It's splashdown for McDonald's CosMc’s brand. The surprising space-themed offshoot has been scrubbed, and its remaining five stores and app will shut this month only a year and half after it launched into orbit in Ohio and then Texas.
Described as a "bold new beverage concept from the McDonald’s universe", CosMc's took off with as much fanfare as a SpaceX rocket launch, attracting long lines at the initial flagship store in Chicago when it opened.
It had been widely billed as a potential Starbucks rival with strange retro-futurist sci-fi branding, so its closure is now being seen as a brand fail for the fastfood giant. But is it mission aborted or mission complete?
What was CosMc's?
CosMc's was a strange proposition. The name was lifted from a long-forgotten piece of McDonald's lore: CosMc was an alien who appeared as a fleeting side character in McD's ads back in the late 80s and 90s.
The company resuscitated the name to pilot a chain of small-format stores that offered unusual, customisable drinks, from turmeric spiced lattes to churro frappes and a prickly pear-flavored slushy with popping candy alongside token McDonald's snacks like the McFlurry and McMuffin. The aim was to lure afternoon snackers from the likes of Starbucks, Dutch Bros and Dunkin' Donuts.
But the end of CosMc’s may not be the failure it's being painted as. It's probable that it was never intended to rollout as a permanent brand. As one designer pointed out to us at the time, even the CosMc's logo felt odd and unfinished. A blend of Cadbury's and storage facility colours, like it was a temporary pop-up.
Like other brand offshoots such as KFC's Saucy, CosMc's was a laboratory that allowed McDonald's to experiment with things that would have been risky to try under its core identity, including creative flavours and new tech, such as drive-thru lanes that manage traffic according to order complexity and evolving menus that could be quickly edited based on customer feedback (perhaps McDonalds should have used CosMc's to test its AI drive-thru before rolling it out at its own restaurants).
CEO Chris Kempczinski described the project as a 'learning lab' through which McDonald's had "discovered some interesting learnings" including about consumers’ customisation preferences and interest in new, emerging beverage categories.
It might seem like an expensive experiment, but McDonald's has the resources to run this kind of innovation incubator, and the lessons learned can create new value in its main brand. The fastfood giant now has a dedicated category team focused on beverages and says it will test CosMc’s most popular drinks in select McDonald’s locations later in the year.
So some of those wild combinations could end up entering orbit on the main McDonald's menu, continuing the company's battle for the specialty drink market withing the galaxy of the main brand.
For more branding news, check out the clever hidden detail in Coca-Cola's new Vitaminwater logo and branding design.
