case study 1 mcdonalds

McDonald's Corporation: The World's Leading Fast Food Chain [Case Study]

Devashish Shrivastava , Anik Banerjee

McDonald's Corporation is an American fast-food organization established in 1940 as a café by Richard and Maurice McDonald, in San Bernardino, California, United States. They rechristened their business as a burger stand and later transformed the organization into an establishment; the Golden Arches logo being presented in 1953 at an area in Phoenix, Arizona.

Ray Kroc, a businessperson, joined the organization as an established operator in 1955 and continued to buy the chain from the McDonald's siblings. McDonald's had its base camp in Oak Brook, Illinois, and moved its worldwide base camp to Chicago in mid-2018.

McDonald's is worth $185+ bn today. It is the world's biggest eatery network by revenue. It was last registered to be serving 69+ million customers each day in more than 120 countries across over 39,000 outlets.

Although McDonald's is best known for its burgers, cheeseburgers, and french fries, its menu also includes chicken items, breakfast things, sodas, milkshakes, wraps, and sweets. In light of changing buyer tastes and a negative backfire on account of the wretchedness of its food, the organization has added mixed greens, fish, smoothies, and natural products to its offerings.

McDonald's Corporation's income originates from leases and charges paid by the franchisees. According to two reports distributed in 2018, McDonald's is the world's second-biggest private manager with 1.7 million representatives (behind Walmart with 2.3 million workers).

Here's bringing you the McDonald's company profile that will present to you McDonald's company overview, when was McDonald's founded, McDonald's growth over the years, about McDonald's, McDonald's owner name, founder of McDonald's corporation, McDonald's history and background, McDonald's case study marketing, and more.

McDonald's - Company Highlights

McDonald's - Startup Story and History McDonald's - Mascot/Logo McDonald's - Business Model And Market Strategy McDonald's - Target And Mission McDonald's - Growth McDonald's - Restaurants And Services McDonald's - Future

McDonald's - Startup Story and History

Richard and Maurice McDonald in 1940, opened the primary McDonald's at 1398 North E Street at West fourteenth Street in San Bernardino, California; however, it was not the McDonald's you know today. Ray Kroc made changes to the siblings' business and modernized it.

The siblings presented the "Speedee Service System" in 1948 by extending the standards of cutting-edge drive-thru eatery that their antecedent White Castle had tried over two decades earlier. McDonald's emerged with a delivery model where it made its food on a supply belt and delivered it within 2 minutes.

It looked like a fantastic and impossible eatery that had:

• Only burgers, fries, and shakes on the menu • No plates or waiters to serve the customers

However, when Ray Kroc came, he was astonished by the never-ending waiting lines that were there waiting for their orders from McDonald's.

Kroc was then 50 already and was selling milkshake mixers door to door. Ray Kroc had earlier tried his hand in many things but never had attained success in his whole life. He already worked as a musical director, pianist, and had also worked as a real estate guy, in the paper cup industry, and as a seller of kitchen appliances, but he couldn't hold on to one thing among them all. Thus, Kroc was a person who lived from paycheck to paycheck.

Kroc came to McDonald's to deliver an absurd order of 8 milkshake mixers for just one area. He wondered "why would someone want to make 40 milkshakes at a time?" This is why he drove to California, at McDonald's to see the place himself.

Seeing the huge demand for McDonald's burgers, fries, and shakes, Kroc sensed a huge opportunity. He soon pushed the founders of the store to embrace a franchise model. The McDonald's brothers who owned the business, were living a comfortable life then, getting rich by the day, and buying Cadillacs as they filled their pockets. They didn't have vision nor they were eager to expand. However, Ray convinced them and rushed to work, as soon as he did that.

He assumed the role by taking 2 major steps back to back:

• Mortgaging his house when he was already 52
• Opening 18 new outlets in the very first year

This has helped the company scale big time, and McDonald's now boasts of:

• Serving 2.3+ billion burgers a year
• Serving 39,000+ restaurants across more than 120 countries
• Being the 4th largest employer in the world
• Being the largest toy distributor in the world

Though it was Ray's idea and the expansion was promising, the McDonald's brothers made an unfair deal with him. Kroc was allowed only 2% of the profits. McDonald's being to scale aggressively but the founders of McDonald's wasn't really happy with Ray and his scaling. This is why Ray borrowed and bought them out for $2.7 mn, thereby becoming the 100% owner of McDonald's.

The organization attributes its success to Ray Kroc. Kroc later bought the McDonald siblings' value in the organization and was responsible for McDonald's overall reach. He was seen as a forceful colleague, driving the McDonald siblings out of the business. Kroc and the McDonald's siblings battled for control of the business, as recorded in Kroc's life account.

The San Bernardino eatery was torn down (1971, as indicated by Juan Pollo) and the site was offered to the Juan Pollo chain in 1976. This zone currently fills in as central command for the Juan Pollo chain, and a McDonald's and Route 66 museum.

With the development of McDonald's into numerous universal markets, the organization has turned into an image of globalization and the American lifestyle. Its unmistakable quality has additionally made it a regular point of open discussions about heftiness, corporate morals , and shopper obligation.

McDonald's - Mascot/Logo

The first mascot of McDonald's was a cooking cap over a burger who was alluded to as "Speedee" . In 1962, the Golden Arches supplanted Speedee as the all-inclusive mascot. The image of jokester Ronald McDonald was presented in 1965. Ronald McDonald showed up to promote amongst children.

On May 4, 1961, McDonald's initially petitioned for a U.S. trademark on the name "McDonald's" with the portrayal "Drive-In Restaurant Services". By September 13, McDonald's, under the direction of Ray Kroc, petitioned for a trademark on another logo—a covering, twofold curved "M" image.

Before the twofold curves, McDonald's used a solitary curve for the design of its structures. Even though the "Brilliant Arches" logo showed up in different structures , the present form was not utilized until November 18, 1968, when the organization was given a U.S. trademark.

McDonald's - Business Model And Market Strategy

The business and revenue model of McDonald's includes almost 37000 outlets which spread to more than 120 nations. Today, McDonald's is the biggest eatery network on the planet in terms of income.

Initially launched as a Drive-In Hamburger Bar, the idea was advanced in 1940 by The McDonald Brothers, Richard James (Dick), and Maurice James (Mac) McDonald. It was after the presentation of the Speedee Service System with shakes, fries, and burgers costing as low as 15 pennies that the McDonald Brothers started the establishment of McDonald's Hamburgers.

In 1954, Ray Kroc turned into the establishment operator of the McDonald Brothers. The main McDonald's eatery was opened by Kroc in 1955 in Des Plaines, Illinois, USA. It was in the year 1961 that the rights to the eating joint of the kin were obtained by McDonald's for a powerful total of $2.7 million.

You may likewise be astonished to realize that when the first McDonald's eatery opened, the extremely well-known McD french fries were eaten with no ketchup! The revenue model of McDonald's, the world's quickest developing food chain, is an interesting one.

McDonald's - Target And Mission

McDonald's endeavours hard to be its clients' "most loved spot and approach to eating". McDonald's plan of action is fixated on the ground-breaking strategy "Plan To Win", which is placed into requests around the world.

With the mission of "Quality, Service, Cleanliness, and Value", McDonald's has clung to each of these characteristics. Client experience is improved by the selection of five fundamentals: people, products, place, price, and promotion.

Additionally, McDonald's plans to give high-review nourishment, at effectively reasonable costs to individuals over the globe. The deals at McDonald's are furrowed through an efficient deals channel which guarantees remarkable consumer loyalty on all occasions.

Astounding Vision

When Ray Kroc opened the Original McDonald's in Illinois, he had a dream of expanding the franchise across the globe with more than 1000 outlets in the States itself. Remaining consistent with its guarantee, McDonald's widened its worldwide handle by opening joints outside the US as early as 1967.

The first international outlets were opened in Canada and Peurto Rico. By January 2018, McDonald's was situated in 120 nations and had about 37200 cafés with 1.9 million workers. It was serving more than 69 million individuals every day. At one point in time, McDonald's was opening a new outlet every 14.5 hours!

Significant Growth Strategy

McDonald's has clutched a promising development technique to serve customers and spread its wings. The presentation of the "Speed Growth Plan" in March 2017 enhanced the development of the business.

McDonald's development system depends on retaining, regaining, and converting. McDonald's strives to hold on to its old clients, recapture the lost trust, and convert easygoing clients into ordinary ones.

What's more, it has additionally embraced three quickening agents: digital, food delivery, and experience of things to control its monstrous development. It keeps on reshaping cooperation with clients and raising the level of consumer loyalty and experience through innovation and human endeavours.

Decent Variety

Monetarily, McDonald's has affected the world more significant manner than some other organizations. McDonald's adheres to the conviction "Decent variety is Inclusion" and doesn't leave a solitary opportunity to make each person from every network feel regarded. Its suggestion of "Decent variety is Inclusion" has affirmed its situation at the top position.

The McDonald's way of life revolves around the following: customer-obsessed, better together, and committed to lead. These coupled with its conviction has caused the fast-food chain to exceed expectations in the field of business enterprise and showcasing.

McDonaldization

McDonald's can appropriately be named as one of the best organizations to be involved in the worldwide system. The worldwide broadening of the McDonald's is regularly alluded to as "McDonaldization." Its accomplishment in more than 120 nations can be credited to its hierarchical structure.

The hierarchical structure of McDonald's mulls over expanding localization, and in this way, the entire plan of action of McDonald's is normally redone thinking about the mass intrigue in different nations.

Fruitful Acquisitions

The McDonald's Corporation Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) have, since its inception, entertained itself with cautious acquisitions. Donato's Pizza which is a Midwestern chain of 143 eateries was obtained by McDonald's on 6 May 1999. Aside from securing Donato's, it acquired the Boston Market on 18 May 2000. Boston Market is a drive-through eatery chain that essentially focuses on home-style sustenance.

Supporting Employees

McDonald's doesn't, in any capacity, hamper the development of its workers. It bolsters its representatives in every possible way and empowers them to set up business systems.

At McDonald's, the work environment is brimming with positivity, connections are advanced, professional openings are supported, and business development is sustained.

Coaches, good examples, and backers are accessible at all times to direct the employees on successful initiatives, professional procedures, and prosperous business.

Engagement Of Community And Education

Aside from being one of the best good-quality fast food options, McDonald's investigates every possibility to endeavour for the network it serves. It effectively takes part in network administration and continues to have a critical effect on assorted networks.

The Global Diversity, Inclusion, and Community Engagement Team alongside its key accomplices have fabricated cherished relations with different network-based associations. McDonald's Hamburger University readies its workforce to maintain the multi-billion dollar business and worldwide initiative improvement programs.

McDonald's - Growth

McDonald's eateries are found in 120 nations and serve 69 million customers each day. McDonald's operates 39,000 restaurants/cafés around the world, utilizing more than 210,000 individuals as part of the arrangement. They help operate 2,770 organization possessed areas and 35,085 diversified areas, which incorporates 21,685 areas diversified to regular franchisees, 7,225 areas authorized to formative licensees, and 6,175 areas authorized to remote affiliates.

Concentrating on its centre image, McDonald's started stripping itself of different chains it had gained during the 1990s. The organization possessed a large stake in Chipotle Mexican Grill until October 2006 when McDonald's was completely stripped from Chipotle through a stock exchange .

Until December 2003, it likewise claimed Donatos Pizza, and it claimed a little portion of Aroma Café from 1999 to 2001. On August 27, 2007, McDonald's sold Boston Market to Sun Capital Partners.

Outstandingly, McDonald's has expanded investor profits for 25 back-to-back years, making it one of the S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats. The organization is positioned 131st on the Fortune 500 of the biggest United States companies by revenue.

In October 2012, its month-to-month deals fell without precedent for nine years. In 2014, its quarterly deals fell without precedent for a long time, when its deals last dropped for the whole of 1997.

In the United States, McDonald's accounts for 70% of sales in drive-throughs. McDonald's shut down 184 eateries in the United States in 2015, which was 59 more than what they wanted to open.

Starting in 2017, the income was roughly $22.82 billion. The brand estimation of McDonald's is more than $88 billion; outperforming Starbucks with a brand estimation of $43 billion. The total compensation of the organization in 2017 was $5.2 billion; this worth saw an ascent of about 11% from the previous year.

McDonald's is, without a doubt, the quickest developing drive-thru eatery chain on the planet. In 2018, McDonald's developed as the most profitable inexpensive food chain with a brand worth nearing $126.04 billion. Also, the all-out resources of McDonald's were almost $33.8 billion.

The world's quickest developing cheap fast food chain partitions its market into four unique areas: U.S., International Lead Markets, High Growth Markets, and Foundational Markets and Corporate.

According to the report set forth by the organization in the year 2017, the market in the U.S. created the biggest measure of income at $8 billion. The International Leads Markets which includes Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and the U.K. created an income of $7.3 billion.

The High Growth Markets which incorporate China, Italy, Korea, Poland, Russia, Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and comparative brought in about $5.5 billion in revenue.

The Foundational Markets and Corporate incorporate the rest of the business sectors. Furthermore, it additionally incorporates a wide range of corporate exercises. The income created by this section of the market represented roughly $1.9 billion.

McDonald's - Restaurants And Services

In certain nations, "McDrive" areas close to roadways offer no counter administration or seating. interestingly, areas in high-thickness city neighbourhoods frequently preclude pass-through service. There are likewise a couple of areas, found for the most part in the downtown locale, that offer a "Walk-Thru" administration instead of a Drive-Thru.

McCafé is a bistro-style backup to McDonald's cafés and is an idea conceived by McDonald's Australia (likewise known, and promoted, as "Macca's" in Australia), beginning with Melbourne in 1993. As of 2016, most McDonald's outlets in Australia have McCafés situated inside the current McDonald's eatery.

In Tasmania, there are McCafés in each eatery, with the rest of the states rapidly following suit. After moving up to the new McCafé look and feel, some Australian eateries have seen up to a 60% expansion in deals. There were more than 600 McCafés around the world some time back.

Create Your Taste

From 2015–2016, McDonald's attempted another gourmet burger administration and eatery idea dependent on other gourmet cafés, for example, Shake Shack and Grill'd. It was taken off without precedent for Australia in early 2015 and extended to China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, and New Zealand with progressing preliminaries in the US showcase.

In committed "Make Your Taste" (CYT) booths, clients could pick all fixings including a kind of bun and meat alongside discretionary additional items. In late 2015, the Australian CYT administration presented CYT servings of mixed greens.

After an individual had requested, McDonald's prompted that hold up times were between 10–15 minutes. At the point when the nourishment was prepared, the prepared group ('has') carried the sustenance to the client's table.

Rather than McDonald's typical cardboard and plastic bundling, CYT nourishment was exhibited on wooden sheets, fries in wire bushels, and servings of mixed greens in china bowls with metal cutlery. A more expensive rate connected. In November 2016, Create Your Taste was supplanted by a "Mark Crafted Recipes" program intended to be increasingly proficient and less expensive.

McDonald's Happy Day

McHappy Day is a yearly occasion at McDonald's during which a portion of the day's deals goes to philanthropy. The collections on this day go to Ronald McDonald House Charities.

In 2007, it was celebrated in 17 nations: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, England, Finland, France, Guatemala, Hungary, Ireland, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and Uruguay. As indicated by the Australian McHappy Day site, McHappy Day brought $20.4 million up in 2009. The objective for 2010 was $20.8 million.

McDonald's Monopoly Donation

In 1995, St. Jude Children's Research Hospital got a mysterious letter stamped in Dallas, Texas, containing a $1 million winnings McDonald's Monopoly game piece. McDonald's authorities went to the medical clinic, joined by a delegate from the bookkeeping firm Arthur Andersen, inspected the card under a diamond setter's eyepiece, took care of it with plastic gloves, and checked it as a winner.

Although game guidelines disallowed the exchange of prizes, McDonald's deferred the standard and made the yearly $50,000 annuity instalments for the full 20-year time frame through 2014, even in the wake of discovering that the piece was sent by an individual associated with a theft plan meant to cheat McDonald's.

McRefugees are destitute individuals in Hong Kong, Japan, and China who utilize McDonald's 24-hour cafés as transitory lodging. One out of five of Hong Kong's populace lives underneath the destitution line. The ascent of McRefugees was first archived by picture taker Suraj Katra in 2013.

McDonald's - Future

The reported objective is to source all visitor bundling from inexhaustible, reused, or ensured sources, reuse visitor bundling in 100% of eateries, and overcome framework challenges by 2025.

McDonald's turned into the principal eatery organization on the planet to set an endorsed Science-Based Target to lessen ozone-depleting substance emanations. It also joined the "We Are Still In Leader's Circle", driving activity to relieve environmental change.

McDonald's USA completed five years as the sole worldwide café organization to serve MSC-ensured fish in each U.S. area. It united with Closed Loop Partners to build up a worldwide recyclable and additionally compostable cup arrangement through the NextGen Cup Challenge and Consortium. Official pioneers called for atmosphere activity and offered arrangements at the primary Global Climate Action Summit (GCAS).

McDonald's co-facilitated the "Way to Greenbuild" occasion with Illinois Green Alliance at its new worldwide home office. The structure, a collaboration among Sterling Bay, McDonald's, and Gensler Chicago, got USGBC LEED Platinum accreditation.

McDonald's is establishing the tone for other inexpensive food organizations to pursue. Given the present want by numerous buyers to spend cash on organizations that are doing great on the planet, where McDonald's leads, others will pursue.

Who is the founder of McDonald's?

McDonald's was founded by Richard McDonald and Maurice McDonald on 15 April 1955 in California, United States.

Who is the CEO of Mcdonald's?

Chris Kempczinski is the CEO of Mcdonald's since Nov 2019.

Who is the owner of McDonald's in India?

In India, McDonald's is a joint-venture company managed by two Indians- Amit Jatia (M.D. Hardcastle Restaurants Private Ltd) and Vikram Bakshi ( Connaught Plaza Restaurants Private Ltd).

When was the fast-food chain McDonald's founded?

Mcdonald's was founded in 1940 in San Bernardino, California.

How much does a Mcdonald's franchise owner make?

An average Mcdonald's franchise generates $150,000 annually.

Must have tools for startups - Recommended by StartupTalky

• Manage your business smoothly- Google Workspace

Vishal Parmar on VAP Group's Evolution Into a Global Powerhouse and the Future of Blockchain and AI

In this exclusive interview with StartupTalky, Vishal Parmar, Founder and CEO of VAP Group, shares his journey of how they began in the digital marketing sector, expanded into various services, and grew into a global business. He talks about VAP Group's strategic pivot to blockchain, AI, staffing, and media services,

“Crafting Bharat: A Podcast Series” Released Its Third Episode With Sanket Shah, CEO of InVideo

The startup industry of India is flourishing, especially rising entrepreneurial drive amongst the younger generation of India. With numerous success stories, the Indian startup ecosystem has witnessed a remarkable increase in venture capital investments, attracting both local and global investors. The "Crafting Bharat - A Startup Podcast Series" powered by

26 Most Profitable Franchise Businesses In India

The franchise industry in India has been witnessing significant growth, with over 300 new franchise companies starting up every year. According to industry statistics, the India franchise business is expected to reach USD 140-150 billion in the next five years. Multi-unit franchisees account for 53% of all franchises in the

Alibaba Business Model | How Does Alibaba Make Money

Every person on this planet is fond of online marketplaces these days. There’s no one left who has never ordered something online, and there is no address that has not seen a delivery from an eCommerce shop. You might wonder how it all began and which were the initial

In-Depth McDonald’s Marketing Case Study – I’m Lovin’ It Already.

By Aditya Shastri

McDonald’s has been one of the leading food chains for many years in terms of the quick-service segment. They are a company with a broad understanding of the needs of its customers. 

Today, McDonald’s is the industry’s leader not only in sales volumes but also in profit rates and market valuation. But how did they manage to gain such a strong position? The answer lies in its well-thought-out strategic marketing moves as well as other internal factors. 

That’s why in this case study, we’ll dig deeper into McDonald’s Marketing Strategy in India and globally from a marketing perspective by going through its marketing strategies, marketing mix, marketing campaigns, and SWOT analysis.

So let us start by first learning more about the business model and brand history of McDonald’s.

About McDonald’s

McDonald’s Corporation, or simply McDonald’s, is the world’s largest chain of fast-food restaurants, serving around 69 million customers per day.  Headquartered in the United States, the company began in 1940 as a restaurant operated by Richard and Maurice McDonald.

In 1948, they reorganized their business as a hamburger stand but later in 1955, businessman Ray Kroc joined the company as a franchise agent who subsequently purchased the chain from the McDonald brothers and oversaw its worldwide growth.

The mission of the company is, “To create delicious feel-good moments for everyone” .  

McDonald’s offers its customers a wide variety of its menu items, along with drinks and other merchandise. It is known for its employee satisfaction, innovation, and commitment to quality.

The business model of McDonald’s is intensive, but in short, it is a franchise-based model. It shares the rights of the business with its franchise partners who later operate McDonald’s in select regions. 

In India, McDonald’s is run by two companies, Hardcastle Restaurants Pvt. Ltd (controls South & West India) and Connaught Plaza Restaurants Private Limited (controls North & East India). It first entered India back in 1996.

Now that we know about McDonald’s Corporation and McDonald’s India. Let us now go through the company in greater detail by going through its marketing mix.

What’s new with McDonalds?

Here’s everything that was buzzing around McDonalds recently:

• McD introduced the new “KARTIK AARYAN Meal” inspired by the actor’s personality. We will discuss this in detail below in the marketing strategies.
• McDonalds in India dropped tomatoes in August of 2023 because of rising prices.
• Mcdonald’s giving away free NFTs in Singapore. Details in this news article by Decrypt .
• In July 2023, McDonald’s announced that they are coming up with a new concept called CosMc – a spinoff restaurant.
• McDonald’s opened their first fully automated restaurant in Texas.

