#15: Grimace Shake Gone Viral: The Power of Gen Z-Led Marketing

Hello and welcome to a new season of The Social Dot newsletter. I’m Andreea, your local social media expert, and together we shall connect the dots of the social media world. We’ll be deconstructing viral trends & campaigns, and getting strategic insights to help your brand thrive on social.

Anyone aged 12 to 25 who has been scrolling through TikTok in the last 30 days has probably come across Grimace - the central character in McDonald's latest TikTok trend.

But who’s Grimace, you may ask?

Grimace is a long-standing character in the McDonald's universe, although he hasn’t really been marketed since the early 2000s. He used to go by “Evil Grimace” back when he was first introduced in 1972, and his main “character trait” was stealing people’s shakes.?

Think Grinch, but with milkshakes and fries.

On TikTok - home of Gen Z -? Grimace is now experiencing a proper revival, on the occasion of his 52nd birthday. Don’t worry, he’s also very much present on Instagram.

?? What happened?

What happened is that McDonald’s, who already has a history of viral campaigns on social media, has decided to launch their new berry-flavored “Grimace shake” based on the mischievous purple mascot.?

They teased the launch (or rather, the Grimace takeover) through a couple of TikTok posts:

Same on Instagram:

And the rest is history - written mostly by Gen Z TikTokers.?

On June 24, a TikTok user by the name of ruiz_alv04 shared a video depicting a fake Grimace shake - induced death.

Thousands of similar videos followed, giving the McDonald’s Grimace campaign a new lease on life (albeit a more sinister one).?

Now, the #grimace hashtag on TikTok has about 1.6B views, while the #grimaceshake has 1.5B views.

Suffice it to say, it’s gone viral.

Looking at McDonald’s social media profiles in Socialinsider, I found pretty much what I expected – a huge peak in engagement on Instagram on the day of the first Grimace post:

And a similar peak on TikTok on June 12, the day this post was shared:?

?? My takeaways

Let’s start with the basics.?

For starters, McDonald’s Grimace campaign definitely had the element of surprise. Nobody saw it coming. Few people alive right now even remembered who Grimace is, prior to the start of this campaign.?

So they had that going for them.?

Secondly, it’s quite clear that they created this campaign with Gen Z in mind. The brief, low-production videos, coupled with your standard, run-of-the-mill TikTok voiceover – it’s a content style that performs very well on TikTok, particularly among Gen Zers.?

Then comes the fortunate case of unintended viral marketing. In McDonald’s case, the faux Grimace shake-induced death trend caused their campaign to really gain traction and become viral fast.

Thanks to their hands-on approach to social media marketing and probably a good deal of social listening - they found the right moment to hop on the trend and make it grow even more:

Even the CMO of McDonald’s made an unexpected appearance and took part in the trend:

All in all, this new McDonald’s campaign has rightfully taken the social media world by storm (and the rest of the world by surprise).?

They pushed all the right buttons: they added a dash of nostalgia, they shared low-production TikTok videos, they (re)introduced an anti-hero character… and then, they let Gen Z do the heavy lifting.?

?? Food for thought

Now it’s your turn.?

Do you know of any other cases of unintended viral marketing? Share them with me, I’d love to hear more!

This is me signing off. I’ll see you next week, in the next issue of The Social Dot, a newsletter powered by Socialinsider, and written by me, Andreea, your local social media expert.

If you have any viral trends and campaigns you’d want me to deconstruct next, don’t hesitate to send them my way.