Taking McDonald's as an example, explore how NFTs can help brands enhance user engagement
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Taking McDonald's as an example, explore how NFTs can help brands enhance user engagement
Brand loyalty programs can serve as an effective way for brands and celebrities (such as sports or music stars) to engage with fans, build a community of loyal supporters, and drive user engagement with their content or services.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: Bastian, VP of Products at Smart Token Labs
Brand loyalty programs can be an effective way for brands and celebrities—such as sports or music stars—to engage with their fans, build a community of loyal supporters, and drive user engagement with their content or services.
Unfortunately, most traditional brand loyalty programs are often one-sided. Achieving genuine, long-term user engagement is difficult, and sustaining it is even harder. Take airline loyalty programs as an example—in most cases, these programs aren’t worth participating in unless consumers fly frequently and accumulate points multiple times per year. Moreover, consumers are unlikely to discuss or share them with friends or family.
Loyalty programs powered by Web3 technology could overcome some of these challenges. Consider McDonald’s annual Monopoly promotion.
McDonald’s runs a Monopoly-themed promotional campaign each year, reportedly designed to boost customer engagement and loyalty by offering discounts and prizes. Prizes range from free food items to cars. The promotion follows the rules of the classic Monopoly board game and features four main types of rewards:
1/ Instant-win prizes – These are straightforward: present a sticker labeled “Free Sundae” or “Free Apple Pie” (or another item), and receive the corresponding free food, provided the offer hasn’t expired.
2/ Online prizes – If you find the correct type of sticker, you can claim online rewards by scanning a QR code or manually entering a code in the McDonald’s app.
3/ McDonald’s Gold Card – Limited to 1,000 cards, each grants a free meal per week for one year.
4/ Property "Set" prizes – Collect all property stickers of a particular color (street group) to win bigger rewards. The more expensive the street set collected, the greater the prize. For example, collecting all green (street) property stickers wins you a MINI electric car.
While this promotion sounds fun, it doesn’t foster long-term interaction between the sponsoring brands and prize winners—it feels more like a one-time marketing push. People are incentivized to visit McDonald’s, but not necessarily to engage with the brand itself. Furthermore, McDonald’s lacks a proper feedback mechanism to accurately assess the outcomes of its promotion. There are no real interactive marketing opportunities, as there’s no direct interaction between consumers and partner brands—only between consumers and McDonald’s. Fortunately, all of these issues can be addressed using NFTs through token-centric solutions.
What if the Monopoly cards offered by McDonald’s were NFTs? Each consumer could receive their instant prizes or property cards as NFTs, which they can then display to showcase their collection. Since NFTs are digital collectibles, users can easily embed them in social media posts, creating stronger network effects. Within a simple marketplace, consumers could interact and trade rare asset cards, boosting engagement and enabling the brand to gather valuable data—such as social media analytics.
Smart Token Labs’ product, Brand Connector—a token-centric middleware—can serve as connective tissue between the market and its users, enabling users to interact with McDonald’s website by verifying them as legitimate NFT holders. It also allows different brands to collaborate directly with McDonald’s existing NFT collections, capturing their audience through token-based rewards. As users participate, they generate valuable data and indices that can be fed into CRMs like Salesforce, empowering brands with better loyalty program management, engagement tracking, and business intelligence.
Authenticated Magic Links—so-called off-chain tokens—can help McDonald’s lower the entry barrier for non-Web3-native users. This enables the brand to attract both Web3-native and non-native audiences, as Brand Connector can recognize both NFTs and off-chain tokens.
Token-centric solutions create interactive marketing opportunities for third parties to reach McDonald’s vast customer base with unique offers. For example, Monopoly could provide additional discounts on its Toys “R” Us games. After the promotion ends, Monopoly could launch another campaign with new prizes based on the same audience, continuously capturing this user group and receiving actionable feedback. These ongoing incentives can create a marketing “flywheel” that enhances consumer engagement within McDonald’s ecosystem. Users who collect NFTs will bring higher engagement, richer data, increased spending, and more qualified leads, while brands offer varied rewards in return. Thus, through a simple exchange of value, NFTs become the ideal trust layer for both parties.
Through Web3-native technologies such as NFTs and tokens, traditional brand marketing boundaries can be broken, empowering brands with new ways to engage users and partners.
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