Sounds like McDonald’s was quite the talk of the town all this year and rightfully so. Let’s now move on and discuss the buyer persona of McDonalds.

Buyer Persona of McDonald’s

A buyer persona generally refers to the detailed information of an ideal customer of a company. When it comes to Mcdonald’s, people from all countries, ages, and genders enjoy their juicy burgers and fries. Hence, we have focused on the attributes of an ideal buyer at Mcdonald’s.

Buyer’s Persona

Profession:

Graphic Designer

• Seeks quick, convenient meals
• Values cost-effectiveness
• Enjoys variety and occasional indulgences
• Prefers shareable food options

Interest & Hobbies

• Digital Art & Design
• Socializing with friends
• Watching movies and TV series
• Exploring new cafes and restaurants

Pain Points

• Time-strapped due to work
• Dislikes long wait times
• Concerned about food consistency
• Health-conscious
• Prefers a quieter ambiance

Social Media Presence

Marketing mix of mcdonald’s.

A marketing mix is a model that an organization uses to advance its interest in its image or product. The main components of this model are the 4Ps: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. So let us look at McDonald’s marketing mix strategy in the coming section.

We have written a separate blog taking a deeper dive into the marketing mix of McDonald’s if you wish to learn more.

Product Strategy of McDonald’s

Being a fast-food company, it primarily sells burgers, french fries, breakfast items, soft drinks, milkshakes and desserts. 

McDonald’s menus are known around the globe, although there are geographic variations to suit the local preferences & tastes of customers. The company continuously improves its products and services based on the changing needs and tastes of consumers.

The core value of what McDonald’s offers has always been fast service which is a huge value addition. Nowhere else can you get such a range of items at even lower prices with such efficiency, convenience and customer service.

Price Strategy of McDonald’s

The pricing strategy of McDonald’s has always been to offer food at low prices. This is what has allowed the restaurant to be successful for many years.

This also has primarily helped McDonald’s build its reputation as one of the top fast-food brands in the world. However, with the costs of living continuing to rise, McDonald’s has begun offering combos and specials in an effort to entice customers and churn out profits through economies of scale.

In India, the brand came up with a punchy line – “Aap Ke Zamane Mein, Baap Ke Zamane Ke Daam” . This was done back in 2008 to attract lower and middle-class customers to experience the offerings of McDonald’s India and it worked out very well.

Place and Distribution Strategy of McDonald’s

McDonald’s is one of the world’s leading quick-service restaurants (QSR) with over 38,000 restaurants in 100+ countries. It recently opened nearly 1,000 new restaurants globally &  also modernized another 900 restaurants in the US.

It has opened different restaurant formats as well as drive-ins, online ordering, and tying with food delivery partners . These new formats allow the customers to get the desired food at a particular time and place which also helps them to have a better experience overall.

The stores themselves are clean unlike others as they always keep their outdoor seating space sanitized while having indoor seating areas for an elegant ambience.

Promotion Strategy of McDonald’s

McDonald’s uses a lot of promotional techniques as promotional activities help build brand loyalty and interest. It gives people who may not normally go to McDonald’s a reason to go there.

Just like any other company, McDonald’s also sponsors various promotion campaigns to push their brand. Promotions help in creating a sense of community and association between the company and its customers.

Now that we know about McDonald’s offerings and its promotional tactics, let us now go through the core marketing elements of its marketing strategy in the coming section.

McDonald’s Marketing Strategy in India and Globally

With an innovative approach to marketing and consumption patterns through value-added menu improvements, McDonald’s aims to significantly improve market share in key markets through continually improving customer satisfaction and attracting new customers through cost savings, operational efficiencies and improving brand awareness.

So let us look at some of the marketing strategies implemented by McDonald’s over the past years .

A Detailed Focus on McDonald’s Franchise Model

McDonald’s has made such a franchise model that many companies even today replicate this model in their operations. 

Why did their model work? Two main factors contributed to the success of the Model: First, McDonald’s made a huge investment to ensure that the quality of services it provided was consistent across all its franchise outlets. The company invested in acquiring its products from local regions and crafted menus that catered to individual regions’ palettes.

The above two factors have worked wonders for McDonald’s and paved the way to enter and expand its reach globally.

Catering to All Age Audience

Being a fast-food restaurant, MC Donaldss decided to cater to all ages. Since then McDonald’s has scouted ways to market its offering for all age groups of a family.

Mcdonald’s came up with options like Happy Meal to target children and also offered its meals in bigger packages and different portion sizes to ensure that hunger be it small or large can be satisfied at Mcdonald’s. 

McDonald’s – I’m Lovin’ It…. Para Pap Pap Paa:

“I’m Lovin’ It…  Para Pap Pap Paa” is a very well-known jingle that has been used by McDonald’s for a very long time now.

This jingle highlights the positive experience one can have while dining at McDonald’s. The jingle is memorable because it speaks about how happy consumers are during their meals there, and how helpful and friendly the employees are.

Brand Mascot of McDonald’s

What is the best McDonald’s brand mascot? A funny clown character that McDonald’s can successfully market to both children and adults. The brand mascot strategy was first implemented by McDonald’s in 1963 and since then this mascot has become an integral part of the company’s legacy. 

Collaborations with McDonald’s

McDonald’s has a long history of collaboration with various companies and artists. The motive behind these collaborations is to maintain its brand reinforcement in the minds of its customers. This goes beyond simply creating advertising campaigns that promote the value of its products. 

It very recently collaborated with BTS – the very popular South Korean Music band where it introduced a special McDonald’s meal called the BTS Meal. Likewise, it has collaborated with artists like Travis Scott, and J Balvin as well as Companies like Coca-Cola .

Digital Marketing Strategies of McDonald’s

By adopting digital marketing practices, McDonald’s has been able to increase its brand awareness and create demand for its offerings. The information promoted is similar to the ones used in traditional marketing platforms such as TV, billboards, newspapers, etc., however, the execution of the same content differs. 

By encouraging its customers to click pictures of their meals and post them on various social media platforms. This growing food photography trend has helped McDonald’s to lure new customers, in fact, between the period of September 2018 and February 2019, there were 4.9 million McDonald’s logos posted on Twitter globally.   

The company also adopted SEO practices, where it found that its “organic” practices perform better than “sponsored” promotions. As per Simplilearn, in December 2019, McDonald’s received 90.7% of the search traffic through organic searches by their customers, while the remainder was received through sponsored activities.  

McDonald’s has increased its engagement with its customers by interacting with them on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Also communication of various offers and discounts through social media have also been a factor contributing to the increase in customer traffic on its website and App.

By incorporating digital elements in McDonald’s marketing strategy, the company has been able to maximise its reach.

Are you interested in learning digital marketing strategies that can help your business grow, then I recommend you check this blog on “ IIDE’s PG in Digital Marketing ROI ” so that you can understand how investing in a PG course can help you reap benefits for your business in the long run.

Marketing & Advertising Campaigns of McDonald’s India

A marketing campaign can have many goals, but at the core, they are all about getting more customers. An effective and well-timed campaign will create a demand which then supports the product or service. 

When it comes to McDonald’s, it has a very strong strategy in place. Right from showcasing its delicious burgers along with bringing out the positive “McDonald’s vibe” to ending the commercials with slogans like, “I’m Lovin’ It…  Para Pap Pap Paa” .

So let us look at some of the popular campaigns of McDonald’s.

Kartik Aaryan Meal by Mcdonald’s India  

Mcdonald’s India introduced the new Kartik Aaryan Meal including burger, fries, and a pizza puff with a different packaging than unusual. The meal also features a QR Code, which upon scanning, fans can take a selfie with him virtually. 

We Get It – Campaign & Commercial Ad  

Another Campaign launched by McDonald’s India was “We Get It” revolving around the craziness of life and how McD continues to make you feel special and give the best experience through that. 

There’s A McCafe for Every Moment – A Marketing Campaign of McDonald’s India

McDonald’s India came up with this campaign to highlight its beverage range, McCafe and how they are there for all the good, bad and neutral moments of life. 

This campaign was released back in 2017, showcasing all the minute elements of life through a catchy theme song.

Family time means McDonald’s #Mealsmakefamilies – A Marketing Campaign gaining lots of love

McDonald’s India came up with this campaign to highlight how meals bring families together.

This campaign which was launched recently showcases some relatable moments people share with families while having a McDonald’s meal.

Marketing & Advertising Campaigns of McDonald’s during the Covid-19 Pandemic:

McDonald’s released a series of advertising commercials showcasing how so many things have changed since the pandemic . The basic idea behind the campaign was to highlight how life has changed but McDonald’s is still there, offering the same positive experience with extra hygiene and safety measures.

 #MatchedByYou – A Marketing Campaign of McDonald’s India

McDonald’s introduced an exciting campaign #MatchedByYou. It shows a love triangle between burgers, fries, and cola. This campaign showcased the offering of food combos for a price as low as ₹45.

After reading the McDonald’s Marketing Strategy, I suggest that you take a deeper look into the SWOT Analysis of Mcdonald’s .

Top Competitors of McDonald’s 

Like fast fashion, fast food outlets are also trying to get a share of the monopoly that McDonald’s once enjoyed. Here are a few top competitors of McDonald’s in India as well as internationally:

1. Top Competitors in India

• Burger King 
• Jumbo King 
• Wow Momo’s 
• Local Food Joints 

2. Top Competitors Internationally

• Smokin Joes
• Burger King

Failed Campaigns of McDonald’s

We looked at the campaigns that brought the essence of McDonald’s to everyone’s screen but now let’s look at some of the failed campaigns that didn’t hit a chord with the audience. 

1. #McDStories on Twitter  

In the late 2010s, McDonald’s introduced a hashtag on Twitter –  #McDStories & that encouraged their fans to share their stories revolving around the Happy Meal. 

What the brand expected was stories that would inspire people to get together with their friends and family to enjoy a Happy Meal. 

Instead, Twitter users started using this hashtag sarcastically and shared their negative experiences with McDonald’s.

Here’s one of the tweets using #McDStories:

2. Controversial Ad in India 

In 2023, McDonald’s released a commercial ad where a customer was wooing a female staff member. The ad didn’t go well without the viewers and faced a lot of backlash. 

Q1. What is the marketing strategy of McDonald’s?

Ans: McDonald’s marketing strategy adopts an emotional approach by marketing Ads that evoke emotions, such as togetherness, joy, and laughter among its target audience. The only aim in evoking such emotions is to show that this brand can deliver an enjoyable experience and make their moments cherishable.

Q2. What type of strategy does McDonald’s use?

Ans: McDonald’s has heavily focused on its pricing strategy by keeping its price as low as possible with the aim to deliver happiness in the lowest possible price.

Q3. What is the marketing strategy of McDonald’s in India?

Ans: McDonald’s marketing strategies in India adopt 5ps: product, price, place, promotion and people. The primary aim of all these 5 Ps is to deliver value to its products and build a relationship over the long run.

Q4. Why is McDonald’s marketing so successful?

Ans: McDonald’s has been working on creating a strong brand through its marketing efforts involving traditional and digital marketing channels. Such consistent communication has helped the community to build a strong relationship with their customers contributing to the success of their marketing efforts.

Q5. Who is the target audience of McDonalds?

Ans: McDonald’s caters to everyone, be it children, elders, working professionals, etc. They have curated meals that can cater to both small and large hunger, making their products a go to meal for their audience. 

McDonald’s is one of the world’s most recognized fast-food restaurants. With annual revenues in excess of $19 billion, it is no doubt that McDonald’s has a major influence on society in terms of food choices. 

Its reach extends far beyond the borders of its home country and geographically encompasses many nations around the globe. With a strong presence on both offline and online marketing, and cruise control over production and distribution, McDonald’s looks very well placed to take up industry-changing challenges.

Want to learn how you can create such compelling strategies? Head onto our Online Digital Marketing Courses where you will be trained in such aspects.

Let us know your thoughts on this case study in the comment section down below. Thank you for reading, and if you liked our then do share this in your circle. 

Liked our work? Interested in learning further? Do check our website for more. Also, if you’re interested in Digital Marketing, you can check out our Free Digital Marketing Masterclass by Karan Shah.

Until then, see you next time!

Aditya Shastri

Lead Trainer & Head of Learning & Development at IIDE

Leads the Learning & Development segment at IIDE. He is a Content Marketing Expert and has trained 6000+ students and working professionals on various topics of Digital Marketing. He has been a guest speaker at prominent colleges in India including IIMs...... [Read full bio]

This is a concise and well written case study of Mc Donald’s. It will be useful for Management students .

One of the best detailed report i have read. Great work, great research.

Very well written blog on mcdonalds marketing strategy which makes us understand how McDonald’s is growing instead of so much competition

McDonald’s leverages nostalgia and innovation, captivating diverse consumer demographics effectively.

Submit a Comment Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Submit Comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

Related Posts

Marketing Mix Of Uniqlo with Updated Company Overview and Explanations

by Aditya Shastri | May 15, 2024

Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing brand known for its high-quality essential pieces formed from the...

In-depth Marketing Strategy of Bata India – India’s Largest Footwear Company

In this article, we will learn about the marketing strategy of Bata India, the largest footwear...

Airtel: Case Study on its Business Model and Marketing Strategy

Bharti Airtel is one of the three telecom giants of India, known for its distinct and engaging...

" * " indicates required fields

I’m Interested in This Masterclass

By providing your contact details, you agree to our Terms of Use & Privacy Policy

McDonald’s Case Study: Cross Functional Collaboration and Organizational Culture.

McDonald’s is a multinational restaurant brand and a leading name in the fast-food industry. It is the second-largest fast-food brand operated mainly by franchisees. The company operates more than 38,000 restaurant stores worldwide. McDonald’s enjoys strong popularity worldwide. The key factors driving its global popularity include menu diversity, competitive pricing, and focus on customer service.

The company generated net revenue of $21 billion in fiscal 2019. It is enjoying strong operating margins but McDonald’s also has high debt obligations. While its operating margin at the end of 2019 stood at 43% compared to 42% at the end of the previous fiscal. Its debt obligations stood at $34.2 billion in 2019 compared to $31.1 billion in 2018. The company has organized its business geographically into three segments. The US market segment of McDonald’s is 95% franchised . The international operated markets segment is 84% franchised and the international developmental licensed and corporate market segment is 98% franchised. (McDonald’s, 2020)

There are two main sources of McDonald’s revenue , which include the sales from the company-operated stores and the fees from franchised stores. The new CEO of McDonald’s is Chris Kempczinski. The focus of the company leadership and top executives remains on maintaining ethical business operations. To ensure better performance and higher efficiency, the company is investing in technology. McDonald’s leadership has focused on growing collaboration across various functions to drive higher accountability and to ensure that the company can achieve superior growth. Digital technology is driving several changes across the company. The company has also grown its focus on digital across sales, marketing, customer service, HRM, and other areas to achieve higher operational efficiency.

Table of Contents

McDonald’s Organizational Functions:

McDonald’s follows a divisional organizational structure. From marketing to sales, supply chain, restaurant operations, legal, finance, and HRM, the company’s operations are divided into various functional divisions (Pratap, 2020).

The marketing function at McDonald’s is responsible for activities that help the business churn demand and grow its sales worldwide. Marketing has always been a central focus area for McDonald’s . There is heavy competition in the fast-food industry. There are several major competitors of McDonald’s in the market like Burger King, Subway, and Wendy’s that offer similar products. Marketing is one of the most important functions of the organization. McDonald’s leading position in the industry is also a result of its focus on marketing. McDonald’s is a globally famous brand. The marketing personnel focuses on growing brand awareness and driving customer retention higher. They also work on creating and running campaigns through digital channels, Television, and social media.

Supplier Management:

Supplier management is also an important function at McDonald’s. It is critical for McDonald’s to focus on managing its supplier relationships so that the company can ensure a continuous supply of good quality raw materials. Apart from food and packaging, McDonald’s restaurants also source equipment and other inputs from thousands of independent suppliers. The focus of the supplier management function at McDonald’s is maintaining quality standards throughout the system. Apart from having quality centers around the world, the company has also established a Food Safety Advisory Council that looks after food safety concerns in the McDonald’s system.

Human Resources:

HRM is also a critical function at McDonald’s that ensures the employees are performing at their best. The company employed 205,000 people as of the end of 2019. The HRM function oversees employee recruitment, training, and other critical areas like performance management. Strategically managing its HR has enabled the company to grow its competitive advantage in the market. From store operations to other areas, the company has to ensure that its employees are performing at their best. This ensures superior organizational performance and customer experience.

Operations:

The company has divided its business on the basis of geographic segments. The US is the main geographic segment of McDonald’s. The international operations of the company are divided into two segments further. Apart from eight domestic McDonald’s subsidiaries, the company also has several international subsidiaries. The company operates its business mainly through franchisees. However, it also owns some company-operated stores that serve as a venue for operations training and innovation.

Store operations are also a critical function at McDonald’s. The employees working at McDonald’s restaurant stores play a critical role in ensuring higher customer satisfaction. These employees are trained to provide customer friendly service at the McDonald’s stores worldwide.

McDonald’s Organizational Structure :

McDonald’s follows a functional organizational structure that allows the company to run organizational operations efficiently. The organizations following a functional organizational structure categorize jobs and positions on the basis of similarity in functions like marketing, operations, HRM, finance, and supply chain management. While the organizational structure of McDonald’s is basically functional, it is a mix of regional and functional. The organization also runs its business on a geographical basis like global and regional operations. For example, Chris Kempczinski, who is the current President & CEO of McDonald’s used to be the President of McDonald’s US operations earlier.

Its operations are mainly divided into domestic and international segments. Joe Erlinger is the president of McDonald’s US operations and Ian Borden is the president of McDonald’s international operations (McDonald’s, 2020).

Image source: Pinterest.

Cross Functional Interaction and collaboration at McDonald’s:

Cross-functional collaboration has become necessary to maintain organizational growth momentum across all industry sectors. At McDonald’s, the leadership maintains a heavy focus on cross-functional collaboration. It helps the company achieve performance targets and organizational objectives. The company is focusing on digitalization to grow the level of collaboration across various functions. Technology has become a key driver of growth for fast food businesses, which have faced several difficulties maintaining their sales during the pandemic. Amidst a nationwide lockdown, fast food brands like McDonald’s made changes to their operating model to serve their customers in the United States. During the pandemic , the need for cross-functional collaboration grew even more highlighted.

In the past, the company has achieved success in several areas including customer engagement, sales growth, operational efficiency, and marketing through cross-functional collaboration. Seamless communication between the various functions at McDonald’s drives superior performance. It also drives super Return on Investment (ROI) in marketing for McDonald’s. The company has run several successful marketing campaigns in the past.

Marketing does not involve only the marketing or customer service functions . To achieve higher ROI, other functions like supply chain and HRM also have to get involved. Now, marketing is not the sole responsibility of the marketing function. It is now more of a cross-functional responsibility involving more departments like communications, operations, supply chain, sales, and customer service. Digital technology enables superior communication between various functions and allows project teams to communicate and collaborate on projects as well as receive feedback in real-time.

McDonald’s frequently launches special products in various local markets. To ensure that a product is a success, the company runs marketing campaigns. However, its success does not depend solely on marketing but product quality, customer service, and many more factors come into play that can make the product a success. For example, McDonald’s launched All day Breakfast in 2015. All Day Breakfast was crafted carefully to suit the needs of modern jobbers that worked in various shifts. McDonald’s believed the product was not going to be an instant success and there were significant risks involved as this product competed with existing offerings from McDonald’s. Making the new offering a success was not possible without a synergistic collaboration between marketing, sales, supply chain, and restaurant operations functions.

Launching a new product required McDonald’s to ready all these functions to beat the challenge. While the marketing, sales, and operation functions had a major challenge before them, the biggest challenge was before the supply chain function (McCorkle, 2017). The company wanted a flawless launch but there were several challenges like uncertain demand, the supply of critical raw materials, cooperation of franchisees, and so on. The marketing, sales and operations functions were ready to deal with the challenge. The marketing function was tasked with preparing ads, selecting the most influential channels, and cooperating with other functions like sales and operations to gather and analyze data for forecasting demand.

However, the most critical role was played by the supply chain function that had to ensure the cooperation of suppliers. If the company could not secure the supply of critical raw materials, it could have been forced to abort the ADB. There was not much time either since the company wanted to execute the plan early and the supply chain function had just a few months to inform the suppliers and secure their commitment to making ADB a success. Predicting demand required the supply chain function to collate data and present an integrated picture.

Digital technology played a critical role in making the plan a success. The supply chain function successfully collaborated with the other functions including operations, marketing, and sales allowing all these functions to work in tandem and ensure the success of the ADB launch. The marketing function selected the most suitable channels for promotion including television, social media, and digital promotions. The sales and operations functions also played a major role in the success of ADB. The launch of ADB was welcomed around the US by customers.

The collaboration between sales, operations, marketing, and supply chain functions ensured that the company gathered the necessary data and information to understand customer reactions. McDonald’s had also formed contingency plans if anything went wrong. However, data played a critical role in making its plan successful. The data being generated from all the channels including sales, marketing, supply chain, and others allowed the company to track the success of its plan and act in the event of a contingency. The digital marketing team at McDonald’s decided to make use of social media as the central promotional tool.

“Over the course of September 2015, the pre-launch of All Day Breakfast kicked off with 12,000 Tweets to McDonald’s customers. The announcement of the launch began with a Tweet to the first person who ever requested 24/7 breakfast on social media”

(Sprinklr, 2016).

While each function played a significant role in the success of ADB, the collaboration between them and their use of data and analytics were instrumental in making ADB a success.

