When Vicky Lee, director of marketing at McDonald’s Restaurants Taiwan, joined the Golden Arches as staff, she did it in a typically Chinese way. In Taiwan, life is relationships and Lee followed in the footsteps of Viya Chen, who sought Lee out as her replacement when she was promoted to a regional role in Singapore. Lee and Chen had worked together at Ogilvy & Mather Taiwan.
“My friends were surprised,” recalls Lee. “Their perception of me was that I should be in the fashion business - Gucci, Pierre Cardin - not McDonald’s. But I enjoy it. I never wonder what my next job will be.”
Marketing, of course, is McDonald’s raison d’etre. “Last year, we were 130 per cent against sales target,” Lee notes. “If you look at informal eating occasions, McDonald’s outperformed all of the categories.”
Which is not bad going for the eight-year McDonald’s veteran, who started her career as a news intern at International Community Radio Taiwan before switching to marketing. Her first agency job was at Brain Advertising, followed by Ogilvy. After moving client-side as marketing manager at City Chain, Lee joined McDonald’s in 2000, and immediately found herself thrust into that year’s Olympics season, working on a “complicated games promotion” .
Today, Lee calls the American fast food giant home, and so - she is happy to point out - do her two children. “M was their first English letter,” she says with a laugh. “They love my job and so do I. The pressure is increasing, but so is the satisfaction and enjoyment.”
Despite this pressure, McDonald’s continues to thrive in Taiwan - after pioneering fast food in the market. Lee was a secondary school student in Hualien when McDonald’s debuted in Taipei in 1984, and would not see the Golden Arches until she moved to the capital city for college. Today, McDonald’s has 350 outlets in Taiwan, which, although a pittance compared to the 30,000-plus McDonald’s worldwide, is more than double the 150 stores of its nearest competitor, KFC. Asked how the rivalry was going, Lee says: “KFC is not feasible in Taiwan. It isn’t open 24-hours. It doesn’t do breakfast.”
Lee’s fascination with breakfast actually hints at one of her major successes at McDonald’s - the introduction of a value card that offers discounts for a year.
Initially, the idea was a flop. Ironically, few cost-conscious Taiwanese deigned to use the free-of-charge card when it was launched in 2004, so the next year, McDonald’s began selling it for NT$45 (US$1.4).
“We have seen 40 consecutive months of positive growth in breakfast sales,” says Lee, firing off numbers with impressive vigour. “Seven hundred out of 1,000 breakfasts are purchased with the card. In Taipei, breakfast is now 20 per cent of sales.”
Another marketing idea developed under Lee’s watch is the Happy Share Meal, an outsized purchase intended for group consumption. Both the Breakfast Card and Happy Share Meal are Taiwanese innovations that are now being considered by McDonald’s networks in other countries.
The results are something of a vindication for the Taiwanese operation, which remains one of the few MNCs to keep increasing advertising spend in a depressed, stagnant market.
Still, the market may be better known among peers, however, for its rice burger, a tactical sandwich variant developed to counter inroads by competitor MOS Burger, and yet another variation that Lee has helped drive.
“To be honest, our sales of rice burgers do not account for much, but they do expand our penetration,” says Lee. “We see families where the kids want to come to McDonald’s, and the parents didn’t have a choice.”
Lee’s devotion to figures can be disconcerting, but they reflect her main gripe about the agency/marketer divide. “Normally,” says Lee, “agency people don’t think about sales figures. But in marketing, that is the ultimate goal. Every morning at 7am, we get the sales figures for the previous day. We can see if our promotions are working. Sales is a reality we face everyday.”
Lee’s dedicated focus is paying dividends. “Last year, our average receipt increased. People are spending more each visit. Taiwan’s economy is bad, and people are cutting back, but our average receipt is growing.”
Vicky Lee’s CV
2007 Marketing director, McDonald’s Taiwan
2000 Marketing manager, McDonald’s Taiwan
1998 Marketing manager, City Chain
1995 Assistant account director, Ogilvy & Mather
