After several years of work on a brand refresh, McCafé has revealed its latest campaign which seeks to better connect the McDonald’s sub-brand to its parent company, while maintaining its own identity.

McDonald’s Canada introduced its “Must Be McCafé” campaign this week, developed in partnership with Cossette. The campaign included new packaging for the brand, and is set up to try and better connect with consumers, featuring an ad showing people enjoying a sip of McCafé coffee, set to upbeat music.

The campaign, and the overall brand refresh for McCafé, is connecting the brand to the “bubble of happy” that’s all-encompassing in McDonald’s overall marketing, says Cossette executive creative director Andrew Chisholm.

“We really capture these little moments, coffee culture at its core, and infuse that a little bit with more of the McDonald’s brand tone,” Chisholm tells strategy. “Taking the credentials that McCafé has within their products, the quality of the coffee, but almost giving it a bit of a brand spin as well, which is more writ large McDonald’s.”

Cossette approached the brand refresh from the context that it was losing share in the coffee market, with guest frequency dropping. So the refresh is about readjusting brand perception, Chisholm says, to put forward McCafé’s credentials while appealing to a new, younger audience.

McCafé and Cossette began working on the brand refresh in 2021. The team’s goal was to present the brand in a new way, while maintaining focus on quality and taste in its marketing.

“We really wanted to not overcomplicate what the enjoyment of drinking a great cup of coffee is. We really wanted to show and not tell that feeling, and capture those little moments of pure enjoyment in a way that feels fresh and fun,” Chisholm says.

Jenna Anderson, Cossette executive creative director, adds that in the past McCafé largely focused its marketing on more functional benefits and the credentials behind the coffee’s quality, without as much emotional storytelling that’s more common in McDonald’s campaigns more broadly.

“It felt like it was really a big opportunity for us to take a step closer to the parent brand and leverage so much of that emotional quality that both of them share, but that we didn’t necessarily always spotlight with McCafé,” Anderson says.

The refresh also includes golden arches on the brand packaging to draw a visual connection to McDonald’s, while maintaining McCafé’s brown brand colour, and because the arches almost feel like a sunrise when associated with coffee, Anderson notes. McDonald’s and McCafé also both use one typeface now to better align the visual communication and tone of both brands.

In the past, Anderson says, McCafé felt like it was positioned more premium alongside McDonald’s, but it now made more sense to Cossette to make McCafé feel more accessible, and more approachable in an everyday way to consumers.

“I think that that’s what the general brand perception was already, but we didn’t necessarily mirror that in how we talked about the brand. [In] the visual language, we positioned things on marble surfaces, we had a lot of beautiful propping,” Anderson says. 

“We’ve definitely tried to simplify and contemporize, and make ourselves feel far more friendly and approachable and accessible as a brand.”

The new campaign is being rolled out on TV, radio, OLV, DOOH, digital media, paid and organic social, and merch. OMD handled media.