Apart from the other things, communication played a role in determining the success of the campaign. Whether it was the communication between the supply chain function and the suppliers, cross functional communication among marketing, sales, supply chain and other functions or the marketing communication targeted at customers, all of them helped make the launch a success. Five years later, McDonald’s is still celebrating the success of ADB. It continues to reduce operational complexity in its system by adopting innovative communication channels that facilitate higher cross-functional collaboration and superior performance.

McDonald’s Organizational Culture:

For organizations of all sizes, culture is a fundamental driver of organizational performance and productivity. McDonald’s is a global fast-food brand. However, its global operations are driven by a central culture that focuses on customer service and customer satisfaction. Customer service is a basic tenet of McDonald’s organizational culture. Other major cultural values that dictate everyday performance at all levels of the organization include integrity and collaboration (McDonald’s, 2020). McDonald’s has differentiated its brand from other fast food businesses through a culture driven by positivity. Its culture promotes flexibility, opportunity, and development. These are some essential tenets of a modern culture that strives to deliver the highest customer satisfaction. They guide workplace behavior and key decisions throughout the organization (Pratap, 2020).

At McDonald’s, organizational culture is at the core of several things including the everyday performance of the employees at the frontline. McDonald’s stores around the world see heavy footfall most of the days during the year. Customer satisfaction depends on the performance of the McDonald’s employees working at the frontline inside the stores. It also depends on the teamwork between employees. The higher the level of teamwork, the better the level of service, and the higher is the resulting customer satisfaction. McDonald’s trains its employees to provide the best quality customer service and to work as a team. In reality, it translates into superior employee performance and lower work stress. The company also trains its employees to maintain a jolly environment inside stores so that customers can have a superior dining experience. In this way, organizational culture has a significant impact on customer experience at McDonald’s stores.

Another important area where the culture of an organization is a leading influence is marketing. Culture also plays an important role in shaping the image of McDonald’s as a fast-food brand around the world. Customer service is a central tenet of McDonald’s culture (McDonald’s Corporate, 2020). The customers’ perception of McDonald’s does not depend only on the quality of food it serves but also on the store environment and the level of service. Apart from a customer-friendly dining environment, McDonald’s also leverages its culture to create the perception of an innovative food brand. The company releases new twists now and then to engage its customers and tingle their taste buds. A customer-centric culture cares for the customers’ happiness. These factors grow demand as they help to attract, engage, and retain customers. The focus is on creating more happiness for both McDonald’s employees and customers. It offers a significant competitive advantage for the brand. Its customer-centric culture has resulted in stronger brand equity and superior returns on marketing investment.

Citations List:

McCorkle, K. C. (2017). McDonald’s All Day Breakfast Launch: The Strategic Value of McDonald’s Supply Chain . Purdue University. Retrieved October, 2020, from https://agribusiness.purdue.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/1-mcdonald-s-case-study-cs6-2.pdf

McDonald’s. (2020). McDonald’s Leadership .

McDonald’s. (2020, January 29). McDonald’s Reports Fourth Quarter And Full Year 2019 Results And Quarterly Cash Dividend . McDonald’s Company News.

McDonald’s. (2020). What is McDonald’s culture like? McDonald’s. Retrieved 2020, from

McDonald’s Corporate. (2020). Our Values . McDonald’s Corporate. Retrieved 2020, from

Pratap, A. (2020). McDonald’s Business Model . Cheshnotes. https://cheshnotes.com/mcdonalds-business-model/

Pratap, A. (2020, April). Organizational culture and why it matters. Cheshnotes. Retrieved 2020, from https://cheshnotes.com/organizational-culture-and-why-it-matters/

Sprinklr. (2016). Why you’re still lovin it . Sprinklr. Retrieved 2020, from https://blog.sprinklr.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/20160824_CS_EN_McDonalds_Customer-First-Case-Study_V01.pdf

View Courses

← Back to Case Studies

Jun 07, 2023

McDonald’s: Through the Golden Arches to Global Dominance

Case Studies

by Conor Ward

Posted on Jun 07, 2023

In marketing theory and analysis, we often stress that a brand is much more than just a logo. There are many factors involved when it comes to developing one that’s instantly recognizable (product offering, mission, tone, messaging and customer experience ). 

But, McDonald’s is a brand that’s inextricably linked to one particular brand element: its Golden arches logo. It’s a powerful and meaningful image, built up over decades that evokes familiarity and a sense of fun for many customers.

Let’s look at how McDonalds used marketing and innovation to become a leading brand in a competitive market. We’ll also look at some of the challenges faced and consider  how the company continues to modernize and adapt to embrace the changing digital landscape including artificial intelligence .

The Origins of Empire

Brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald  opened the first McDonald’s restaurant in San Bernardino, California in 1940. The restaurant’s early years’ success led the brothers to franchise their concept to further locations, and the Golden Arches logo was first introduced in 1953 in Phoenix, Arizona.

Ray Kroc, a Chicago native and distributor of a milkshake mixing machine, visited the McDonald brothers in 1954, which led to him becoming their franchise agent. Kroc  ended up buying the rights to expand McDonald’s throughout the US.

How McDonald’s Built a Global Brand

Kroc’s ambition was to bring the company to a larger scale which he did largely through clever and creative marketing. 

Kroc - subject of the 2017 film The Founder - established a partnership with Coca-Cola in 1955 to be the McDonald’s beverage supplier, a key alliance which has endured to this day and helped drive both companies to global expansion.

One standout piece of marketing to drive this growth was the “Look for the Golden Arches!” campaign, introduced in 1960. With the logo gaining increased prominence and traction, this message was genius in its simplicity.

Ronald McDonald was introduced in 1965, and the character began appearing in advertising to target their audience of children, adding that all-important element of fun: albeit one that hasn’t continued so well into this century, despite going through a 2012 makeover.

The company ramped up its advertising campaigns during these years, involving major spending on media – TV, radio and newspapers – with billboards and outdoor signage also playing a role in building brand awareness. The emergence of McDonald’s as a major brand coincided with the golden era in TV advertising, and the company leveraged the medium to its advantage.

Another arena for brand exposure is McDonald’s ongoing sponsorship of sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup, although their 41-year partnership with the Olympic Games ended in 2017 due to heightened competition, the need to fund menu changes and tech improvements along with bad press for selling ‘junk food’.

McDonald’s Braves Stormy Waters

The company has often been the focus of controversy over the years. As its power and prominence have grown, its business practices, environmental record, working conditions, and health issues have come under the microscope.

In 1990, activists from a small group known as London Greenpeace distributed leaflets entitled ‘What’s wrong with McDonald’s?’, criticizing its environmental, health, and labor record. The company sued them for libel and the case turned out to be the longest running legal action of all time in the UK, referred to as the ‘McLibel’ case .

Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 documentary ‘Super Size Me’ claimed that McDonald’s food was contributing to the increase of obesity in society, and the company was failing to provide nutritional information to its customers. Just weeks after the film premiered, McDonald’s announced that it was eliminating the super-size option from its menu, and creating the adult Happy Meal. Aside from nutritional and health issues, McDonald’s has been a key target of the “Fight for $15” movement which started in the U.S in 2012 as a ground-level push from fast-food workers who started to walk off the job in an effort to raise the minimum wage. Their efforts have had some effect, with 22 million workers seeing raises, and the issue is expanding  into other sectors, like the “gig economy” and ride-share workers.

Modernization and Improving Image

Coming into the 21st Century, the company worked on addressing its deficiencies, improving its image and keeping up to speed with technologies. McDonald’s published its first ever Social Responsibility Report in 2002.

The tagline “I’m lovin’ it”, launched in 2003, has been a success, enduring in marketing campaigns ever since. Menu items continue to change according to health and environmental trends. The brand’s charity work is well known, like the ‘McHappy Day’ annual event and the Ronald McDonald House Charities. The corporate website highlights many areas of the company’s corporate and social responsibility , like climate action, beef sustainability, packaging, diversity, recycling and more.

Most recently—under the leadership of current CEO Chris Kempczinski—the brand rolled out its pivotal “Plan For Change”: an engaging and informative piece of content that outlines key objectives surrounding its revamped net zero emissions, sustainable food sourcing, efficiency, and inclusion and diversity initiatives.

Digital Transformation and Investment

" How do you transition from mass marketing to mass personalization? To do that, you’ve really got to unlock the data within that ecosystem in a way that’s useful to a customer. " - McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook

McDonald’s is in the midst of a digital transformation , adapting to new trends and leveraging technology to its advantage.

Pioneering AI decision technology

In 2019, McDonald’s purchased big data start-up Dynamic Yield Ltd, becoming one of the first global restaurant brands to integrate decision technology into its restaurants. 

By leveraging its AI technology, McDonald’s enabled personalization in its drive thru menu and in-store kiosk displays by showing relevant items based on factors such as the weather, time of day or regional preferences. While Dynamic Yield was sold to Mastercard in 2022, McDonald’s will continue to scale and integrate the technology to further enhance customer experience. 

However, some customers were not fans of this new software, Ren Adams (@resinsbiren) made a drive thru order only to have the passenger’s order who pulled up beside her also included! Other users have reported mishaps with the AI technology adding multiple orders or misinterpreting requests. 

Customer Loyalty

Its ‘My Rewards’ app is so successful that in 2021 alone it earned 100% more downloads than its main loyalty competitor, Starbucks.

By developing a cohesive eco-system based on automated technologies, the brand plans to drive extra loyalty from its existing customers while creating a far more bespoke experience by tracking key insights from digital menus, food collection points, and mobile app interaction.

Speaking on the initiatives, McDonald’s President and CEO Chris Kempczinski, explained:

“Digital changes everything. So today, with 90% of the customers coming into my restaurant, I don’t know who they are. I don’t know their prior purchase. I don’t know what their buying pattern is. As I get better and better visibility into that customer, I can actually track and identify their preferences over time.”

The idea here is not only to drive an immense level of personalization , but to also improve operational efficiency in a way that improves output as well as speed of service.

Driving centralization

McDonald’s has centralized its digital strategy for its social media accounts, simplifying their entire social operation, and allowing them to respond to customers in a personalized manner. 

The launch of McDonald’s global brand hubs , a series of offices around the world, employs a ‘follow the sun’ model of engagement to track and interact with customers in real-time, on a constant basis. With thousands of brand mentions a day to deal with, this forms a key part of the digital strategy.

Inspiring communications and campaigns

Recent advertising campaigns have focused on advances in customer experience and digital innovations, highlighting how the brand is making life easier for customers. 

The brand’s most recent forward-thinking campaigns include its artistic ‘McDelivery Pins’ print billboards, its star-studded influencer-led ‘Wanna Go To McDonald’s?’ initiative, and its quirky ‘Raise Your Arches’ campaign.

Spearheaded by British filmmaker, Edgar Wright, this stand-out video ad likens raised eyebrows to the famous Golden Arches.

Join for FREE to access this video .

Amplified by the hashtag #raiseyoureyebrows, the campaign has earned droves of engagement from various channels.

By partnering up with trending celebrities for its Famous Orders collaborations - including its Travis Scott Meal and J Balvin Meal - McDonald’s has tapped deep into the consciousness of Gen Zers while boosting in-app loyalty exponentially in recent years. In fact, the app installs skyrocketed by 23% during the initial week of its big BTS Meal promotion. No small feat in such a saturated industry.

However, McDonald’s has reprioritized its advertising budget in a bid to get more value and efficiency from its spending. A reduction in overall ad spend (a drop from $98.7 million in 2014 to $63.8 million in 2022) as well as more focused campaigns has proved to be a winning approach.

Tapping into community

The lion’s share of McDonalds’ traffic comes from organic search, direct engagement, and paid advertising—but what’s particularly interesting is the fact that community platform Reddit is one of the brand’s most engaged social channels.

It appears that the colossal impact of its various marketing initiatives, irresistible consumer deals, and commitment to making change has resulted in an ever-growing online community where fans share thoughts, opinions, and insider McD’s hacks. 

This Subreddit provides the brand with access to no end of consumer insight for future marketing initiatives while offering an opportunity to connect with its audience on a personal level.

This video ad showcases McDonald’s ability to tap into memorable everyday moments to position the brand as a fast food purveyor for the people. With a wealth of content, from the funny and inspirational to the enlightening and educational, McDonald’s also earns healthy levels of engagement from its YouTube channel .

McDonald’s: Analysis and Final Thoughts

The digital revolution represents a major challenge for McDonald’s, a brave new world where it needs to adapt to remain strong and profitable. The company is showing that it’s up for that challenge, however, making some smart moves in order to stay ahead of the chasing pack. 

“Long-term vision and commitment to staying the course goes a long way. Too many digital transformation projects are launched with the flawed expectation of jam tomorrow. McDonald’s is chasing the digital secret sauce over a far more pragmatic time frame,” according to digital commentator Stuart Lauchlan.

Millions of people continue to engage with, and buy from, the company daily. It’s an incredible success story, and it will be interesting to see how this powerful brand will continue to evolve.

Published 2019, updated 2023

Related Articles

Related free video lessons.

• ▶ Persuading and Influencing Activities Involved in Managing Upwards
• ▶ GDPR Key Concepts of GDPR
• ▶ Working With Others Different Types of Communication
• ▶ Creativity Skills Skills for Effective Problem Solving

Conor is a content producer and writer, and former Membership Content Executive at the Digital Marketing Institute. In that position he played a key role in building and managing an extensive library of specialist digital marketing content for the Membership platform. He is an experienced writer and editor, both for print publications and digital platforms, with a passion for content marketing, major brands and career topics. He can be found on LinkedIn here . 

• Categories:
• case-studies
• customer experience •
• digital management and leadership •

Recomended For You

webinar : Webinar: Land your Dream Digital Marketing Job

toolkit : How to Give Effective Feedback

toolkit : Digital Marketing Budgets - The Full Toolkit

article : 5 Ways to Upskill Your Marketing & Sales Teams

article : 9 Tips for Effective Meetings

article : How to Gain Customer Trust By Caring about Earth Day

Table of Contents

Mcdonald's consumer profile, mcdonald's advertising strategy , promotion for broadcast, billboard ads, outdoor ambient marketing, mcdonald's digital marketing strategy, become a digital marketer in 2022, mcdonald's marketing strategy - a case study.

In 1940, California was where the first McDonald's opened. It became well-known quickly for its tasty hamburgers and friendly service. Eight years later, it was one of the first places to switch from traditional table service to fast food. It added new kinds of burgers and milkshakes to its menu. The success of the development led the company to sign its first franchise agreement in 1952, which led to rapid growth worldwide. The company runs about 40,031 restaurants worldwide, and sales in other countries brought in about $21.076 billion in 2019.

McDonald's marketing strategy has helped the company achieve the success it commands today. From the start of its growth, the company wanted to build strong brand recognition and market penetration to help promote its growing franchise business. As the company's number of customers grew, they did more research on demographics to help them target easily. McDonald's marketing strategy includes investing in online and offline marketing methods that spread its clear, brand-centered messages to a large audience and using other channels like its dedicated mobile app to reach and keep loyal customers.

Learn All the Tricks of the Marketing Trade

McDonald's has a wide range of customers because it uses mass marketing and has low prices at fast-food restaurants. Most of the chain's customers are between 35 and 54. Buyers, both men and women, often have low to average incomes. They are known as brand-loyal casual diners who spend an average of $7.79 each time they eat.

Many of these customers are parents of young children who like that the brand's atmosphere and food are good for families. This market group was first targeted in 1979 when Happy Meal, a set of children's meals with a free-themed toy, was introduced. 

McDonald's website wants to create a "pleasant, entertaining environment for everyone to enjoy." This shows how many different kinds of people it wants to attract. The brand does primary market research to determine how to market itself and make sure it fits the demographics of the people it wants to reach. McDonald's uses surveys and questionnaires in stores, on social media, and through its mobile app to find out how happy customers are with the food, service, delivery, and other things. McDonald's Community and other digital channels are always being watched to keep track of what customers say and do.

McDonald's spends a lot of money on billboards and TV ads. In 2018, the company spent nearly $1.5 billion on advertising in the US alone. Outdoor, TV, and radio ads aren't likely to reach many people, so digital marketing strategies are used to send consistent information to people who aren't likely to see or hear the ads.

McDonald's marketing strategy uses TV and radio to get the word out about its brand and promote new menu items, meal discounts, and charitable work. Its broadcast channels and times are chosen so that most people will watch or listen. In November 2018, when the NFL season was at its peak popularity, McDonald's is expected to have spent $52.9 million on TV ads in the United States. This shows the importance of the fast-food chain getting the most prominent broadcast ad positions.

McDonald's has a lot of traditional billboard ads, which have the same marketing goals and content as its TV ads. With billboards that range from static to digitally interactive and are placed in high-visibility, high-traffic areas, the company tries to keep its target demographic and other connected consumer groups thinking positively about its brand.

This is a great example of how multiple ways to promote the same goals can make the campaign more successful compared to campaigns that only use one method.

McDonald's also does creative and interesting outdoor ambient marketing. Ambient advertising is when promotional materials are put in places or on things that are very unusual or unexpected or that aren't usually used for advertising. McDonald's is using this type of guerrilla marketing to make more of an impact on customers. McDonald's campaign shows this for its "Massive McMuffin Breakfast." During the whole year of 2010, the company put up big paper takeout bags with the name of its new breakfast item on major streets in New Zealand. The unexpected and hard-to-miss image got a lot of attention from people walking by, as shown by the many photos of the scene people took and shared on social media. This helped promote the McMuffin breakfast.

The brand's street markings at pedestrian road crossings are another example. They are meant to look like fries sticking out of a McDonald's-branded package of fries.

Online advertising helps the brand reach its goals of building brand awareness and creating demand. The information used online is similar to what you might see in a McDonald's TV ad or on a billboard. However, both the language and the graphics are made to work best on the social media platforms used, such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. By asking customers to post pictures of their meals online, McDonald's takes advantage of the growing food photography trend. In fact, between September 2018 and February 2019, 4,9 million logos of McDonald's were posted on Twitter around the world. This made McDonald's the second most pictured brand.

The company also works on search engine optimization (SEO), but its "organic" SEO method does better than "sponsored" promotion. As of December 2019, 90.7% of the search traffic to mcdonalds.com came from natural search results, while 9.3% came from sponsored keywords.

Become a Certified Marketing Expert in 8 Months

McDonald's marketing strategy in the digital medium includes customer interactions through social media like Facebook and Instagram. The customers interact with the brand and with each other on social media. Also, the company offers various discounts and coupons through their social media pages and the company app. McDonald's was one of the few companies that performed well during the 2000s recession. The reason for the success was that the company communicated its strategy to the consumers.

McDonald's digital marketing strategy allowed the company to fight back rumours circulating on social media in 2018. The company got  a Long Term Excellence Award from the Marketing Society. The company responded directly to the allegations that it faced and was able to get its message out in the open. 

McDonald's marketing strategy across the various offline and online methods has allowed the company to maintain its leadership position in the fast-food business. The target audience is families that allow most of the population to feel comfortable at the restaurant. McDonald's marketing strategy across the digital channels helps the company communicate clearly and directly.

If you enjoy studying marketing strategy of different brands then you should make a career in marketing. Digital marketing currently has the fastest growing job market. You can easily learn the correct skills in our Professional Certificate Program In Digital Marketing . Land your dream job of becoming a digital marketing expert! Learn from the best and get placed in a top role by investing in yourself, risk-free — a Simplilearn promise.

Our Digital Marketing Courses Duration And Fees

Digital Marketing Courses typically range from a few weeks to several months, with fees varying based on program and institution.

Recommended Reads

Digital Marketing Career Guide: A Playbook to Becoming a Digital Marketing Specialist

Walmart Marketing Strategy

12 Powerful Instagram Marketing Strategies To Follow in 2021

Introductory Digital Marketing Guide

A Case Study on Netflix Marketing Strategy

What is Digital Marketing and How Does It Work?

Get Affiliated Certifications with Live Class programs

Post graduate program in digital marketing.

• Joint Purdue-Simplilearn Digital Marketer Certificate
• Become eligible to be part of the Purdue University Alumni Association
• PMP, PMI, PMBOK, CAPM, PgMP, PfMP, ACP, PBA, RMP, SP, and OPM3 are registered marks of the Project Management Institute, Inc.

• Harvard Business School →
• Faculty & Research →
• October 1992 (Revised September 1996)
• HBS Case Collection

McDonald's Corporation

• Format: Print
• | Pages: 22

About The Author

Joshua D. Margolis

Related work.

• October 2002 (Revised June 2005)
• Faculty Research

McDonald's Corporation (Abridged)

• McDonald's Corporation (Abridged)  

McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis

• To find inspiration for your paper and overcome writer’s block
• As a source of information (ensure proper referencing)
• As a template for you assignment

Overview of the Case

Definition of the problem, alternative solutions, selected solution to the problem, expected results and rationale for the solution, positive and negative results.

McDonald’s, the first food chain known for its strong performance in a very competitive industry is facing stiff competition from other firms. The firm’s breakfast offerings are not as competitive as they were before due to strong performance by products from other market players such as Taco Bell, White Castle, Dunkin Brands Group, Burger King and Starbucks.

These firms have new breakfast products which have been received well by consumers in different areas they are operating in. As a result, these firms’ improved performance in the industry has negatively affected McDonald’s market share (Jargon, 2014, p. 1).

McDonald’s poor competitive position can be seen through its declining sales and profit revenues in the past six months. This paper is going to discuss the main marketing issues that McDonald’s faces in its operations and how they can be improved to help the firm regain its competitive position in the industry.

McDonald’s weakening position in the industry is due to its failure to come up with effective marketing strategies that respond to the needs of young consumers. In the past, the firm’s breakfast offerings performed well in the market but it has been losing customers gradually to new firms.

