these things is going to be through the roof because it is an offer that nobody that can refuse it's $1 for an item and they are not making money off their $1 offer that is the slippery slope that gets you into the store you want to pick an absolute Godfather offer that people feel completely stupid in saying no to and then sell them multiple things off the back end today I have assigned the help of my trusty videographer to be helping me because I Am Naturally not going to be putting this poison in this Temple of a body so we're going to load you up with calories I weigh 70 kilos and I will weigh myself again at the end of the day see how much weight I've actually gained from eating from 5 F through joint but we're just getting started we'll be investigating five of these Brands and the last tactic singlehandedly has the possibility of 10x in your business and it's what I use to go from cold calling from my bedroom to generating over $7. 8 billion in my agency Starbucks these guys do $32 billion per year in sales spend 500 $ million in marketing let's head on inside and see what are the tactics that they're going to use against me so to most people Starbucks is just a coffee shop Hi how are you good how are you can I please get a ice Americo however under the surface these guys are operating the biggest unregulated bank in the world thanks to their Rewards program so we fire up the app and of course we want to update our balance here so we select the top up amount I can't put in the exact amount that I want to buy the coffee or the beverage that I want no it's 20 40 $50 or $100 all righty I am going to order an Americano notice how an average drink costs somewhere around $5 but the minimum option that they let you load into this app is 20 bucks in this case that means that they are increasing their average order value by 300% confirm and pay insufficient balance let's go on top this bad boy up a couple hundred bucks Buck just like gift cards a lot of these things go unused and then they sit there and it's free money this sounds innocent enough right but here's where things really get interesting by the end of 2022 $1. 7 billion was just sitting in these accounts that is money that Starbucks gets to hold on to and earn interest on flip it into Commodities and do whatever it is that they like it's basically like an interest free loan that they get from their customers as they continue to push you to spend more and earn rewards how much and the Grand Day all these guys are Masters at the price ladder they start you at $5 for a small but then you can get double the size for just an extra $2 when you're pricing your products it is very important to have at least three different pricing packages so if you're only presenting them one offer you're going to find yourself constantly getting squeezed on priced and negotia down instead what you want to do you want to have three different pricing packages and you want to be pitching to your middle or your higher package that way when someone's asking hey is there something better that you can do on price you've always got a lower package to default on and you're not just squeezing out the profits of your primary product just by presenting three offers to people you will always get 20% of people that will take the higher package just because you presented it to them one of the marketing strategies that Starbucks is known to deploy is misspelling your name so you go in there you AUD a coffee they misspell your name then you take a photo of it and you share it on social media and it just gives the company more free marketing Subway these guys do over $10 billion per year in sales they spend 355 million dollar per year on marketing and in some countries their bread has to be legally classified as cake cuz it has so much sugar in it their tagline is Subway eat fresh and their positioning is all about a healthier alternative pleas get a fo long meat and can I get some tread and cheese on that can I addac Subway has successfully tricked the masses into believing that if you go there that you're being healthy make that crispy huh and this is far from the case these guys are literally pushing foot long churos brownies and 1,400 calorie cookies what's your most popular Subway in I went in and ordered their most popular sub with all of the add-ons how are you going to even close that and you won't believe how many calories this thing is 1,700 1,700 calories all right so you have got more than my daily consumption of calories in this one meal I think this is more than both our daily but apparently we don't need to worry about the calories oh my goodness all right you'd be the judge she double cook the bacon because it's got all the vegetables and [ __ ] on it you feel like it's fresh I feel like I'm healthy and it tastes good this sandwich has more calories than three Big Macs combined we're going to see how you fair by the end of today you are going to be the fast food connoisseur you should have tried everything but nothing is better than how these guys latched on to a big promo they found this guy called Jared Fogle who he lived 10 steps away from a Subway store and he changed his diet to eating two Subways per day and lost over 400 lb or half his body weight when the brand found out about this they brought him on as a brand ambassador but there was one specific event that made their sales explode it was when he went on live TV and pulled up a pair of his trousers to visually demonstrate how much weight that he had lost by eating two Subway sandwiches a day after that appearance their sales soared by 20% now it's worth noting that while having a spokesperson for your brand can do wonders it can also backfire because you're basically putting all of your eggs in the basket of having that person carry them in a way that makes you feel proud to have them endorsing your brand and that certainly wasn't the case with Subway and this came back to backfire big time for the brand and that's why you see big companies like Nike and proactive they use multiple different celebrities and influencers to push their brands because inevitably some controversy is going to come out about these people they simply drop them and then they push another celebrity they've got in their lineup Taco Bell these guys do over $2.
4 billion per year in sales and spend $388 million a year on marketing I head inside to order their cheesy gorti Taco I've never been here what do you recommend how hung are you a Cheesy G it's like a taco but there's like a FL around it and there's like a lot of cheese everything's got a lot of cheese in it these guys manufacture cravings for their food using their Bliss Point marketing strategy if we give you this it might be the end of it do you like churos churos good right the Bliss point is a concept from food science that refers to the perfect balance of salt sugar and fat that makes food irresistible oh my Lord look at this a cheese [ __ ] explosion I'm going to have to try this but let's see what this is about they have engineered food to be as addictive as humanly possible this thing has got so much [ __ ] cheese in it look it's exploded everywhere all over the ground here so you keep coming back for more it's got that crunch to it I don't even know how to describe that it's like a UF filled of cheese and just Mexican magic Taco Bell are Masters at baking in virality into their product and into their menu like their insane Taco waffles or the naked Chicken Chalupa so that people when they order the food or they actually go into location just to see this spectacle then they're filming it and they're sharing it this is the digital economy that we're living in unless you're baking in these little bread crumbs within your product then you're not going to be promoting people to share it when you can do that and you can reach customers for Less Domino's Pizza these guys do $3.
