The United States has been the sole supplier of Sweet ‘N Sour McNuggets sauce available in Taiwan and the taste of the sauce has become the standard in the country. When COVID-19 disrupted the global supply chain, causing shipments of the sauce stuck at sea with no immediate release in sight, McDonald’s Taiwan had to place orders from nearby countries which also manufacture the sauce following the same global recipe.

However, for those McNuggets connoisseurs, no slightest deviation in taste can escape their taste radars, and no such sauce replacement was acceptable even with the best intentions. They made their dissatisfaction and outcry very public and social; among them some went as far as vowing to boycott McNuggets.

Before things culminated into an unintended PR disaster, McDonald’s Taiwan must quickly mitigate this public uproar to avoid lost sales.

Time was of the essence as the sauce outcry was spreading like wildfire. Utilizing CrowdTangle, we noticed that a type of government public announcement on Facebook, in the form of a thank you note, always received overwhelming numbers of positive responses.

That became our inspiration. At the height of its COVID battle, Taiwan was confronted with a serious vaccine shortage due to its peculiar international status. So whenever another country donated its vaccines to Taiwan, the government would publish a thank you note on social media to show national gratitude towards the donor countries.

By analogy, for Taiwan to receive Sweet ‘N Sour sauce from non-U.S. countries when in need is like receiving lifesaving vaccines from the country’s allies. Let’s appreciate non-U.S. Sweet ‘N Sour sauce just like we do for the vaccines, by publishing a thank you note for non-U.S. Sweet ‘N Sour McNuggets sauce!

With CrowdTangle, a social listening tool powered by Facebook and Natural Language Processing AI, we analyzed the comments of each of the Taiwanese government’s social media posts published during the COVID-19 pandemic and picked out the posts with the highest numbers of positive responses – which turned out to be public announcements about vaccine donation arrivals from Taiwan’s unofficial ally countries.

To engage with all of our Sweet ‘N Sour Sauce connoisseurs in this conversation, we chose to run the campaign on Facebook, the social media platform where most cultural discussions and social debates happened online in Taiwan.

Our “Thank You Note for the Sweet ‘N Sour Sauce” post was to nip this crisis in its bud through demonstrating Taiwan’s appreciation towards those who have helped us during this trying time. To do that, the composition of the post mimicked the style of the government’s vaccine thank you note down to the last detail with some twists, and made use of a mix of verbal and symbolic elements, including: a huge cargo ship, friendly and grateful McDonald’s Taiwan staff, pallets of Sweet ‘N Sour sauce from other countries, and a big “Thank you Korea for the sauce!”

We were urgent in our execution of the task. “Thank You Note for the Sweet ‘N Sour Sauce” was published soon after complaints about non-U.S. Sweet ‘N Sour sauce started to spread.

Within 24 hours, our “Thank You for the Sweet ’N Sour Sauce” post received over 9K+ likes and 6K comments, among which 99.8% of the comments were positive responses.

With zero media budget, the post was seen by 438,965 people on their Facebook feeds, with an interaction rate 3 times higher than other posts published during the same time frame. Additionally, 129 news outlets reported the story voluntarily.

All this was equivalent to 1.6 million U.S. dollars in media value.

Most importantly, with this one social post we defused a brewing PR disaster and turned the situation around. In the end, the sales of McNuggets saw a 30% YoY growth.