Low innovation in the firm has made it difficult for the firm to attract new consumers who are willing to try out the product it sells in the market (Jargon, 2014, p. 2).

The firm has also failed to come with an effective product development strategy to help it sell new high quality products that satisfy consumers’ expectations. As a result, this has affected the company’s competitive position in the market because it has failed to keep up with modern market trends that are crucial for its long term performance.

The firm also needs to improve the relationships it has with its franchisees. They feel that the firm’s marketing strategies are not effective and fresh ideas are needed to help the firm regain its footing in the industry. In addition, they insist that more needs to be done to improve the quality of the firm’s operations in the industry.

The main actors that need to be analyzed are: McDonald’s, its competitors and franchisees. McDonald’s has not been able to come up with important strategic changes to help it maintain its market share in the industry. Other fast food firms have developed efficient market processes that are responsive to current consumer trends in the market.

Therefore, McDonald’s competitors have been able to institute higher operational standards that position them well in the industry (Jargon, 2104, p. 3). The firm has also been unable to develop beneficial partnerships with its franchisees. They feel that it needs to come up with innovative promotional strategies to attract new customers to sample its products.

McDonald’s faces various problems such as: a weakening brand, low sales, ineffective promotions and the inability to keep up with its competitors. The main problem the firm needs to address to solve all these issues is its marketing mix functions. The company needs to review the four P’s of the marketing mix which are: products, prices, promotions and place.

This will help the firm to improve the value of its internal systems of operations to help it attain high standards of performance in the long run (Bradley, 2010, p. 75).

In addition, the firm needs to understand issues related to the quality of service it offers that need to be improved to help it attain its objectives in the industry. This approach will help the firm to focus on priorities to regain its market share in the industry to help it register good performance in the long run.

Product improvements and developments are a crucial part of any marketing strategy. McDonald’s needs to carry out research to find out specific types products that customers prefer to consume for breakfast. This approach will enable the firm to stay in touch with its customers to anticipate their needs and expectations by providing products that satisfy them.

At the moment, the firm has failed to create appropriate menus that attract customers to make them more willing to try out its product offerings (Bradley, 2010, p. 79).

The pricing of products should be maintained at current levels to make customers have positive perceptions about the quality of products they are purchasing. This requires the firm to develop effective customer relationship management systems that increase the value of its products in the market.

Promotional aspects of operations need an overhaul to enable the firm to regain its competitive position in the market. The firm needs to rethink its strategy of offering customers give away products because this is likely to increase its costs of operations in the long run.

The current strategy of offering give away products has caused disagreements between the firm and its franchisees, a situation that is likely to have a negative effect on the firm’s operations in the long run.

In addition, the firm needs to look at the internal atmosphere in its outlets to find out if it is suitable for consumer’s eating patterns (Rue & Byars, 2003, p. 43). It may be compelled to redesign its restaurants to enable them to offer a memorable service experience to customers.

The firm needs to carry out market research to find out new products which can be introduced to improve its performance in the industry. The firm needs to test some of its product concepts in some franchises to find out how they are likely to be received by customers. This approach will enable the firm to evaluate how they are likely to perform in the firm in the long run.

The main benefit the firm will get out of this strategy is that it will be able to create new revenue streams for its operations and this will help to increase its profits in the industry.

The firm will also be in a position to establish relationships with new customers to make them more interested in consuming its products (Rue & Byars, 2003, p. 49). However, the main disadvantage associated with such a strategy is that the firm may end up experiencing losses especially if the new products do not appeal to customers’ interest effectively.

The firm needs to improve the quality of service it offers to its customers. It needs to come up with new ways of engaging with its customers to make them understand the benefits they can get from its services.

The firm needs to rely more on innovative technology solutions to market its offerings and attract young consumers in the industry. As a result, this will enable the firm to understand new market trends and how they affect its long term operations in the industry (Panda, 2008, p. 37).

The benefit of this approach is that the firm will be in a position to satisfy the needs of its customers because it will sell appropriate products that conform to specific market conditions. The disadvantage the firm is likely to experience from this approach is that it may take a long period of time before it yields positive results.

Another solution the firm needs to use is to change its promotional strategies. The firm needs to engage with people in their communities to make them have positive perception towards its operations. It needs to go out and conduct promotions in schools, colleges and other places to encourage young people to try out some of its breakfast products (Panda, 2008, p. 43).

This approach is likely to yield positive results in the long run because the firm will be able to understand how to elicit positive consumer sentiments that favor its products in the market.

The advantage of changing its promotional strategy will enable the firm to attract new consumer segments that are willing to sample its products. On the other hand, the main disadvantage associated with this strategy is that it may increase the costs incurred by the firm in its operations.

New product concepts will enable the firm to regain the market share it has lost to its competitors. The firm should consider using popular accompaniments with its products to make them more appealing to customers. As a result, this will help the firm to increase the value of its brand in the market to take advantage of new opportunities which exist.

In addition, the firm needs to develop new menus that attract consumers to make them more interested in various products that are on offer.

Customers should be given more consideration when new product concepts are developed to enable them to satisfy their needs and expectations (Salisbury, 2014). This approach will help the firm to increase the value of its brand in the industry making it well prepared to capitalize on various opportunities that exist.

The firm needs to differentiate services offered to customers who consume breakfast in its outlets. It needs to come up with new ways of appealing to their lifestyles. Moreover, the firm needs to find out conditions that exist in its restaurants to find out if they satisfy the high standards it has set for itself in its operations.

Customers’ perceptions towards a particular product are influenced by the quality of service they get whenever they consume it. Therefore, the firm needs to come up with ways of ensuring that its customers have positive experiences whenever they visit its outlets to consume breakfast (Salisbury, 2014).

This entails retraining its employees to ensure they offer prompt and high quality services to customers in different outlets. As a result, the firm needs to empower its employees to make them more willing to satisfy customers who visit its restaurants.

The firm needs to rebrand its breakfast service offerings to differentiate them from other products that are sold during the day. This approach will help the firm to direct customers’ attention to new quality improvements in its operations that make it stand out in the market. As a result, this will improve customers’ perceptions towards the firm’s products because they will feel that they connect with them on a personal level.

The firm needs to use focus strategies to increase the value of its important products in the market. In addition, the firm needs to redefine specific customer segments it will target with its new breakfast products. This will enable the firm to find out specific methods it can use to attract them. Consequently, the firm will be in a position to turn around its operations to by increasing its profit revenues (Vrontis & Pavlou, 2008, p. 299).

There has been an increase in the number of customers who are interested in consuming healthy diets that have low sugar and fat content. The firm needs to engage young people and make them aware about healthy diets it is going to offer for breakfast as part of its menu. As a result, the firm will be in a position to diversify its product offerings to enable it to attract new customer segments in the industry.

In the long term, this will help the firm to increase various sources of incomes for its operations to increase its competitive edge in the industry. Many people are conscious about what they eat due to the high increase in lifestyle diseases which are mainly caused by poor eating habits revenues (Vrontis & Pavlou, 2008, p. 301).

Therefore, this approach will help the firm to demonstrate that it takes seriously the health and wellbeing of its customers and as a result, it will be in a position to turn around its operations.

McDonald’s new product development strategy will help it take advantage of future opportunities in the industry. This will allow the firm to appeal to younger consumers to make them more loyal. As a result, the firm will be in a better position to grow its revenues to overcome the challenges it has been facing in the industry.

The firm’s business model will focus more on adapting to market conditions to increase its competitive advantage in the long run. As a result, this will enable the firm to use efficient methods to respond to external market conditions that have caused it to lose its market share to competitors (Marder, 1997, p. 47).

For a long time, the firm has focused more on standardizing processes in different markets where its operations are based. However, this strategy will enable the firm to be more flexible in its operations to enable it to achieve higher levels of service excellence in the industry.

An effective product development strategy will enable the firm to improve quality perceptions that are associated with its products in the market. As a result, the firm will be in a position to increase the value of its brand in the industry by ensuring that its operations focus more on customer service excellence.

More importantly, the firm will be able to institute learning processes that enable its staff to acquire new skills to make them satisfy customers’ needs and expectations (Marder, 1997, p. 52). This will increase revenues obtained by the firm from its operations in the industry. In addition, this will help the firm to share information with its franchisees regarding specific improvements that need to be made.

The rationale for this solution is due to the fact that the firm is losing its competitive edge in the industry. Therefore, this requires the firm to make its external and internal processes more innovative so that it can be well prepared to satisfy the needs of its customers in different markets. In addition, the firm’s current strategy has the potential of causing conflicts with its franchisees who are important stakeholders.

As a result, this solution will enable the firm to improve the relationships it has with its stakeholders to ensure that they understand the importance of its new strategies.

The firm needs to review the manner in which it conducts its operations by coming up with new ways of engaging young consumers (Kotler & Armstrong, 2007, p. 72). As a result, this will enable the firm to develop strong and reliable relationships with them and this will help it attain good long term performance in the long run.

The firm needs to implement effective brand management strategies to safeguard the product life cycle of their current and potential new products in the market. This approach will enable the firm to find out how to regulate the growth of its new products in the market to maintain high levels of interest from consumers.

The firm needs to be careful about fads that are driven by high levels of customer excitement which do not last for a long period of time. Therefore, the new product development processes must be guided by information obtained from the targeted customer segments in the market (Kotler & Armstrong, 2007, p. 75). This will to find out how its new products are likely to fare in the market in the long run.

Therefore, the firm needs to rely on forecasting tools to predict expected changes in consumer behavior that are likely to impact on the performance of new products which are sold in the market.

The firm also needs to be careful about becoming complacent in the industry after it starts to register good results from its operations. The firm should institute learning processes that make all employees and other key stakeholders aware about constant trends in the industry that have an impact on its operations.

As a result, this approach will help the firm to focus its attention on organizational priorities that affect the manner in which it performs its functions in the industry. Therefore, this will help the firm to come up with proactive solutions to various challenges it is likely to face in the industry in the long run (Kotler & Armstrong, 2007, p. 82).

Moreover, it is important for the firm to adopt risk management strategies to protect it against situations that are directly caused by poor financial performance. This will increase the stability of its operations in the industry in the long run.

McDonald’s needs to take urgent measures to protect its market share in the industry. The firm needs to develop new products that can satisfy the needs of its customers in the industry. In addition, the firm should come up with new service improvements to help its clients obtain high quality services from its operations. This approach will improve the firm’s advantage over its competitors in the industry.

Bradley, N. (2010). Marketing research: Tools and techniques. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Jargon, J. (2014, Apr. 20). McDonald’s faces sharper competition in breakfast battleground. The Wall Street Journal.

Kotler, P., & Armstrong, G. (2007). Principles of marketing. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.

Marder, E. (1997). The laws of choice: Predicting customer behavior . New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

Panda, T.K. (2008). Marketing management. New Delhi, India: Excel Books

Rue, L. & Byars, L. (2003). Management: Skills and applications. New York, NY: McGraw Hill.

Salisbury, P. (2014, Feb 20). The globalization of “fast food”. Behind the brand: McDonald’s. Global Research. Retrieved from https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-globalization-of-fast-food-behind-the-brand-mcdonald-s/25309

Vrontis, D., & Pavlou, P. (2008). The external environment and its effect on strategic marketing planning: A case study for McDonald’s. J. International Business and Entrepreneurship Development, 3 (3/4), 289-307.

• Samsung Company: Creating Offerings
• Fashion and Cinema: “Breakfast at Tiffany's”
• McDonald's Corporation Marketing Strategy
• The Apple Company Managerial Marketing
• McDonald’s Company’s Strategy and Competition
• Orlando International Airport
• E-Marketing Plan for an iPhone
• Digital Marketing in the Fashion Industry
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2019, June 19). McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mcdonalds-company-analysis-2/

"McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis." IvyPanda , 19 June 2019, ivypanda.com/essays/mcdonalds-company-analysis-2/.

IvyPanda . (2019) 'McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis'. 19 June.

IvyPanda . 2019. "McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis." June 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mcdonalds-company-analysis-2/.

1. IvyPanda . "McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis." June 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mcdonalds-company-analysis-2/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "McDonald’s Corporation Case Study Analysis." June 19, 2019. https://ivypanda.com/essays/mcdonalds-company-analysis-2/.

MBA Knowledge Base

Business • Management • Technology

Home » Management Case Studies » Case Study: McDonalds Marketing Strategies

Case Study: McDonalds Marketing Strategies

McDonald’s is the world’s largest fast-food restaurant chain. It has more than 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries. Over one billion more customers were served in 2007 than in 2006. Although net income was down by $1.1 billion in 2007, McDonald’s sales were up 6.8%, and revenue was a record high of $23 billion. “The unique business relationship among the company, its franchisees and suppliers (collectively referred to as the System) has been key to McDonald’s success over the years. The business model enables McDonald’s to play an integral role in the communities we serve and consistently deliver relevant restaurant experiences to customers.”

McDonald’s overall strategic plan is called Plan to Win. Their focus is not so much on being the biggest fast-food restaurant chain, rather it is more focused on being the best fast-food restaurant chain. McDonald’s “ strategic alignment behind this plan has created better McDonald’s experiences through the execution of multiple initiatives surrounding the five factors of exceptional customer experiences — people, products, place, price and promotion”. McDonald’s also incorporates geographical strategic plans. In the U.S., McDonald’s strategic plan continues to focus on breakfast, chicken, beverages and convenience. These are the core areas in the United States. McDonald’s has launched the Southern Style Chicken Biscuit for breakfast and the Southern Style Chicken Sandwich for lunch and dinner. In the beverage business, McDonald’s starting introducing new hot specialty coffee offerings on a market-by-market basis. In Europe, McDonald’s uses a tiered menu approach. This menu features premium selections, classic menu, and everyday affordable offerings. They also “complement these with new products and limited-time food promotions”. In the Asia-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa markets, McDonald’s strategic plan is focused around convenience, breakfast, core menu extensions and value. With McDonald’s overall strategic plan and its geographical strategic plan, the company should start to see more positive financial results.

McDonald’s incorporates several organizational strategies. Some of the organizational strategies consist of better restaurant operations, placing the customer first, menu variety and beverage choice, convenience and daypart expansion, and ongoing restaurant reinvestment. McDonald’s plans to “continue to drive success in 2008 and beyond by leveraging key consumer insights and our global experience, while relying on our strengths in developing, testing and implementing initiatives surrounding our global business drivers of convenience, branded affordability, daypart expansion and menu variety”. One of the ways McDonald’s can obtain a positive net income is to maximize efficiency in its restaurant operations while at the same time placing the customer first. With strategic focus on menu variety and beverage choice, McDonald’s is hoping for increased sales and guest counts. With their convenience and daypart expansion initiative, McDonald’s is hoping to increase efficiency in its drive-thru pick up window, and the company is staying open later for those late-nighters who want a quick bite to eat. McDonald’s also has locally owned and operated restaurants which “are at the core of their competitive advantage and makes them not just a global brand but a locally relevant one”. They are in the process of remodeling and upgrading its franchises. The company is also opening up McCafe’s “with the expectation that the gourmet coffee shop would move it closer to its goal of doubling sales at existing U.S. restaurants over the next decade”. A couple other organizational strategies are branded affordability, and the development of their employees starting with recruitment and training and leading all the up to leadership and management .

McDonald’s strategic plan is influencing their marketing efforts by building better brand transparency. They want their image to be recognized globally. They are enhancing the customer’s experience. “Across their markets, they are making is easier for customers to enjoy a great McDonald’s experience. They are introducing drive-thrus to the increasingly mobile populations in China and Russia, while in the U.S. and Canada, greater drive-thru efficiency and double drive-thru lanes enable them to serve even more customers quickly”. In Germany, McDonald’s has a reimaging program that includes adding about 100 McCafes. They are also installing new kitchen operating systems so that they can continue to deliver high food quality . McDonald’s has already renovated about 10,000 restaurants world wide. They want their restaurants to be an expression of their brand. The company is also delivering greater value to the customer with new menu selections. “By serving a locally relevant balance of new products, premium salads and sandwiches, classic menu favorites and everyday affordable offerings around the world, they create value for customers and satisfy their demand for choice and variety”.

Types of marketing mix that McDonald’s use to achieve their marketing goals are longer operating hours, everyday value meals, and optimizing efficiency in the drive-thru. McDonald’s also uses marketing campaigns. In 2007, McDonald’s used the Shrek movie to give children a choice between milk, fruit, or vegetables as part of their Happy Meal. In addition to their commitment with children, McDonald’s is building their brand image “with innovated marketing transporting ideas across borders and using i’m lovin’ it to deepen their connection with customers who love their food and the unique McDonald’s experience”. In the 2008 Olympics held in Beijing, McDonalds offered the Beijing Burger, Carmel and Banana Sundae, and Rice Sticks. They featured nine Olympic and Paralympic athletes on their packaging. In Australia, McDonald’s held a marketing campaign where the people could decide what name to give its new hamburger. The name that won was Backyard Burger. With marketing campaigns like these, McDonald’s is trying to create a better brand image.

Other organizational and marketing strategies are “creating stronger bonds of trust by being accessible and maintaining an open dialogue with customers and key stakeholders ”. The company is reinvesting approximately $1.9 billion into their restaurants primarily to reimage existing restaurants and build new ones. McDonald’s is also moving towards a more heavily franchised, less capital-intensive business model. Although in some countries, such as China, this is not permissible due to governmental laws.

With McDonald’s growing global brand image and its emphasis on the five factors of exceptional customer service, this should help them increase sales and net income. With the initiative of remodeling and upgrading existing franchises, this will give the customer a more pleasant and friendly place to dine out at. With McDonald’s marketing campaign for the 2008 Olympics, they were an integral part of the games and this only enhanced McDonald’s brand image in a positive way. With the recruitment and training initiatives for current employees or future prospects, this will allow McDonald’s to achieve less of an already high turnover ratio.

Related posts:

• Case Study of McDonalds: Advertising and Promotion Strategies
• Case Study: Marketing Strategies of IBM
• Case Study: Toyota Prius Marketing Strategies
• Case Study: L’Oreal Marketing Strategies in India
• Case Study on MNC’s Marketing Strategies: In India, it’s a Brand New Way
• Case Study of McDonalds: Strategy Formulation in a Declining Business
• Case Study of Dupont: Marketing of “Disappearing” Products
• Case Study: PepsiCo’s International Marketing Strategy
• Case Study: Starbucks Social Media Marketing Strategy
• Case Study: Marketing Strategy Analysis of Apple iPad

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

McDonalds Case Study

In this paper we worked on the case study on Mcdonalds marketing case study which is in marketing management........

Related Papers

Melis Yurtbay

The BRIC Nations - Should marketers adopt a similar approach across the four nations? A Case Study of McDonald’s

Journal of Asian Business Strategy

Gaurav Ashwath

The aim of this paper is presentation of the activities of food service companies in the area of social responsibility. In today's business world, there are many strategies being used to run business. Interest of the topic of corporate social responsibility has growing rapidly. Many companies have started to engage in CSR as strategy in order to gain benefits that can give them an added advantage over their competitors. The corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the company's strategy, based on the assumption that business is responsible for the society within which it operates. There have been increasing numbers of companies engaged in CSR. CSR is becoming an important issue in the food service business. Nowadays CSR can drive companies to succeed in business by increasing sales volume and brand awareness and also added advantage over their competitors. For this thesis was decided to choose McDonald's corporation as a case study. This is one of the famous restaurants all over the world. McDonald's has a good reputation in terms of social responsibility. Hence, the significance of this paper is not only to increase related stakeholders' understanding of CSR, resulting in the achievement of long term sustainability, but also fill in the academic gap of CSR, especially for catering business in Poland. The main objective of the article will be to find out, how McDonald's implements CSR towards employees, customers, supply partners and the community. Purpose: The aim of this paper is presentation of the activities of food service companies in the area of social responsibility on example of international fast food chain-McDonald's. Methodology: For this thesis was decided to choose McDonald's corporation as a case study, empirical, qualitative research method. Findings: Since last year's McDonald's has been seen to adopt a more proactive strategy on CSR. McDonald's has set good examples of social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility McDonald's takes part in: animal welfare, corporate giving/Ronald McDonald House Charities, education scholarships, employment practices for, environmental practices, work with Corporate Social Responsibility Suppliers, Corporate Responsibility McDonald's Reports. The evidence presents a case that the corporation is implementing CSR policies as a means to greater profitability. It is promoting itself as a notable corporate citizen and has turned CSR around from a cost of doing business into a profitable enterprise and been commended for it. But, McDon-alds CSR strategies mostly lay in the overlapping ethics/law area. 65 Originality/value: Hence, the significance of this paper is not only to increase related stakeholders' understanding of CSR, resulting in the achievement of long term sustainability, but also fill in the academic gap of CSR, especially for catering business in Poland. The demand for results is related to a poor adoption of CSR in small companies, especially in the gastronomy business. There is a possibility to improve performance with the example of McDonald's as the role model.

Weiwei Huang

MUHAMMAD IMAD UD DIN

pengfei lei

Yuanxin Tian

British Food Journal

Anuththara Wanaguru

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

RELATED TOPICS

•   We're Hiring!
•   Help Center
• Find new research papers in:
• Health Sciences
• Earth Sciences
• Cognitive Science
• Mathematics
• Computer Science
• Academia ©2024

Get alerted any time new stories match your search criteria. Create an alert to follow a developing story, keep current on a competitor, or monitor industry news.

Overwrite Existing Alert:

Don’t forget you can visit MyAlerts to manage your alerts at any time.

Retirement Planning > Social Security > Claiming Strategies

Two Social Security Claiming Case Studies, One Conclusion

Share with Email

Thank you for sharing.

This is the latest in a series of biweekly articles featuring Social Security claiming case studies drawn from the ALM publication “ 2024 Social Security & Medicare Facts ,” by Michael Thomas with support from Jim Blair, a former Social Security administrator, and Marc Kiner, a planning expert with extensive experience in public accounting.

Scenario No. 1: Single Earner With the Option to Delay

Virginia was never married and is not eligible for benefits from any other individual’s work record. She was born in September 1962, meaning her full retirement age is 67, and her projected monthly FRA benefit is $2,024.

Given this straightforward situation, Virginia’s options are limited to filing for benefits on her own work record between ages 62 and 70.  If she delays benefits past her full retirement age, she will earn delayed retirement credits — but when she dies, the benefit ends, and no survivor will benefit from the bigger monthly check.

Key to the claiming math is her actuarially projected death age of 87, according to the authors. There is more than a $90,000 difference in the projected total lifetime payout between the potential claiming strategies.

What the Numbers Show

With respect to maximizing the lifetime projected benefit, the least effective approach would see Virginia file at age 62 in October 2024 for a reduced worker benefit of $1,425. This would give her a projected lifetime benefit of $431,775.

More than $60,000 in additional projected benefits comes from assuming Virginia can rely on other income sources and wait to file for her full retirement age benefit in September 2029, when she turns 67. This approach delivers a projected lifetime benefit of $493,856.

The optimal approach, according to the authors, is for Virginia to wait until September 2032 to file for her maximum benefit of $2,509 at age 70. This results in a projected lifetime benefit of $521,872 — an increase of more than $90,000.

Scenario No. 2: Married Couple Five Years Apart in Age

Another scenario considered by the authors involves George and Joan, a married couple five years apart in age. Given their birth years, George will reach full retirement age at age 66 1/2, while Joan reaches her FRA at 67.

In the scenario, George had significantly more income than Joan, who is expected to survive George by 7 1/2 years.

Troublemakers, Be Warned: AI Is Watching

12 new findings on how workers are saving for retirement: vanguard, morgan stanley sued over low interest rates on client cash.

For Young Widows, the Best Social Security Claiming Choice Isn't Always What It Seems

Listen to free podcasts to get the info you need to solve business challenges!

More on this topic

What Advisors Can Do for Gen Z Right Now

7 Things Advisors Need to Know About Divorce

The ‘Tiresome’ Persistence of the 4% Rule

Why Advisors Love the Retirement Planning Field

Resource center.

Your Digital Marketing Blind Spots: How To Find Them, How To Fix Them

Charting Your Own Course: Discover Five Business Models for the Modern RIA

Are You Earning Your Keep? Why Investors Continue To Work With Their Financial Advisors

George’s FRA benefit is $2,647, while Joan’s is $724, and the pair has as many as six claiming scenarios to consider. These come along with more than a $100,000 difference in the lifetime projected benefits for the couple.

The least optimal strategy for this couple, according to the authors, would have seen George file in January 2024 for a slightly reduced worker benefit of $2,602, while Joan waits to file for her reduced benefit of $509 in October 2024. Eventually, Joan would switch to collecting her survivor benefit ($2,602), delivering projected lifetime benefits of just over $1 million.

A better approach would have seen George wait for April 2024 to file for his FRA worker benefit of $2,647, while Joan waits until September 2029 to file for her FRA benefit of $724. She then, once again, eventually switches to her survivor benefit, delivering about $18,000 in additional lifetime benefits.

A much bigger increase comes from assuming that George waits until October 2027 to file for his maximum worker benefit of $3,388, while Joan waits until age 67 to get her FRA worker benefit of $724. She then switches to the maximum survivor benefit down the line, garnering a total projected lifetime benefit of more than $1.1 million.

So, Is Delaying Always Best?

While these case studies show the power of delayed Social Security claiming in many scenarios, there are particular situations where claiming earlier makes sense — either from a benefit maximization perspective or as a matter of necessity.

For example, a prior case study in this series showed that a couple with a big age gap could potentially benefit from the lower-earning spouse claiming their benefit at age 62 while the higher earner — the older member of the couple — waits until age 70 to claim their benefit. This approach delivers an excess $130,000 in projected benefits of early claiming.

In other situations, people simply cannot afford to delay claiming due to their inability to work beyond age 62 or due to a lack of other income sources that can make waiting for the FRA or maximum benefit feasible. In the end, each couple and individual has to asses their distinct claiming options, and wealth maximization isn’t the only factor in the calculus.

Credit: Chris Nichols/ALM

John Manganaro

NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected] . For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.

Connect with ThinkAdvisor

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

How Retailers Became Ad Platforms

• Sebastian Gabel,
• Duncan Simester,
• Artem Timoshenko

It’s a major growth opportunity — if companies can navigate the strategic challenges.

Major retailers are today, most notably Amazon, are creating and operating their own advertising platforms — and they’re making millions doing it. McKinsey estimates that by 2026, retail media will add $1.3 trillion to enterprise values in the U.S. alone, with profit margins between 50% and 70%. In this article, the authors introduce readers to the main kinds of retail media, discuss three strategic challenges that they present, and provide guidance for effectively managing those challenges.

A rapidly growing number of major retailers are today creating and operating their own advertising platforms — a phenomenon widely referred to as retail media.  Nobody has had more success in the space than Amazon, which in 2023 earned $46.9 billion from advertising, comprised primarily of sponsored ads on its site. This figure exceeds the annual global revenue of Coca-Cola and makes Amazon the third-largest advertising platform in the United States, behind only Google and Facebook.

• SG Sebastian Gabel is an assistant professor of marketing at Erasmus University. His research focuses on developing deep learning for targeting applications in retailing. Prior to his academic career, Sebastian co-founded a retail-media services company that was sold to the Schwarz global retail group.
• DS Duncan Simester is the NTU Professor of Marketing at the MIT Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on marketing strategy, go-to-market strategies, and the use of artificial intelligence and experiments to improve business decisions. He regularly consults with companies on these topics.
• AT Artem Timoshenko is an assistant professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management, at Northwestern University. His research focuses on applications of AI to marketing analytics and customer insights.

Partner Center

About Stanford GSB

• The Leadership
• Dean’s Updates
• School News & History
• Commencement
• Business, Government & Society
• Centers & Institutes
• Center for Entrepreneurial Studies
• Center for Social Innovation
• Stanford Seed

About the Experience

• Learning at Stanford GSB
• Experiential Learning
• Guest Speakers
• Entrepreneurship
• Social Innovation
• Communication
• Life at Stanford GSB
• Collaborative Environment
• Activities & Organizations
• Student Services
• Housing Options
• International Students

Full-Time Degree Programs

• Why Stanford MBA
• Academic Experience
• Financial Aid
• Why Stanford MSx
• Research Fellows Program
• See All Programs

Non-Degree & Certificate Programs

• Executive Education
• Stanford Executive Program
• Programs for Organizations
• The Difference
• Online Programs
• Stanford LEAD
• Seed Transformation Program
• Aspire Program
• Seed Spark Program
• Faculty Profiles
• Academic Areas
• Awards & Honors
• Conferences

Faculty Research

• Publications
• Working Papers
• Case Studies

Research Hub

• Research Labs & Initiatives
• Business Library
• Data, Analytics & Research Computing
• Behavioral Lab

Research Labs

• Cities, Housing & Society Lab
• Golub Capital Social Impact Lab

Research Initiatives

• Corporate Governance Research Initiative
• Corporations and Society Initiative
• Policy and Innovation Initiative
• Rapid Decarbonization Initiative
• Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative
• Value Chain Innovation Initiative
• Venture Capital Initiative
• Career & Success
• Climate & Sustainability
• Corporate Governance
• Culture & Society
• Finance & Investing
• Government & Politics
• Leadership & Management
• Markets and Trade
• Operations & Logistics
• Opportunity & Access
• Technology & AI
• Opinion & Analysis
• Email Newsletter

Welcome, Alumni

• Communities
• Digital Communities & Tools
• Regional Chapters
• Women’s Programs
• Identity Chapters
• Find Your Reunion
• Career Resources
• Job Search Resources
• Career & Life Transitions
• Programs & Webinars
• Career Video Library
• Alumni Education
• Research Resources
• Volunteering
• Alumni News
• Class Notes
• Alumni Voices
• Contact Alumni Relations
• Upcoming Events

Admission Events & Information Sessions

• MBA Program
• MSx Program
• PhD Program
• Alumni Events
• All Other Events
• Operations, Information & Technology
• Organizational Behavior
• Political Economy
• Classical Liberalism
• The Eddie Lunch
• Accounting Summer Camp
• Videos, Code & Data
• California Econometrics Conference
• California Quantitative Marketing PhD Conference
• California School Conference
• China India Insights Conference
• Homo economicus, Evolving
• Political Economics (2023–24)
• Scaling Geologic Storage of CO2 (2023–24)
• A Resilient Pacific: Building Connections, Envisioning Solutions
• Adaptation and Innovation
• Changing Climate
• Civil Society
• Climate Impact Summit
• Climate Science
• Corporate Carbon Disclosures
• Earth’s Seafloor
• Environmental Justice
• Operations and Information Technology
• Organizations
• Sustainability Reporting and Control
• Taking the Pulse of the Planet
• Urban Infrastructure
• Watershed Restoration
• Junior Faculty Workshop on Financial Regulation and Banking
• Ken Singleton Celebration
• Marketing Camp
• Quantitative Marketing PhD Alumni Conference
• Presentations
• Theory and Inference in Accounting Research
• Stanford Closer Look Series
• Quick Guides
• Core Concepts
• Journal Articles
• Glossary of Terms
• Faculty & Staff
• Researchers & Students
• Research Approach
• Charitable Giving
• Financial Health
• Government Services
• Workers & Careers
• Short Course
• Adaptive & Iterative Experimentation
• Incentive Design
• Social Sciences & Behavioral Nudges
• Bandit Experiment Application
• Conferences & Events
• Get Involved
• Reading Materials
• Teaching & Curriculum
• Energy Entrepreneurship
• Faculty & Affiliates
• SOLE Report
• Responsible Supply Chains
• Current Study Usage
• Pre-Registration Information
• Participate in a Study

GoodRx: A Prescription for Drug Savings

GoodRx, which launched in 2011, had created a popular online platform that helped millions of patients across America afford their medications. The U.S. pharmaceuticals market was estimated at $527 billion in 2022. But consumers and health care practitioners often found it challenging to navigate this market and find the best prices for generic or brand-name prescriptions. Even online searches for price and availability often proved unreliable.

This case study explores GoodRx’s innovative approach to cost savings, along with a detailed look at the complexities within the U.S. pharmaceutical supply chain—and offers a closer look at GoodRx’s workarounds to cut the cost of prescription medications. By early 2024, GoodRx had saved patients an estimated $65 billion in prescription costs. The GoodRx platform also helped keep medications accessible, especially to people who lacked health insurance.

Over the years, GoodRx broadened its services to include telemedicine, veterinary medicine, a prescription subscription service, and even the manufacturing of generic medications. These services, however, had not matched the success of the GoodRx prescription savings program. With impending regulatory pressure on the pharmaceutical industry, changes in the company leadership, potential artificial intelligence (AI) applications, and the increased scrutiny of pharmacy benefit managers (PBM) practices, the GoodRx business model was likely to face significant challenges going forward. What would be the company’s next steps and how would its business model evolve? What new paths should GoodRx explore to provide value to consumers?

Learning Objective

• Priorities for the GSB's Future
• See the Current DEI Report
• Supporting Data
• Research & Insights
• Share Your Thoughts
• Search Fund Primer
• Affiliated Faculty
• Faculty Advisors
• Louis W. Foster Resource Center
• Defining Social Innovation
• Impact Compass
• Global Health Innovation Insights
• Faculty Affiliates
• Student Awards & Certificates
• Changemakers
• Dean Jonathan Levin
• Dean Garth Saloner
• Dean Robert Joss
• Dean Michael Spence
• Dean Robert Jaedicke
• Dean Rene McPherson
• Dean Arjay Miller
• Dean Ernest Arbuckle
• Dean Jacob Hugh Jackson
• Dean Willard Hotchkiss
• Faculty in Memoriam
• Stanford GSB Firsts
• Class of 2024 Candidates
• Certificate & Award Recipients
• Dean’s Remarks
• Keynote Address
• Teaching Approach
• Analysis and Measurement of Impact
• The Corporate Entrepreneur: Startup in a Grown-Up Enterprise
• Data-Driven Impact
• Designing Experiments for Impact
• Digital Business Transformation
• The Founder’s Right Hand
• Marketing for Measurable Change
• Product Management
• Public Policy Lab: Financial Challenges Facing US Cities
• Public Policy Lab: Homelessness in California
• Lab Features
• Curricular Integration
• View From The Top
• Formation of New Ventures
• Managing Growing Enterprises
• Startup Garage
• Explore Beyond the Classroom
• Stanford Venture Studio
• Summer Program
• Workshops & Events
• The Five Lenses of Entrepreneurship
• Leadership Labs
• Executive Challenge
• Arbuckle Leadership Fellows Program
• Selection Process
• Training Schedule
• Time Commitment
• Learning Expectations
• Post-Training Opportunities
• Who Should Apply
• Introductory T-Groups
• Leadership for Society Program
• Certificate
• 2024 Awardees
• 2023 Awardees
• 2022 Awardees
• 2021 Awardees
• 2020 Awardees
• 2019 Awardees
• 2018 Awardees
• Social Management Immersion Fund
• Stanford Impact Founder Fellowships and Prizes
• Stanford Impact Leader Prizes
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Stanford GSB Impact Fund
• Economic Development
• Energy & Environment
• Stanford GSB Residences
• Environmental Leadership
• Stanford GSB Artwork
• A Closer Look
• California & the Bay Area
• Voices of Stanford GSB
• Business & Beneficial Technology
• Business & Sustainability
• Business & Free Markets
• Business, Government, and Society Forum
• Second Year
• Global Experiences
• JD/MBA Joint Degree
• MA Education/MBA Joint Degree
• MD/MBA Dual Degree
• MPP/MBA Joint Degree
• MS Computer Science/MBA Joint Degree
• MS Electrical Engineering/MBA Joint Degree
• MS Environment and Resources (E-IPER)/MBA Joint Degree
• Academic Calendar
• Clubs & Activities
• LGBTQ+ Students
• Military Veterans
• Minorities & People of Color
• Partners & Families
• Students with Disabilities
• Student Support
• Residential Life
• Student Voices
• MBA Alumni Voices
• A Week in the Life
• Career Support
• Employment Outcomes
• Cost of Attendance
• Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program
• Yellow Ribbon Program
• BOLD Fellows Fund
• Application Process
• Loan Forgiveness
• Contact the Financial Aid Office
• Evaluation Criteria
• GMAT & GRE
• English Language Proficiency
• Personal Information, Activities & Awards
• Professional Experience
• Letters of Recommendation
• Optional Short Answer Questions
• Application Fee
• Reapplication
• Deferred Enrollment
• Joint & Dual Degrees
• Entering Class Profile
• Event Schedule
• Ambassadors
• New & Noteworthy
• Ask a Question
• See Why Stanford MSx
• Is MSx Right for You?
• MSx Stories
• Leadership Development
• How You Will Learn
• Admission Events
• Personal Information
• Reference Letters
• GMAT, GRE & EA
• English Proficiency Tests
• Career Change
• Career Advancement
• Daycare, Schools & Camps
• U.S. Citizens and Permanent Residents
• Requirements
• Requirements: Behavioral
• Requirements: Quantitative
• Requirements: Macro
• Requirements: Micro
• Annual Evaluations
• Field Examination
• Research Activities
• Research Papers
• Dissertation
• Oral Examination
• Current Students
• Education & CV
• International Applicants
• Statement of Purpose
• Reapplicants
• Application Fee Waiver
• Deadline & Decisions
• Job Market Candidates
• Academic Placements
• Stay in Touch
• Faculty Mentors
• Current Fellows
• Standard Track
• Fellowship & Benefits
• Group Enrollment
• Program Formats
• Developing a Program
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Strategic Transformation
• Program Experience
• Contact Client Services
• Campus Experience
• Live Online Experience
• Silicon Valley & Bay Area
• Digital Credentials
• Faculty Spotlights
• Participant Spotlights
• Eligibility
• International Participants
• Stanford Ignite
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Founding Donors
• Location Information
• Participant Profile
• Network Membership
• Program Impact
• Collaborators
• Entrepreneur Profiles
• Company Spotlights
• Seed Transformation Network
• Responsibilities
• Current Coaches
• How to Apply
• Meet the Consultants
• Meet the Interns
• Intern Profiles
• Collaborate
• Research Library
• News & Insights
• Program Contacts
• Databases & Datasets
• Research Guides
• Consultations
• Research Workshops
• Career Research
• Research Data Services
• Course Reserves
• Course Research Guides
• Material Loan Periods
• Fines & Other Charges
• Document Delivery
• Interlibrary Loan
• Equipment Checkout
• Print & Scan
• MBA & MSx Students
• PhD Students
• Other Stanford Students
• Faculty Assistants
• Research Assistants
• Stanford GSB Alumni
• Telling Our Story
• Staff Directory
• Site Registration
• Alumni Directory
• Alumni Email
• Privacy Settings & My Profile
• Success Stories
• The Story of Circles
• Support Women’s Circles
• Stanford Women on Boards Initiative
• Alumnae Spotlights
• Insights & Research
• Industry & Professional
• Entrepreneurial Commitment Group
• Recent Alumni
• Half-Century Club
• Fall Reunions
• Spring Reunions
• MBA 25th Reunion
• Half-Century Club Reunion
• Faculty Lectures
• Ernest C. Arbuckle Award
• Alison Elliott Exceptional Achievement Award
• ENCORE Award
• Excellence in Leadership Award
• John W. Gardner Volunteer Leadership Award
• Robert K. Jaedicke Faculty Award
• Jack McDonald Military Service Appreciation Award
• Jerry I. Porras Latino Leadership Award
• Tapestry Award
• Student & Alumni Events
• Executive Recruiters
• Interviewing
• Land the Perfect Job with LinkedIn
• Negotiating
• Elevator Pitch
• Email Best Practices
• Resumes & Cover Letters
• Self-Assessment
• Whitney Birdwell Ball
• Margaret Brooks
• Bryn Panee Burkhart
• Margaret Chan
• Ricki Frankel
• Peter Gandolfo
• Cindy W. Greig
• Natalie Guillen
• Carly Janson
• Sloan Klein
• Sherri Appel Lassila
• Stuart Meyer
• Tanisha Parrish
• Virginia Roberson
• Philippe Taieb
• Michael Takagawa
• Terra Winston
• Johanna Wise
• Debbie Wolter
• Rebecca Zucker
• Complimentary Coaching
• Changing Careers
• Work-Life Integration
• Career Breaks
• Flexible Work
• Encore Careers
• Join a Board
• D&B Hoovers
• Data Axle (ReferenceUSA)
• EBSCO Business Source
• Global Newsstream
• Market Share Reporter
• ProQuest One Business
• Student Clubs
• Entrepreneurial Students
• Stanford GSB Trust
• Alumni Community
• How to Volunteer
• Springboard Sessions
• Consulting Projects
• 2020 – 2029
• 2010 – 2019
• 2000 – 2009
• 1990 – 1999
• 1980 – 1989
• 1970 – 1979
• 1960 – 1969
• 1950 – 1959
• 1940 – 1949
• Service Areas
• ACT History
• ACT Awards Celebration
• ACT Governance Structure
• Building Leadership for ACT
• Individual Leadership Positions
• Leadership Role Overview
• Purpose of the ACT Management Board
• Contact ACT
• Business & Nonprofit Communities
• Reunion Volunteers
• Ways to Give
• Fiscal Year Report
• Business School Fund Leadership Council
• Planned Giving Options
• Planned Giving Benefits
• Planned Gifts and Reunions
• Legacy Partners
• Giving News & Stories
• Giving Deadlines
• Development Staff
• Submit Class Notes
• Class Secretaries
• Board of Directors
• Health Care
• Sustainability
• Class Takeaways
• All Else Equal: Making Better Decisions
• If/Then: Business, Leadership, Society
• Grit & Growth
• Think Fast, Talk Smart
• Spring 2022
• Spring 2021
• Autumn 2020
• Summer 2020
• Winter 2020
• In the Media
• For Journalists
• DCI Fellows
• Other Auditors
• Academic Calendar & Deadlines
• Course Materials
• Entrepreneurial Resources
• Campus Drive Grove
• Campus Drive Lawn
• CEMEX Auditorium
• King Community Court
• Seawell Family Boardroom
• Stanford GSB Bowl
• Stanford Investors Common
• Town Square
• Vidalakis Courtyard
• Vidalakis Dining Hall
• Catering Services
• Policies & Guidelines
• Reservations
• Contact Faculty Recruiting
• Lecturer Positions
• Postdoctoral Positions
• Accommodations
• CMC-Managed Interviews
• Recruiter-Managed Interviews
• Virtual Interviews
• Campus & Virtual
• Search for Candidates
• Think Globally
• Recruiting Calendar
• Recruiting Policies
• Full-Time Employment
• Summer Employment
• Entrepreneurial Summer Program
• Global Management Immersion Experience
• Social-Purpose Summer Internships
• Process Overview
• Project Types
• Client Eligibility Criteria
• Client Screening
• ACT Leadership
• Social Innovation & Nonprofit Management Resources
• Develop Your Organization’s Talent
• Centers & Initiatives
• Student Fellowships

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Judge dismisses charges in Nevada pro-Trump fake electors case over venue question

The Associated Press

Nevada state Republican Party Chair Michael McDonald is seen in 2018 in Las Vegas. On Friday, a judge dismissed a criminal indictment against six Republicans, including McDonald, accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state’s 2020 presidential election. L.E. Baskow/AP hide caption

LAS VEGAS — A Nevada state court judge dismissed a criminal indictment Friday against six Republicans accused of submitting certificates to Congress falsely declaring Donald Trump the winner of the state's 2020 presidential election , potentially killing the case with a ruling that state prosecutors chose the wrong venue to file the case.

Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford stood in a Las Vegas courtroom a moment after Clark County District Court Judge Mary Kay Holthus delivered her ruling, declaring that he would take the case directly to the state Supreme Court.

"The judge got it wrong and we'll be appealing immediately," Ford told reporters afterward. He declined any additional comment.

Defense attorneys bluntly declared the case dead, saying that to bring the case now to another grand jury in another venue such as Nevada's capital city of Carson City would violate a three-year statute of limitations on filing charges that expired in December.

"They're done," said Margaret McLetchie, attorney for Clark County Republican Party Chairman Jesse Law, one of the defendants in the case.

The judge called off trial, which had been scheduled for next January, for defendants that included state GOP Chairman Michael McDonald; national party committee member Jim DeGraffenreid; national and Douglas County committee member Shawn Meehan; and Eileen Rice, a party member from the Lake Tahoe area. Each was charged with offering a false instrument for filing and uttering a forged instrument, felonies that carry penalties of up to four or five years in prison.

Defense attorneys contended that Ford improperly brought the case in Las Vegas instead of Carson City or Reno, northern Nevada cities closer to where the alleged crime occurred. They also accused prosecutors of failing to present to the grand jury evidence that would have exonerated their clients, and said their clients had no intent to commit a crime.

All but Meehan have been named by the state party as Nevada delegates to the 2024 Republican National Convention next month in Milwaukee.

Meehan's defense attorney, Sigal Chattah, said her client "chose not to" seek the position. Chattah ran as a Republican in 2022 for state attorney general and lost to Ford, a Democrat, by just under 8% of the vote.

After the court hearing, Hindle's attorney, Brian Hardy, declined to comment on calls that his client has faced from advocacy groups that say he should resign from his elected position as overseer of elections in northern Nevada's Story County, a jurisdiction with a few more than 4,100 residents. Those calls included ones at a news conference Friday outside the courthouse by leaders of three organizations.

Nevada is one of seven presidential battleground states where slates of fake electors falsely certified that Trump had won in 2020, not Democrat Joe Biden.

Others are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Criminal charges have been brought in Michigan, Georgia and Arizona.

Trump lost Nevada in 2020 by more than 30,000 votes to Biden and the state's Democratic electors certified the results in the presence of Nevada Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, a Republican. Her defense of the results as reliable and accurate led the state GOP to censure her, but Cegavske later conducted an investigation that found no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state.

New Case Study: Unmanaged GTM Tags Become a Security Nightmare

Are your tags really safe with Google Tag Manager? If you've been thinking that using GTM means that your tracking tags and pixels are safely managed , then it might be time to think again. In this article we look at how a big-ticket seller that does business on every continent came unstuck when it forgot that you can't afford to allow tags to go unmanaged or become misconfigured.

Read the full case study here .

Google Tag Manager saves website owners time and money. Its visual interface lets them attach tracking tags to their sites and then modify them as needed without the need to call a developer every time. Such tags gather the marketing and analytics data that power growth, and GTM makes them easier to manage, but with strict rules around data privacy to consider, you can't trust it completely; it needs active oversight.

The ticket seller

A case in point that we recently became aware of involves a global company that sells tickets to live events. With global operations it's important to establish who has overall responsibility for a particular function, but in this case, that was lacking. In a culture where the lines of responsibility aren't clear, it isn't surprising that a marketing team outsourced something to an external company because it saw it as a security concern it could offload rather than a marketing issue.

Download the full case study here .

The task was the management of its Google Tag Manager usage. The team may have felt that marketing and growth were their priorities and so this move made sense, but security is one of those strands that runs through everything. The consequence of outsourcing this work was a data breach because the contractor didn't catch a misconfiguration.

GDPR, CCPA, the Cyber Resilience Act , and other privacy-related legislation require companies not to let this happen. They must protect their customers' data and obtain their explicit permission before collecting and sharing it, and because of the misconfiguration this didn't happen. Getting it wrong in this way can be very expensive both in terms of money and reputation, not to mention the fact that cybercriminals have used Google Tag Manager as a vessel for conducting web skimming and keylogging attacks. You can read more about the details of this story in our case study .

How big a problem is misconfiguration?

As we explored the case of the global ticketing company, we became curious about Google Tag Manager and wondered how widespread this kind of problem might be. We wondered how many other companies might be exposing themselves to potential multi-million-dollar class action lawsuits brought by masses of individuals whose data they have shared without permission or against local privacy regulations, and how many might be at risk of attracting big penalties from data privacy watchdogs and industry regulators?

The sample study

We decided to look at a sample of 4,000 websites that use Google Tag Manager. It turned out that they connect an average website to around five applications, and that 45% of these apps are used for advertising, 30% are pixels and 20% are analytics tools. Here are the apps that we found users connecting with Google Tag Manager the most, in order of popularity.

For more information, read the full case study here .

We found that across all industries, Google Tag Manager and its connected apps account for 45% of all risk exposure among users. Overall, 20% of these apps are leaking personal or sensitive user data due to a misconfiguration.

Misconfigurations showed up in the applications below, which account for 85% of all cases:

Oh, the irony!

Ironically, we found that Google Tag Manager itself is responsible for the most cases of misconfigurations that might leak user data and land the website owners who unquestioningly trust it in hot water.

Now, this is not an attack on Google Tag Manager, because it's a very useful and effective tool when handled safely. Our intention is to point out the dangers of not managing the potential risks that come with using it, and to encourage you to read all about the many practical ways of ensuring that your tags behave themselves.

Continuous protection

In considering tactics, techniques, and procedures in cyber, organizations must consider employing a continuous web threat management system, such as Reflectiz. Its digital tag management and security tools give your teams complete visibility and control over tags issuing alerts on any changes to tags (and in fact any code on the website) for review and approval. It satisfies the conflicting priorities of both marketing and security teams, allowing Security to do the gatekeeping without restricting the growth and innovation ambitions of Marketing. Read the full case study to find out more.

Continuous Attack Surface Discovery & Penetration Testing

Continuously discover, prioritize, & mitigate exposures with evidence-backed ASM, Pentesting, and Red Teaming.

Cybersecurity Webinars

Secure your digital identity with these 5 must-have itdr features.

Facing identity threats? Discover how ITDR can save you from lateral movement and ransomware attacks.

Why Compromised Credentials Are the #1 Cyber Threat in 2024

From data breaches to identity theft, compromised credentials can cost you everything. Learn how to stop attackers in their tracks.

Democratization of Cyberattacks: How Billions of Unskilled Would-be Hackers Can Now Attack Your Organization

Survey Reveals Compliance Professionals Seek Quality, Efficiency, Trust & Partnership

Securing SaaS Apps in the Era of Generative AI

Patching vs. Isolating Vulnerabilities

Get the latest news, expert insights, exclusive resources, and strategies from industry leaders – all for free.

• Search Menu
• Sign in through your institution
• Author Guidelines
• Submission Site
• Open Access
• About Briefings in Bioinformatics
• Journals Career Network
• Editorial Board
• Advertising and Corporate Services
• Self-Archiving Policy
• Journals on Oxford Academic
• Books on Oxford Academic

Article Contents

Introduction, background and methods, limitations, acknowledgements, data availability.

• < Previous

Advancing drug-response prediction using multi-modal and -omics machine learning integration (MOMLIN): a case study on breast cancer clinical data

• Article contents
• Figures & tables
• Supplementary Data

Md Mamunur Rashid, Kumar Selvarajoo, Advancing drug-response prediction using multi-modal and -omics machine learning integration (MOMLIN): a case study on breast cancer clinical data, Briefings in Bioinformatics , Volume 25, Issue 4, July 2024, bbae300, https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbae300

• Permissions Icon Permissions

The inherent heterogeneity of cancer contributes to highly variable responses to any anticancer treatments. This underscores the need to first identify precise biomarkers through complex multi-omics datasets that are now available. Although much research has focused on this aspect, identifying biomarkers associated with distinct drug responders still remains a major challenge. Here, we develop MOMLIN, a multi-modal and -omics machine learning integration framework, to enhance drug-response prediction. MOMLIN jointly utilizes sparse correlation algorithms and class–specific feature selection algorithms, which identifies multi-modal and -omics–associated interpretable components. MOMLIN was applied to 147 patients’ breast cancer datasets (clinical, mutation, gene expression, tumor microenvironment cells and molecular pathways) to analyze drug-response class predictions for non-responders and variable responders. Notably, MOMLIN achieves an average AUC of 0.989, which is at least 10% greater when compared with current state-of-the-art (data integration analysis for biomarker discovery using latent components, multi-omics factor analysis, sparse canonical correlation analysis). Moreover, MOMLIN not only detects known individual biomarkers such as genes at mutation/expression level, most importantly, it correlates multi-modal and -omics network biomarkers for each response class. For example, an interaction between ER-negative-HMCN1-COL5A1 mutations-FBXO2-CSF3R expression-CD8 emerge as a multimodal biomarker for responders, potentially affecting antimicrobial peptides and FLT3 signaling pathways. In contrast, for resistance cases, a distinct combination of lymph node-TP53 mutation-PON3-ENSG00000261116 lncRNA expression-HLA-E-T-cell exclusions emerged as multimodal biomarkers, possibly impacting neurotransmitter release cycle pathway. MOMLIN, therefore, is expected advance precision medicine, such as to detect context–specific multi-omics network biomarkers and better predict drug-response classifications.

The advent of high-throughput sequencing technologies has revolutionized our ability to collect various ‘omics’ data types, such as deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) methylations, ribonucleic acid (RNA) expressions, proteomics, metabolomics and bioimaging datasets, from the same samples or patients with unprecedented details [ 1 ]. By far, most studies have performed single omics analytics, which capture only a fraction of biological complexity. The integration of these multiple omics datasets offers a more comprehensive understanding of the underlying complex biological processes than single-omic analyses, particularly in human diseases like cancer and cardiovascular disease, where it significantly enhances prediction of clinical outcomes [ 2 , 3 ].

Cancer is a highly complex and deadly disease if left unchecked, and its heterogeneity poses significant challenges for treatment [ 4 ]. Standard treatments, including chemotherapy with or without targeted therapies, aim to reduce tumor burden and improve patient outcomes such as survival rate and quality of life [ 5–7 ]. However, even for the most advanced therapies, such as immunotherapies, treatment effectiveness varies widely across cancer types and even between patients with same diagnosis [ 8 ]. This heterogeneity is believed to be due to tumor microenvironment heterogeneity and their effects on the resultant complex and myriad molecular interactions within cells and tissues [ 9 , 10 ]. This variability underscores the urgent need to identify precise biomarkers to predict individual patient responses and potential adverse reactions to a particular therapy [ 11 ]. This can be made possible through multi-omics data integration analyses at the individual patient scale [ 12 ].

To assess treatment response, such as pathologic complete response (pCR) and residual cancer burden (RCB), current clinical practice relies on clinical parameters (e.g. tumor size/volume and hormone receptor status), along with genetic biomarkers (e.g. TP53 mutations) [ 13–15 ]. However, these approaches do not fully capture the complex intracellular regulatory dynamics [ 16 , 17 ] or the tumor-immune microenvironment (TiME) interactions that influence outcomes [ 18 , 19 ]. Thus, to enhance personalized cancer treatments, we need novel methodologies that can handle large, complex molecular (omics) and clinical datasets. Machine learning (ML) methods integrating multi-omics data offer a promising avenue to improve prediction accuracy and uncover robust biomarkers across drug-response classes [ 20 ], which may be overlooked by single-omics analytics. This approach can predict patients benefiting from standard treatments and those requiring alternative plans like combination therapies or clinical trials.

The current drug-response prediction methods can be broadly categorized into ML-based and network-based approaches. ML methods often analyze each data type (e.g. mutations and gene expression) independently using univariable selection [ 21 , 22 ] or dimension reduction methods [ 23 ]. These results are then integrated using various classifiers or regressors [e.g. support vector machine, elastic-net regressor, logistic regression (LR) and random forest (RF)] [ 24–26 ] and ensemble classifier to make predictions [ 9 ]. However, these methods often overlooked the crucial interactions among different data modalities. Deep learning methods, while gaining popularity, are limited by the need for large clinical sample sizes to achieve sufficient accuracy [ 27 ]. Recent ML advancements have focused on integrating multimodal omics features with patient phenotypes to improve predictive performance [ 28 , 29 ]. To discover multimodal biomarker, techniques such as multi-omics factor analysis (MOFA) and sparse canonical correlation analysis (SCCA), including its variant multiset SCCA (SMCCA) offer realistic strategies for integrating diverse data modalities [ 30–32 ]. However, although these methods are suitable for classification tasks, they are unsupervised and do not directly incorporate phenotypic information (e.g. disease status) to integrate diverse data types. As a result, they are limited to identify phenotype-specific biomarkers.

Recently, advanced supervised approaches like data integration analysis for biomarker discovery using latent components (DIABLO) by Sing et al. (2019) have emerged to overcome these limitations [ 28 ]. DIABLO is an extension of generalized SCCA (GSCCA), considers cross-modality relationships and extracts a set of common factors associated with different response categories. Network-based methods, like unsupervised network fusion or random walk with restart approaches construct drug–target interaction and sample similarity networks that are effective for patient stratification [ 20 , 33 ]. However, these methods lack a specific feature selection design, limiting their utility for identifying biomarkers for patient classification. Nevertheless, none of these ML methods are rigorous in terms of task/class-specific biomarker discovery and interpretability, and both SMCCA and GSCCA struggle with gradient dominance problem due to naive data fusion strategies [ 34 ]. Therefore, it is essential to develop novel interpretable methods for identifying robust multimodal network biomarkers across diverse data types to advance our understanding of the complex factors that influence drug responses.

In this study, we introduce MOMLIN, a multi-modal and -omics ML integration framework to enhance the prediction of anticancer drug responses. MOMLIN integrates weighted multi-class SCCA (WMSCCA) that identifies interpretable components and enables effective feature selection across multi-modal and -omics datasets. Our method contributes in three keyways: (i) innovates a class-specific feature selection strategy with SCCA methods for associating multimodal biomarkers, (ii) includes an adaptive weighting scheme into multiple pairwise SCCA models to balance the influence of different data modalities, preventing dominance during training process and (iii) ensures robust feature selection by employing a combined constraint mechanism that integrate lasso and GraphNet constraints to select both the individual features and subset of co-expressed features, thereby preventing overfitting to high-dimensional data.

We applied MOMLIN to a multimodal breast cancer (BC) dataset of 147 patients comprising clinical features, DNA mutation, RNA expression, tumor microenvironment and molecular pathway data [ 9 ], to predict drug-response classes, specifically distinguishing responders and non-responders. Our results demonstrate MOMLIN’s superiority in terms of outperforming state-of-the-art methods and interpretability of the underlying biological mechanisms driving these distinct response classes.

Overview of our proposed method for treatment response prediction

The workflow of our proposed method MOMLIN for identifying class- or task-specific biomarkers from multimodal data is shown in Fig. 1 . The core of this pipeline involves three stages: (i) identification of response-specific sparse components, in terms of input features and patients, (ii) development of drug-response predictor using latent components of patients and (iii) interpretation of sparse components and multi-modal and -omics biomarker discovery.

Schematic representation of the proposed framework. In stage 1, multimodal datasets from cancer patients (e.g. BC) were sourced from a published study [ 9 ]. This dataset comprises clinical features, DNA mutations, and gene expression from pre-treatment tumors, alongside post-treatment response classes (pCR, RCB-I to III). TiME and pathway activity were derived from transcriptomic data using statistical algorithms. For identifying class-specific correlated biomarkers, class binarization and oversampling were used to balance between classes. WMSCCA models the multimodal associations across different biomarkers and identifies response-specific sparse components on diverse input features and patients. In stage 2, a binary LR classifier then utilizes these patient latent components for predicting response to therapies, evaluated by AUROC. Next in stage 3, class–specific sparse components are shown in a heatmap, highlighting key signatures (non-zero loading) in colors. Finally, the identified multi-modal and -omics signatures then formed a correlation network, revealing pathways associations with multi-modal and -omics biomarkers for each response class. Nodes with colors in the network indicate multimodal features.

The rationales underpinned of this approach is that effective biomarkers are: (i) response–related multimodal features including genes, cell types and pathways, and (ii) features that demonstrate prediction capabilities on unseen patients. The first stage, a ‘feature selection step’ that selects multimodal features on the generated sparse components based on their relevance to drug-response categories (pCR and RCB-I to III). Features with high loading identified are considered as potential biomarker candidates. The second stage, a ‘classification step’, validates these biomarkers by assessing their predictive power in distinguishing responders from non-responders to anticancer therapy; any predictions indicating chemo-resistant tumors should be considered for enrolment in clinical trials for novel therapies. The third stage, an ‘interpretation step,’ analyzes the candidate biomarkers in a multi-modal and-omics network associated with relevant biological pathways. This step aims to elucidate the underlying biological processes differentiating between drug–response phenotypes.

Stage 1. Identification of response-associated sparse components in terms of input features and patients

Multi-modal and -omics data overview and preparation.

This study utilized clinical attributes, DNA mutation and gene expression (transcriptome) data from147 matched samples of early and locally advanced BC patients (categorized as pCR, n  = 38, RCB-I, n  = 23, or RCB-II, n  = 61, or RCB-III, n  = 25), obtained from the TransNEO cohort at Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation [ 9 ]. The dataset includes clinical attributes (8 features, summary attributes are available in Supplementary Table S1 available online at http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/ ), genomic features (31 DNA mutation genes, applying a strict criterion of genes mutated in at least 10 patients) and RNA-sequencing (RNA-Seq) features (18 393 genes), covering major BC subtypes-normal-like, basal-like, Her2, luminalA and luminalB. Although DNA mutation genes typically represent binary data, we used mutation frequencies to construct a mutation count matrix. Initial data pre-processing involved a log2 transformation on the RNA-Seq features after filtering out less informative features at 25th percentile (in terms of mean and standard deviation) using interquartile range. For integrative modeling, we used the top 40% of variable genes (3748 genes, based on median absolute deviation ranking) from the RNA-Seq datasets. Finally, each feature was normalized dividing by its Frobenius norm, adjusting the offset between high and low intensities across different data modalities.

To characterize TiME and pathway markers, we applied various statistical algorithms on the RNA-Seq data. The GSVA algorithm [ 35 ] calculated (i) the GGI gene sets [ 36 ] and (ii) STAT1 immune signature scores [ 37 ]. For immune cell enrichment, three methods were used: (i) MCPcounter [ 37 ] with voom-normalized RNA-Seq counts; (ii) enrichment over 14 cell types using 60 gene markers, employing log2-transformed geometric mean of transcript per million (TPM) expression [ 38 ]; and (iii) z -score scaling of cancer immunity parameters [ 39 ] to classify four immune processes (major histocompatibility complex molecules, immunomodulators, effector cells and suppressor cells). Additionally, the TIDE algorithm [ 40 ] computed T-cell dysfunction and exclusion metrics for each tumor sample using log2-transformed TPM matrix of counts, which can serve as a surrogate biomarker to predict the response to immune checkpoint blockade. Pathway activity scores for each tumor sample were computed using the GSVA algorithm with input gene sets from Reactome [ 41 ], PIP [ 42 ] and BioCarta databases within the MSigDB C2 pathway database [ 43 ].

Sparse multiset canonical correlation analysis

In this study, lowercase letters denote a vector, and uppercase ones denote matrices, respectively. The term |${\left\Vert .\right\Vert}_{1,1}$| denotes the matrix |${l}_1$| -norm, and |${\left\Vert .\right\Vert}_{gn}$| denotes the GraphNet regularization. The sparse multiset canonical correlation analysis (SMCCA) is an extension of dual-view SCCA, proposed to model associations among multiple types of datasets [ 31 ]. Given the multiple types of datasets, let |$X\in{\mathcal{R}}^{n\times p}$| represent gene expression data with |$p$| features, and |${Y}_k\in{\mathcal{R}}^{n\times{q}_k}$| represent the |$k$| -th data modality (e.g. clinical, DNA mutation and tumors microenvironment) with |${q}_k$| features. Both |$X$| and |${Y}_k$| have |$n$| samples, and |$k=\left(1,\dots, K\right)$|⁠ , where |$K$| denotes the number of different data modalities. The objective function of SMCCA is defined as follows:

where |$u$| and |${v}_k$| are the canonical weight vectors corresponding to |$X$| and |${Y}_k$|⁠ , indicating the importance of each respective biomarkers. The term |${\left\Vert .\right\Vert}_1$| represents the |${l}_1$| regularization to detect small subset of discriminative biomarkers and prevent model overfitting. |${\lambda}_u,{\lambda}_{vk}$| are non-negative tuning parameters balancing between the loss function and regularization terms. The term |${\left\Vert .\right\Vert}_2^2$| denotes the squared Euclidean norm to constraint weight vectors |$u$| and as unit length |${v}_k$|⁠ , respectively.

However, SMCCA has limitations: (i) it is naturally unsupervised, meaning SMCCA cannot leverage phenotypic information (e.g. disease status and drug-response classes); (ii) pairwise association among multiple data types can vary significantly and can lead to gradient dominance issues during optimization; and (iii) SMCCA mines a common subset of biomarkers for classifying different tasks, which diminishes its relevance, as each task might require distinct features sets.

Weighted multi-class sparse canonical correlation analysis

To address the above limitations, here we propose weighted multi-class SCCA (WMSCCA), a formal model for class/tasks-specific feature selection, different from the conventional SMCCA. Throughout this study, we used the terms tasks/classes/drug-response classes interchangeably. WMSCCA includes phenotypic information as an additional data type, employs a weighting scheme to resolve the gradient dominance issue and innovates traditional class–specific feature selection strategies through the one-versus-all strategies into its core objective function. In this study, the underlying motivation is WMSCCA can jointly identify drug-response class–specific multimodal biomarkers to improve drug-response prediction. For ease of presentation, we consider |$n$| patients with data matrices |${X}_c\in{\mathcal{R}}^{n\times p},{Y}_{ck}\in{\mathcal{R}}^{n\times{q}_k}$|⁠ , and |$Z\in{\mathcal{R}}^{n\times C}$| from C different drug-response classes. Here, |${X}_c$| denotes |$p$| features from gene expression datasets, |${Y}_{ck}$| denotes |${q}_k$| features from |$k$| -th data modality (e.g. mutation, clinical features, TiME and pathway activity), |${Z}_c$| denotes |$c$| response class, and |$k=\left(1,\dots, K\right)$|⁠ , |$K$| denotes the number of data modalities. The WMSCCA optimization problem can be formulated as follows:

where |$U\in{\mathcal{R}}^{p\times C},{V}_k\in{\mathcal{R}}^{q_k\times C}$| are canonical loading matrices correspond to |$X$| and |${Y}_k$|⁠ , representing the importance of candidate biomarkers for each class |$C$|⁠ , respectively. In this equation, the first term models associations among |$X$|⁠ , and |${Y}_k$| datasets; the second- and third terms correlate class labels |${Z}_c$| with |$X$| and |${Y}_k$| data modalities for each |${C}^{th}$| class, aiming to identify class-specific features and their relationships; |$\psi (U)$| and |$\psi \left({V}_k\right)$| represent sparsity constraints on |$U$| and |${V}_k$|⁠ , to select a subset of discriminative feature. As mentioned in Equation ( 1 ), to address gradient dominance, the adjusting weight parameter |${\sigma}_{xy}$|⁠ , |${\sigma}_{xz}$| and |${\sigma}_{yz}$| can be defined as:

where |$k=\left(1,\dots, K\right)$|⁠ , |$K$| denotes the number of data modalities. |${\sigma}_{..}$| adjusts a larger weight if the non-squared loss (denominator term) between datasets is small and vice versa.

Given high-dimensional datasets, the model in Equation ( 2 ) encounters an overfitting problem. Therefore, the use of a sparsity constraint is appropriate to address this issue. We hypothesized that gene expression biomarkers can be either single genes or co-expressed sets; thus, a combined penalty is designed for the |$X$| dataset. Therefore, |$\psi (U)$| for |$X$| takes the following form:

where, |${\mathrm{\alpha}}_u,\beta$| are nonnegative tuning parameters. |$\beta$| balances between the effect of co-expressed and individual feature selection. The first sparsity constraint is matrix |${l}_{1,1}$| -norm, which is defined as follows:

This penalty promotes class-specific features on |$U$|⁠ . The second sparsity constraint GraphNet regularization, defined as follows:

where |${L}_c$| represents the Laplacian matrices of the connectivity in |$\boldsymbol{X}$| matrices. The Laplacian matrix is defined as |$L=D-A$|⁠ , where |$D$| is the degree matrix of connectivity matrix |$A$| (e.g. gene co-expression or correlation network). This penalty term promotes a subset of connected features to discriminate each response on |$U$|⁠ .

Besides, neither every mutation marker nor every clinical/TiME/pathways involves in predicting response classes, therefore, the |${l}_{1,1}$| -norm is used on the |${Y}_k$| datasets to select individual markers, i.e. |$\psi \left({V}_k\right)$| for the |${\boldsymbol{Y}}_k$| data modalities take the following form:

where |${\mathrm{\alpha}}_{vk}$| is non-negative tuning parameter.

Finally, we obtained C pairs of canonical weight matrices |$\big({U}_c{V}_{ck}\big)\left(c=1,\dots, C;k=1,\dots, K\right)$| using an iterative alternative algorithm by solving Equation ( 2 ) [ 44 , 45 ]. Detected features with non-zero weights in each class in the weight vectors were extracted as correlated sets.

The WMSCCA method involves parameters |${\mathrm{\alpha}}_u,\mathrm{\beta}, and\ {\mathrm{\alpha}}_{vk}$| |$\left(k=1, \dots, K\right)$|⁠ . Given the limited number of samples, we applied a nested cross-validation (CV) strategy on training sets and evaluated the maximum correlation on the test datasets. Optimal values for the regularization parameters were determined within each training set via internal five-fold CV.

Stage 2. Drug-response prediction using latent components of patients

To predict drug-response categories, we trained LR classifier using the latent components of patients (or raw multimodal features) generated by MOMLIN in Fig. 1 : stages 1 and 2. We used a binary classification scheme, distinguishing pCR versus non-pCR, RCB-I versus non-RCB-I, RCB-II versus non-RCB-II and RCB-III versus non-RCB-III, to evaluate model performance. In addition, we performed analyses with existing multi-omics methods, including SMCCA+LR, MOFA+LR, DIABLO and latent principal component analysis (PCA) features, with LR classifiers. To assess prediction performance for the response to treatment in an unbiased manner, we used five-fold cross-validated performance and repeated the process over 100 runs. The partitioning of data was kept consistent across all models for fair comparisons. The accuracy of response prediction was evaluated using area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC).

Stage 3. Interpretation of sparse components and multi-omics biomarker discovery and their networks

After learning sparse latent components of features across different data modalities using MOMLIN, we identify the most relevant feature based on the loading weight of genes, TiME and pathways, which reveal underlying interactions for discriminating response classes. The larger the loading weight, the more important the pair of features in discriminating response categories. We then use these selected features to construct a sample correlation network, or a relationship matrix based on their canonical weights [ 46 ]. In this network, nodes represent selected features, and the edge weights between two interconnected features indicate correlation or relatedness. The generated network is visualized using the ggraph package in R ( https://cran.r-project.org ). Finally, we prioritize multi-omics biomarkers based on their degree centrality within the interconnected correlation network.

Derivation of response-associated latent components from BC data with MOMLIN

We applied MOMLIN to analyze a breast cancer (BC) dataset to predict treatment response and gain molecular insights. The dataset comprised 147 BC patients with early and locally advanced pretherapy tumors [ 9 ], categorized as follows: pCR with 38 patients, RCB-I (good response) with 23 patients, RCB-II (moderate response) with 61 patients and RCB-III (resistance) with 25 patients. After preprocessing and filtering least informative features, the final dataset comprised 3748 RNA genes (top 40% out of 9371 genes), 31 mutation genes, 8 clinical attributes, 64 TiME and 178 pathways activities ( Fig. 1 : stage 1). Supplementary Table S1 available online at http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/ summarizes overall clinical characteristics by patients’ response classes.

While our proposed framework offers general applicability for identifying context-specific multi-omics biomarkers, this study specifically focused on discovering drug-response–specific biomarkers to enhance the prediction of pCR and RCB resistance. MOMLIN decomposed the input multimodal data into response-associated sparse latent components of input-features and patients. These sparse components reveal patterns of how various features (e.g. genes and mutations) and clinical attributes related to treatment outcomes ( Fig. 1 : stage 1–3), and their effectiveness was evaluated by measuring prediction performance. We assessed the predictive ability of MOMLIN through five-fold CV repeated 100 times. In each iteration, the dataset is divided into five-folds, with one random fold assigned as the held-out test set, and the remaining folds used as the training set. MOMLIN was trained using the training dataset, including detection of predictive marker candidates, and its performance was evaluated on the ‘unseen’ test set. This process was repeated for all five-folds to ensure robust evaluation of MOMLIN’s generalizability. Performance was measured by the AUROC matrices ( Fig. 1 : stage 2).

Performance comparison with existing methods for drug-response prediction

To evaluate the prediction capability of MOMLIN, we modeled each response category as a binary classification problem and compared its prediction accuracy to existing multi-omics integration algorithms. For comparison, we randomly split the dataset into a training set (70%) and a test set (30% unseen data), with balanced inclusion of response classes. We employed LR as the classifier to assess predictive performance of multimodal biomarkers. We compared MOMLIN with four other classification algorithms for omics data: (i) SMCCA, which integrates multi-omics data by projecting it onto latent components for discriminant analysis; (ii) MOFA, which decomposes multi-omics data into common factors for discriminant analysis; (iii) sparse PCA; and (iv) DIABLO, a supervised integrative analysis method, represent the state-of-the-art in classification. All methods were trained on the same preprocessed data.

The classification results showed that MOMLIN outperformed the compared multi-omics integration methods in most classification tasks on unseen test samples ( Fig. 2A ). Notably, DIABLO, the next best performer, was 10 to 15% less effective than our MOMLIN. Additionally, we compared the performance of component-based LR models against raw feature-based LR models to predict RCB response classes. Although raw feature-based models showed improved prediction, their performance was notably dropped compared to component-based models ( Fig. 2B ). This indicates the superior adaptability and effectiveness of component-based models in leveraging multi-omics data for predictive purposes.

Performance comparison with existing methods and detection of informative data combination. All results in the plots depict test AUROC over five-fold CV obtained from 100 runs. (A) Box plots comparing response prediction performance of MOMLIN against existing state-of-the-art multi-omics methods. (B) Performance comparison between predictors based on latent components and those utilizing a selected subset of multimodal features. (C) Comparing AUROCs for the models with different data subset combinations (clinical, clinical + DNA, clinical + RNA and clinical + DNA + RNA) using MOMLIN.

Moreover, to test and demonstrate generalizability of this framework, we applied MOMLIN to a preprocessed multi-omics dataset of colorectal adenocarcinoma (COAD) with 256 patients [ 47 ]. This dataset included gene expression, copy number variations and micro-RNA expression data, which we used to classify COAD subtypes such as chromosomal instability (CIN, n  = 174), genomically stable (GS, n  = 34) and microsatellite instability (MSI, n  = 48). The performance results shown in Supplementary Table S2 available online at http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/ and Supplementary Figure S1 available online at http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/ , indicate that MOMLIN outperformed all state-of-the-art methods tested in classifying COAD subtypes. Moreover, when comparing the raw feature-based accuracies with sparse components-based (features derived from MOMLIN) accuracies, we found that raw feature-based classifier was superior against existing methods ( Figure S1A and B ), but lower than the components-based classifier. This consistent observation supports our findings with BC drug-response performances.

Importance of different omics data for treatment response prediction

To assess the added value of integrating multimodal data for predicting treatment response, we trained four prediction models with different feature combinations: (i) clinical features only, plus adding (ii) DNA, (iii) RNA and (iv) both DNA and RNA. We found that adding different data modalities improved prediction performance across all response classes ( Fig. 2C ). Notably, the models that combined clinical data with either RNA or both DNA and RNA demonstrated superior and comparable performance with an average AUROC of 0.978. In contrast, the model based on clinical features alone had much lower AUROC, ranging from 0.51 to 0.82. These results suggest that RNA transcriptome is the most informative data modality in this dataset. Thus, integrating gene expression with clinical features could significantly improve our ability to predict treatment outcomes in BC.

Interpretation of response-associated sparse components identified by MOMLIN

To understand the molecular landscape of treatment response in BC, we used MOMLIN to model response–specific bi-multivariate associations across multiple data modalities. We observed stronger correlations between RNA gene expression and both TiME ( r  = 0.701) and pathway activity ( r  = 0.868), indicating greater overlap or explained information between them. Conversely, moderate correlations were found between RNA gene expression and DNA mutations ( r  = 0.526), or clinical features ( r  = 0.488), indicating partially overlapping or independent information. These results suggest that multimodal biological features provide complementary information in a combinatorial manner.

When investigating the importance of each feature to predict response classes, MOMLIN identified four distinct loading vectors corresponding to pCR and RCB response classes, highlighting distinct weight patterns for pCR versus non-pCR and RCB versus non-RCB classes ( Fig. 3 ). For example, in the pCR (complete response) components—taking the top five molecular features across different modalities revealed distinct molecular patterns. Specifically, gene expression analysis showed that downregulation of FBXO2 and RPS28P7 inhibits tumor cell proliferation, and potentially may enhance treatment efficacy, and the upregulation of C2CD4D-AS1, CSF3R, and SMPDL3B genes may promote immune response, increasing tumor cell vulnerability and therapeutic effect ( Fig. 3A ). Mutational analysis revealed negative associations of marker genes HMCN1 and GATA3, but a positive association for COL5A1 ( Fig. 3C ). Additionally, tumor mutation burden (TMB), and homologous recombination deficiency (HRD)-Telomeric AI signatures were higher in pCR patients, suggesting high genomic instability compared to RCB patients [ 9 ]. TiME analysis showed reduced immunosuppressive mast cells and extracellular matrix (ECM), along with increased infiltration of neutrophils, TIM-3 and CD8+ T-cells ( Fig. 3D ). Subsequently, the pathway analysis further revealed potential downregulation of the PDGFRB pathway, involved in stromal cell activity and associated with improved patient response [ 49 ], while upregulation of pathways for antimicrobial peptides, FLT3 signaling, ephrin B reverse signaling and potential therapeutics for SARS ( Fig. 3E ), suggesting enhanced immune surveillance and interaction with tumor cells. In summary, MOMLIN reveals distinct genomic landscape with higher immune activity and genomic instability in pCR that characterizes its favorable treatment response.

Heatmaps illustrate the features importance on response-associated components identified by MOMLIN. Each row in the heatmap represents a drug-response class, pCR, RCB-I , RCB-II and RCB-III, with columns representing features across different data modalities. The color gradient indicates feature loading or importance, representing the strength of association with response classes. The sign (negative or positive) of gradient denotes the association directions to response classes. All results in the heatmaps depict an average over 100 runs of five-fold CV. (A–E) represents the response-associated candidate biomarkers detected in latent components in (A) gene expression data (highlighting DE genes), (B) clinical features, (C) DNA mutations (highlighting mutated genes), (D) TiME cells and (E) functional pathway profiles (highlighting altered pathways).

Similarly, in the RCB-I (good response) components—RNA expression analysis revealed that lower expression of genes GPX1P1 and HBB are linked to less aggressive tumors [ 48 ], while those of thiosulfate sulfurtransferase (TST), NPIPA5 and GSDMB were overexpressed, linked to enhanced immune response and therapeutic effectiveness [ 49 , 50 ]. Mutational analysis showed positive association for therapeutic targets signatures TP53, MUC16 and RYR2 [ 51 , 52 ], but a negative in NEB, and CIN scores. TiME analysis demonstrated increased infiltration of Tregs, cancer-associated fibroblast (CAF), monocytic lineage and natural killer (NK) cells, indicating more active of immune environment [ 9 ], with reduced TEM CD4 cells. Pathway analysis further identified downregulation of NOD1/2 signaling, EPHA-mediated growth cone collapse and toll-like receptor (TLR1, TLR2) pathways, involved in inflammation and immune response, with the upregulation of allograft rejection, and G0 and early G1 pathways. In summary, tumors that achieve RCB-I is marked by distinct genomics marker, active immune response, and lower CIN.

In RCB-II (moderate response) components: RNA expression analysis revealed overexpression of RPLP0P9, FTH1P20, RNF5P1 pseudogenes, following accumulation of overexpressed ERVMER34-1, and PON3 genes play an oncogenic role in BC [ 53 ]. Mutation analysis revealed positive association of HRD-LOH, RYR1 and MT-ND4, but negative association of MACF1 and neoantigen loads, in line with previous reports [ 54 , 55 ]. Analysis of TiME features demonstrated increased infiltration of IDO1 and TAP2, with reduced CTLA 4, NK cells and PD-L2 cells, indicating a less suppressive immune environment. Pathways analysis further revealed downregulation pathways of G1/S DNA damage checkpoints and TP53 regulation, highlighting DNA repair issues, with the upregulation of PDGFRB pathway, E2F targets and signaling by Hedgehog associated with cell proliferation. In summary, RCB-II patients display distinct genomics markers including pseudogenes, lack of suppressive immune environment and active proliferation.

In RCB-III (resistant) components: RNA gene expression analysis revealed lower expression of therapeutic target PON3, and FGFR4 [ 56 ], and flowed accumulation of lower expressed lncRNAc ENSG00000225489, ENSG00000261116 and RNF5P1. Mutation signature analysis identified a positive association of MT-ND1, but a negative association in therapeutic targets TP53, and MT-ND4 [ 7 , 52 ]. Neoantigen loads were higher following lower TMB indicate reduced tumor suppressor activity. TiME analysis revealed reduced activity of T-cell exclusion, and HLA-E, with increased ECM, HLA DPA1 and LAG3, suggesting an immune suppressive tumor environment. Pathway analysis revealed upregulation of pathways involved in neurotransmitter release, cell-cycle progression (RB-1) and immune system diseases, suggesting active cell signaling and proliferation, with downregulation of EPHB FWD pathway and nucleotide catabolism. In summary, patients that attained RCB-III, characterized by low mutational burden and an immune suppressive environment, leading to treatment resistance.

Linking biology to treatment response through biomarker network analysis

To further extract multimodal network biomarkers and understand the complex biological interactions in patients with pCR and RCB, we performed cross-interaction network analysis using candidate signatures identified by MOMLIN across different modalities. This analysis included clinical features, DNA mutations, gene expression, TiME cells and enriched pathways, aiming to elucidate the underlying biology associated with specific treatment responses. Figure 4 shows the interaction networks of selected multimodal features for each RCB class. To identify potential biomarkers associated with pCR and RCB response, we specifically focused on the top ten multimodal features based on network edge connections. For example, tumors that attained in pCR, the network analysis revealed co-enrichment of mutations in HMCN1 and COL5A1 genes, particularly in estrogen receptor (ER)-negative patients. HMCN1 and COL5A1 therapeutic targets like molecules encode proteins for ECM structure, and mutations of these genes regulate tumor architecture and cell adhesion, potentially facilitating immune cell infiltration [ 52 ]. We also observed elevated expressions of FBXO2, CSF3R, C2CD4D-AS1 and RPS28P7 genes, alongside increased infiltration of CD8+ T-cells [ 9 , 57 ]. FBXO2 is a component of the ubiquitin-proteasome system, which regulates protein degradation and influences cell cycle and apoptosis [ 58 ], while CSF3R plays a vital role in granulocyte production and immune response [ 59 ]. These gene expression patterns, coupled with increased CD8+ T-cell infiltration, suggest a robust anti-tumor immune response. Furthermore, these molecular perturbations may be linked to antimicrobial peptide pathways and FLT3 signaling, potentially contributing to the favorable outcome in achieving pCR [ 60 , 61 ]. Future work could specifically search for these complex interactions across different molecules to gain more clinically relevant insights into pCR tumors. Supplementary Table S3 available online at http://bib.oxfordjournals.org/ presents the more detailed list (top 30) of the multi-modal and -omics biomarkers identified using the MOMLIN pipeline.

Multimodal network biomarkers explain drug-response classes. The multimodal networks detail the candidate biomarkers and their interactions for each response class, (A) the pCR patients (B) the RCB-I patients (good response), (C) the RCB-II patients (moderate response) and (D) the RCB-III resistance patients. Nodes in the network represent candidate biomarkers derived from clinical features, DNA mutations, gene expression, enriched cell-types and pathways, each indicated in different colors in the figure legend. Negative edges are light green; positive edges are in light magenta. Edge width reflects the strength of the interaction between features. Node size corresponds to the number of connections (degree), and the font size of node labels scales with degree centrality, highlighting the most interconnected biomarkers.

Similarly, RCB-I tumors exhibited co-enriched mutations in MUC16 and TP53, particularly in HER2+ cases [ 14 ]. MUC16 (CA125) is therapeutic molecule associated with immune evasion and tumor growth [ 51 ], while TP53 mutations can lead to loss of cell cycle control and genomic instability [ 62 ]. We also observed elevated expression of TST involved in the detoxification processes and GPX1P1 [long non-coding RNA (lncRNA)] involved in oxidative stress response. The immune landscape of these tumors showed increased infiltration of TEM CD4 cells (adaptive immunity), monocytic lineage cells (phagocytosis and antigen presentation) and NK cells (innate immunity), as well as CAFs. This immune landscape, coupled with potential perturbations in the allograft rejection pathway, suggests an active but potentially incomplete immune response against the tumor, resulting in minimal residual disease.

RCB-II tumors had lower neoantigen loads compared to pCR, both in ER-negative and HER2+ patients. This reduced neoantigen load might contribute to a weaker immune response. Gene expression analysis showed elevated levels of specific lncRNAs, including FTH1P20 (associated with iron metabolism), RNF5P1 (potentially affecting protein degradation) and RPLP0P9 (involved in protein synthesis), along with ERVMER34-1, which can influence gene expression and immune response in BC patients. Numerous studies have underscored the key regulatory roles of lncRNAs in tumors and the immune system. Notably, increased expression of the immune checkpoint protein IDO1 negatively regulates the expression of CTLA-4, both known to modulate antitumor immune responses [ 63 ]. The combined effect of these molecular alterations suggests potential tumor survival mechanisms, including immune evasion and dysregulation of G1/S DNA damage [ 64 ] contributing to moderate residual disease.

In RCB-III tumors, we observed the reduced prevalence of TP53 and MT-ND4 mutations, typically associated with genomic instability and aggressive tumor behavior [ 51 ], coupled with a higher neoantigen load, suggesting an alternative mechanism (pathways) that drives tumor progression. Despite the higher neoantigen loads, increased expression of HLA-E immune checkpoints and T-cell exclusion in the tumor microenvironment hindered effective anti-tumor immune responses. Additionally, the low-expressed genes PON3, ENSG00000261116 (lncRNA) and RNF5P1 are involved in detoxification, gene regulation and protein degradation, respectively, represents an adaptive response to cellular stress in these tumors. Clinical markers indicating lymph node involvement suggest a more advanced disease state [ 9 ]. These findings, along with potential perturbations in the neurotransmitter release cycle pathway, collectively portray RCB-III tumors as genetically unstable, yet effectively evading immune surveillance, contributing to their significant treatment resistance. Overall, further investigation of these interactive molecular networks, comprising both positive and negative interactions offers a more depth understudying of these potential candidate biomarkers for distinguishing treatment-sensitive pCR and resistant RCB tumors.

The advent of multi-omics technologies has revolutionized our understanding of cancer biology, offering unprecedented insights into the complex molecular interactions that shape tumor behavior and treatment response. In this study, we presented MOMLIN (multi-modal and -omics ML integration), a novel method to enhance cancer drug-response prediction by integrating multi-omics data. MOMLIN specifically utilizes class-specific feature learning and sparse correlation algorithms to model multi-omics associations, enables the detection of class-specific multimodal biomarkers from different omics datasets. Applied to a BC multimodal dataset of 147 patients (comprising RNA expression, DNA mutation, tumor microenvironment, clinical features and pathway functional profiles), MOMLIN was highly predictive of responses to anticancer therapies and identified cohesive multi-modal and -omics network biomarkers associated with responder (pCR) and various levels of RCB (RCB-I: good response, RCB-II: moderate response and RCB-III: resistance).

Using MOMLIN, we identified that pCR is determined by an interactive set of multimodal network biomarkers driven by distinct genetic alterations, such as HMCN1 and COL5A1, particularly in ER-negative tumors [ 9 , 65 ]. Gene expression signatures, including FBXO2 and CSF3R were associated with the immune cell infiltration (CD8+ T-cells), which has been previously reported as a key determinant of response [ 57 ]. The association of these biomarkers with antimicrobial peptide and FLT3 signaling pathways suggests a robust immune response [ 61 ] as a critical driver of complete response. Additionally, C2CD4D-AS1, an lncRNA was identified, and its exact role with these complex molecular interactions in BC remains to be elucidated. Future work could specifically search for these complex interactions across different molecules to gain more clinically relevant insights into pCR tumors.

RCB-I tumors, despite responding well to response, were associated with a distinct multimodal molecular signature. These tumors were enriched for mutations in the therapeutic target MUC16 (CA125), known for its role in immune evasion [ 51 ], and the tumor suppressor gene TP53, particularly in HER2+ cases [ 14 ]. Elevated expression of TST and GPX1P1 (lncRNA involved in oxidative stress response) were associated with increased infiltration of diverse immune cells, including Tem CD4+ cells, monocytes and NK cells [ 10 ]. This active immune landscape and the intricate interactions of these signature with the potential perturbations in the allograft rejection pathway, suggests a robust yet potentially incomplete anti-tumor immune response, contributing to the minimal residual disease observed in this subtype.

RCB-II tumors showed lower neoantigen loads compared to pCR, which could contribute to a weaker immune response, particularly in ER-negative and HER2+ subtypes. Increased expression of lncRNAs, such as FTH1P20, RNF5P1, RPLP0P9 and ERVMER34–1, were associated with the immune checkpoint protein IDO1, and negatively regulate the CTLA-4 protein expression, suggests immune evasion and alterations in tumor cell metabolism and proliferation. These molecules altered intricate interactions implicate dysregulation of G1/S DNA damage as a possible mechanism for moderate treatment response [ 64 ].

RCB-III tumors, classified as resistant, were associated with a distinct multimodal molecular landscape driven by reduced TP53 and MT-ND4 mutations [ 52 ], accompanied with higher neoantigen loads compared to other response groups. This suggests an alternative mechanism driving tumor progression and immune evasion. Despite the high neoantigen load which could potentially trigger immune response, these tumors exhibited immune evasion through increased HLA-E immune checkpoints and T-cell exclusion [ 40 , 55 ]. Also, the downregulation of genes like PON3 and the lncRNA ENSG00000261116, along with lymph node involvement, pointed to advanced disease and cellular stress adaptation [ 9 ]. The presence of these complex interactions, including potential perturbations in the neurotransmitter release cycle pathway, could contribute to treatment resistance in RCB-III tumors. Future studies targeting these immunosuppressive mechanisms and exploring novel pathways could offer promising avenues to overcome resistance in this aggressive subtype.

These findings above emphasize the potential of MOMLIN to enable deeper understanding of complex biological mechanism correspondence to each response class, ultimately paving the way for personalized treatment strategies in cancer. MOMLIN also demonstrated the best prediction performance for unseen patients by utilizing these identified sets of network biomarkers. By identifying response-associated biomarkers, researchers can stratify patients based on their likelihood of achieving pCR or experiencing RCB to anticancer treatments, facilitating more informed treatment decisions and potentially improving patient outcomes. Moreover, the identified biomarkers could serve as valuable targets for the development of novel therapeutic interventions and new biological hypothesis generation. However, the clinical translation of multimodal biomarkers necessitates addressing the potential economic burden associated with multi-omics testing. Developing targeted biomarker panels and prioritizing key hub molecules from the large-scale candidate multimodal network biomarkers identified by MOMLIN could be a viable strategy for reducing costs while maintaining predictive accuracy. Furthermore, ongoing advancements in sequencing and diagnostic technologies are expected to make multi-omics testing more accessible and affordable over time.

In conclusion, our study demonstrates MOMLIN’s capacity to uncover nuanced molecular signatures associated with different drug-response classes in BC. By integrating multi-modal and -omics datasets, we have highlighted the complex interplay between genetic alterations, gene expression, immune infiltration and cellular pathways that contribute to treatment response and resistance. Future research in this direction holds promise for refining risk stratification, optimizing treatment selection and ultimately improving patient outcomes.

While MOMLIN demonstrates promising results as shown, a key limitation lies in its reliance on correlation-based algorithms for multi-omics data integration. These algorithms are great at identifying associations, but they can fall short when it comes to inferring causality between different omics layers. This is a challenge faced by most current state-of-the-art methods [ 28 , 30 ]. In the future iterations of MOMLIN, we aim to incorporate causal inference methodologies alongside sparse correlation algorithms to better understand the complex causal relationships within multi-omics datasets.

We proposed MOMLIN, a novel framework designed to integrate multimodal data and identify response-associated network biomarkers, to understand biological mechanisms and regulatory roles.

MOMLIN employed an adaptive weighting for different data modalities and employs innovative regularization constraint to ensure robust feature selection to analyze high-dimensional omics data.

MOMLIN demonstrates significantly improved performance compared to current state-of-the-art methods.

MOMLIN identifies interpretable and phenotype-specific components, providing insights into the molecular mechanisms driving treatment response and resistance.

We thank Dr Yoshihiro Yamnishi and Mr Chen Yuzhou for their technical help.

This work was supported by the core research budget of Bioinformatics Institute, ASTAR.

Supplemental information and software are available at the Bib website. Our algorithm’s software is available for free download at https://github.com/mamun41/MOMLIN_softwar/tree/main

Hasin Y , Seldin M , Lusis A . Multi-omics approaches to disease . Genome Biol 2017 ; 18 : 83 .

Google Scholar

Rashid MM , Hamano M , Iida M . et al.  Network-based identification of diagnosis-specific trans-omic biomarkers via integration of multiple omics data . Biosystems 2024 ; 236 : 105122 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2024.105122 .

Zhu B , Song N , Shen R . et al.  Integrating clinical and multiple omics data for prognostic assessment across human cancers . Sci Rep 2017 ; 7 : 16954 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-17031-8 .

Aly HA . Cancer therapy and vaccination . J Immunol Methods 2012 ; 382 : 1 – 23 .

Debela DT . et al.  New approaches and procedures for cancer treatment: current perspectives . SAGE Open Med 2021 ; 9 : 20503121211034366 .

Rauf A , Abu-Izneid T , Khalil AA . et al.  Berberine as a potential anticancer agent: a comprehensive review . Molecules 2021 ; 26 :7368. https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules26237368 .

Islam MR , Islam F , Nafady MH . et al.  Natural small molecules in breast cancer treatment: understandings from a therapeutic viewpoint . Molecules 2022 ; 27 : 2165 . https://doi.org/10.3390/molecules27072165 .

Emran TB , Shahriar A , Mahmud AR . et al.  Multidrug resistance in cancer: understanding molecular mechanisms . Front Oncol 2022 ; 12 : 891652 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2022.891652 .

Sammut SJ , Crispin-Ortuzar M , Chin SF . et al.  Multi-omic machine learning predictor of breast cancer therapy response . Nature 2022 ; 601 : 623 – 9 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-04278-5 .

Zhang A , Miao K , Sun H . et al.  Tumor heterogeneity reshapes the tumor microenvironment to influence drug resistance . Int J Biol Sci 2022 ; 18 : 3019 – 33 . https://doi.org/10.7150/ijbs.72534 .

Karczewski KJ , Snyder MP . Integrative omics for health and disease . Nat Rev Genet 2018 ; 19 : 299 – 310 .

In GK . et al.  Multi-omic profiling reveals discrepant immunogenic properties and a unique tumor microenvironment among melanoma brain metastases . NPJ Precis Oncol 2023 ; 7 : 120 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41698-023-00471-z .

Denkert C , Untch M , Benz S . et al.  Reconstructing tumor history in breast cancer: signatures of mutational processes and response to neoadjuvant chemotherapy (small star, filled) . Ann Oncol 2021 ; 32 : 500 – 11 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.annonc.2020.12.016 .

Lesurf R , Griffith OL , Griffith M . et al.  Genomic characterization of HER2-positive breast cancer and response to neoadjuvant trastuzumab and chemotherapy-results from the ACOSOG Z1041 (alliance) trial . Ann Oncol 2017 ; 28 : 1070 – 7 . https://doi.org/10.1093/annonc/mdx048 .

Choi JH , Yu J , Jung M . et al.  Prognostic significance of TP53 and PIK3CA mutations analyzed by next-generation sequencing in breast cancer . Medicine (Baltimore) 2023 ; 102 : e35267 . https://doi.org/10.1097/MD.0000000000035267 .

Simeoni O , Piras V , Tomita M . et al.  Tracking global gene expression responses in T cell differentiation . Gene 2015 ; 569 : 259 – 66 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gene.2015.05.061 .

Piras V , Hayashi K , Tomita M . et al.  Enhancing apoptosis in TRAIL-resistant cancer cells using fundamental response rules . Sci Rep 2011 ; 1 : 144 . https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00144 .

Misetic H , Keddar MR , Jeannon JP . et al.  Mechanistic insights into the interactions between cancer drivers and the tumour immune microenvironment . Genome Med 2023 ; 15 : 40 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s13073-023-01197-0 .

Son B , Lee S , Youn HS . et al.  The role of tumor microenvironment in therapeutic resistance . Oncotarget 2017 ; 8 : 3933 – 45 . https://doi.org/10.18632/oncotarget.13907 .

Wang C , Lye X , Kaalia R . et al.  Deep learning and multi-omics approach to predict drug responses in cancer . BMC Bioinformatics 2021 ; 22 : 632 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s12859-022-04964-9 .

Li F , Yin J , Lu M . et al.  ConSIG: consistent discovery of molecular signature from OMIC data . Brief Bioinform 2022 ; 23 :bbac253. https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbac253 .

Yang Q , Li B , Tang J . et al.  Consistent gene signature of schizophrenia identified by a novel feature selection strategy from comprehensive sets of transcriptomic data . Brief Bioinform 2020 ; 21 : 1058 – 68 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbz049 .

Picard M , Scott-Boyer MP , Bodein A . et al.  Integration strategies of multi-omics data for machine learning analysis . Comput Struct Biotechnol J 2021 ; 19 : 3735 – 46 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csbj.2021.06.030 .

Dong Z , Zhang N , Li C . et al.  Anticancer drug sensitivity prediction in cell lines from baseline gene expression through recursive feature selection . BMC Cancer 2015 ; 15 : 489 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s12885-015-1492-6 .

Menden MP , Iorio F , Garnett M . et al.  Machine learning prediction of cancer cell sensitivity to drugs based on genomic and chemical properties . PloS One 2013 ; 8 : e61318 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0061318 .

Basu A , Bodycombe NE , Cheah JH . et al.  An interactive resource to identify cancer genetic and lineage dependencies targeted by small molecules . Cell 2013 ; 154 : 1151 – 61 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2013.08.003 .

Adam G , Rampášek L , Safikhani Z . et al.  Machine learning approaches to drug response prediction: challenges and recent progress . NPJ Precis Oncol 2020 ; 4 : 19 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41698-020-0122-1 .

Singh A , Shannon CP , Gautier B . et al.  DIABLO: an integrative approach for identifying key molecular drivers from multi-omics assays . Bioinformatics 2019 ; 35 : 3055 – 62 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/bty1054 .

Wang T , Shao W , Huang Z . et al.  MOGONET integrates multi-omics data using graph convolutional networks allowing patient classification and biomarker identification . Nat Commun 2021 ; 12 : 3445 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-23774-w .

Argelaguet R , Arnol D , Bredikhin D . et al.  MOFA+: a statistical framework for comprehensive integration of multi-modal single-cell data . Genome Biol 2020 ; 21 : 111 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s13059-020-02015-1 .

Rodosthenous T , Shahrezaei V , Evangelou M . Integrating multi-OMICS data through sparse canonical correlation analysis for the prediction of complex traits: a comparison study . Bioinformatics 2020 ; 36 : 4616 – 25 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa530 .

Witten DM , Tibshirani RJ . Extensions of sparse canonical correlation analysis with applications to genomic data . Stat Appl Genet Mol Biol 2009 ; 8 : Article28 . https://doi.org/10.2202/1544-6115.1470 .

Jeong D , Koo B , Oh M . et al.  GOAT: gene-level biomarker discovery from multi-omics data using graph ATtention neural network for eosinophilic asthma subtype . Bioinformatics 2023 ; 39 :btad582. https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btad582 .

Hu W , Lin D , Cao S . et al.  Adaptive sparse multiple canonical correlation analysis with application to imaging (epi)genomics study of schizophrenia . IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 2018 ; 65 : 390 – 9 . https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2017.2771483 .

Hanzelmann S , Castelo R , Guinney J . GSVA: gene set variation analysis for microarray and RNA-seq data . BMC Bioinformatics 2013 ; 14 : 7 .

Sotiriou C , Wirapati P , Loi S . et al.  Gene expression profiling in breast cancer: understanding the molecular basis of histologic grade to improve prognosis . J Natl Cancer Inst 2006 ; 98 : 262 – 72 . https://doi.org/10.1093/jnci/djj052 .

Desmedt C , Haibe-Kains B , Wirapati P . et al.  Biological processes associated with breast cancer clinical outcome depend on the molecular subtypes . Clin Cancer Res 2008 ; 14 : 5158 – 65 . https://doi.org/10.1158/1078-0432.CCR-07-4756 .

Danaher P , Warren S , Dennis L . et al.  Gene expression markers of tumor infiltrating leukocytes . J Immunother Cancer 2017 ; 5 : 18 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s40425-017-0215-8 .

Charoentong P , Finotello F , Angelova M . et al.  Pan-cancer immunogenomic analyses reveal genotype-immunophenotype relationships and predictors of response to checkpoint blockade . Cell Rep 2017 ; 18 : 248 – 62 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2016.12.019 .

Jiang P , Gu S , Pan D . et al.  Signatures of T cell dysfunction and exclusion predict cancer immunotherapy response . Nat Med 2018 ; 24 : 1550 – 8 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0136-1 .

D’Eustachio P . Reactome knowledgebase of human biological pathways and processes . Methods Mol Biol 2011 ; 694 : 49 – 61 .

Schaefer CF , Anthony K , Krupa S . et al.  PID: the pathway interaction database . Nucleic Acids Res 2009 ; 37 : D674 – 9 . https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkn653 .

Liberzon A , Subramanian A , Pinchback R . et al.  Molecular signatures database (MSigDB) 3.0 . Bioinformatics 2011 ; 27 : 1739 – 40 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btr260 .

Du L . et al.  Identifying diagnosis-specific genotype–phenotype associations via joint multitask sparse canonical correlation analysis and classification . Bioinformatics 2020 ; 36 : i371 – 9 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa434 .

Hao X , Li C , du L . et al.  Mining outcome-relevant brain imaging genetic associations via three-way sparse canonical correlation analysis in Alzheimer’s disease . Sci Rep 2017 ; 7 : 44272 . https://doi.org/10.1038/srep44272 .

Shi WJ , Zhuang Y , Russell PH . et al.  Unsupervised discovery of phenotype-specific multi-omics networks . Bioinformatics 2019 ; 35 : 4336 – 43 . https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btz226 .

Duan R , Gao L , Gao Y . et al.  Evaluation and comparison of multi-omics data integration methods for cancer subtyping . PLoS Comput Biol 2021 ; 17 : e1009224 . https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009224 .

Ponzetti M , Capulli M , Angelucci A . et al.  Non-conventional role of haemoglobin beta in breast malignancy . Br J Cancer 2017 ; 117 : 994 – 1006 . https://doi.org/10.1038/bjc.2017.247 .

Yang X , Tang Z . Role of gasdermin family proteins in cancers (review) . Int J Oncol 2023 ; 63 : 100 . https://doi.org/10.3892/ijo.2023.5548 .

Chen Z , Yao N , Zhang S . et al.  Identification of critical radioresistance genes in esophageal squamous cell carcinoma by whole-exome sequencing . Ann Transl Med 2020 ; 8 : 998 . https://doi.org/10.21037/atm-20-5196 .

Zhou Y , Zhang Y , Zhao D . et al.  TTD: therapeutic target database describing target druggability information . Nucleic Acids Res 2024 ; 52 : D1465 – 77 . https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkad751 .

Li F , Yin J , Lu M . et al.  DrugMAP: molecular atlas and pharma-information of all drugs . Nucleic Acids Res 2023 ; 51 : D1288 – 99 . https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkac813 .

Záveský L , Jandáková E , Weinberger V . et al.  Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) in breast cancer: altered expression pattern implicates divergent roles in carcinogenesis . Oncology 2024 ; 102 : 1 – 10 . https://doi.org/10.1159/000538021 .

van der Wiel AMA , Schuitmaker L , Cong Y . et al.  Homologous recombination deficiency scar: mutations and beyond-implications for precision oncology . Cancers (Basel) 2022 ; 14 : 4157 . https://doi.org/10.3390/cancers14174157 .

Morisaki T , Kubo M , Umebayashi M . et al.  Neoantigens elicit T cell responses in breast cancer . Sci Rep 2021 ; 11 : 13590 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-91358-1 .

Levine KM , Ding K , Chen L . et al.  FGFR4: a promising therapeutic target for breast cancer and other solid tumors . Pharmacol Ther 2020 ; 214 : 107590 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pharmthera.2020.107590 .

Ali H , Provenzano E , Dawson SJ . et al.  Association between CD8+ T-cell infiltration and breast cancer survival in 12 439 patients . Ann Oncol 2014 ; 25 : 1536 – 43 . https://doi.org/10.1093/annonc/mdu191 .

Liu Y , Pan B , Qu W . et al.  Systematic analysis of the expression and prognosis relevance of FBXO family reveals the significance of FBXO1 in human breast cancer . Cancer Cell Int 2021 ; 21 : 130 . https://doi.org/10.1186/s12935-021-01833-y .

Park SD , Saunders AS , Reidy MA . et al.  A review of granulocyte colony-stimulating factor receptor signaling and regulation with implications for cancer . Front Oncol 2022 ; 12 : 932608 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fonc.2022.932608 .

Aghamiri S , Zandsalimi F , Raee P . et al.  Antimicrobial peptides as potential therapeutics for breast cancer . Pharmacol Res 2021 ; 171 : 105777 . https://doi.org/10.1016/j.phrs.2021.105777 .

Chen R , Wang X , Fu J . et al.  High FLT3 expression indicates favorable prognosis and correlates with clinicopathological parameters and immune infiltration in breast cancer . Front Genet 2022 ; 13 : 956869 . https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2022.956869 .

Chen X , Zhang T , Su W . et al.  Mutant p53 in cancer: from molecular mechanism to therapeutic modulation . Cell Death Dis 2022 ; 13 : 974 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41419-022-05408-1 .

Azimnasab-Sorkhabi P , Soltani-As M , Yoshinaga TT . et al.  IDO blockade negatively regulates the CTLA-4 signaling in breast cancer cells . Immunol Res 2023 ; 71 : 679 – 86 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s12026-023-09378-0 .

Sideris N , Dama P , Bayraktar S . et al.  LncRNAs in breast cancer: a link to future approaches . Cancer Gene Ther 2022 ; 29 : 1866 – 77 . https://doi.org/10.1038/s41417-022-00487-w .

Burstein MD . et al.  Comprehensive genomic analysis identifies novel subtypes and targets of triple-negative breast cancer . Clin Cancer Res 2015 ; 21 : 1688 – 98 .

Supplementary data

Email alerts

Citing articles via.

• Recommend to your Library

Affiliations

• Online ISSN 1477-4054
• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• About Oxford Academic
• Publish journals with us
• University press partners
• What we publish
• New features  
• Open access
• Institutional account management
• Rights and permissions
• Get help with access
• Accessibility
• Advertising
• Media enquiries
• Oxford University Press
• Oxford Languages
• University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

• Copyright © 2024 Oxford University Press
• Cookie settings
• Cookie policy
• Privacy policy
• Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

Sign In or Create an Account

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.