Why the McDonald Brothers Never Asked Their Customers Anything

Picture a California tennis court after hours, in the late 1940s. The McDonald brothers – owners of a hamburger restaurant - are redesigning their kitchen from scratch on that court. They’ve drawn the layout of the kitchen and all its equipment – counters, cookers, refrigerators – in chalk on the ground. Employees are placed at their ‘stations’ and then take an imaginary order. The brothers time every step of every movement it takes to fulfil that order. If they think it could be faster – more efficient – they erase the chalk marks, redraw them, and run the choreography again. They keep at it for hours. Until they get it just right.

This is a pivotal moment from The Founder (2016), the biopic about Ray Kroc, the man who took the brothers’ ideas and turned McDonald's into the global corporation it is today. To understand the brothers’ thinking, we have to step back to their time.

In mid-20th century America, fast food as we now know it didn't really exist. Restaurants were drive-ins — carhops took your order at the car and you waited 30 minutes for food that often arrived cold. Dishes got stolen. Teens loitered. Families stopped showing up.

The brothers saw this, and wanted to make a change. Yet what's worth noticing is what they didn't do. They didn’t ask their customers, ‘What do you want?’ because they realized people weren't asking for the freedom to choose from 30 menu items. Instead, when they ran the numbers, they saw that 87% of their sales came from three items: hamburgers, fries, and Coke. They realised that customers wanted something fast, cheap, consistent, and portable enough to eat in the car. So they changed their way of working to meet that demand.

It was an insight that produced the now familiar paper-bag and the 30-second-service hamburger stand. No plates, no cutlery, no carhops. Not just the McDonald's we know today, but the blueprint for the entire fast-food industry.

The ‘By Popular Request’ Trap

By popular request, we've developed a new product.

This sounds like a textbook recipe for a successful product-development: ‘We listened to the customers and made a product to meet their needs’. But having spent years watching how products actually get built, I'd argue the opposite: that that sentence is a red flag, a warning of danger.

Why? Because the needs customers can articulate almost always sit inside the edges of what already exists. They want variations on what they already know. It’s a problem illustrated by a famous line from Henry Ford, the revolutionary car manufacturer, who once said, ‘If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.’ 

The products that actually change (revolutionize) markets come from needs the customer hasn't yet identified. So the challenge is this: how do you fulfil a need before it’s been identified? Here are three tactics I use.

Tactic 1: Understand what customers actually want, not what they say they want

This is exactly what the McDonald brothers did. They didn't ask customers to take part in a survey — they observed them. No open-ended questionnaires. Just a sales ledger and a stopwatch. Not stated preferences, but the evidence of actual behaviour. They learned what sold and found a way to provide it. In Japan, there’s a recent version of the same tactic. 

In 2020, Workman, a retailer known for rugged workwear and industrial safety gear, launched a sub-brand it named #WorkmanJoshi (Workman Girls, since rebranded Workman Colors). The trigger for this was a fact uncovered in the sales data: women were buying FineGrip hoes, a non-slip shoe designed for restaurant kitchens.

Curious, Workman investigated and discovered that the buyers weren't chefs or other kitchen staff. They were pregnant women and mothers carrying babies — people who very much did not want to slip on a wet floor or a rainy manhole cover. So Workman came up with #WorkmanJoshi. Not because customers had asked for safety footwear, but because they’d seen it and were buying it. The receipts did the talking.

The McDonald brothers’ chalk drawings, and Workman's new brand, were both grounded in an observation of the same thing: the behaviour of their customers. The McDonald’s customers wanted fast; not a broad menu. Workman’s customers wanted safety; not a nice-looking shoe. Behaviour, not language, is where the customer’s unmet need so often hide.

Tactic 2: Read the mood of the society your customer lives in

The second tactic is to step back from the customer and look at the era they're living in. And its concerns. Consider Yakult.

Yakult is the century-old Japanese probiotic drink now sold globally. Such drinks have been on Japanese shelves since 1935, when they were positioned for those over 80 as ‘good for your gut health’. At the time Yakult was first launched, the wider understanding of how much such health actually mattered to people of all ages was still decades away. But now it has earned its place in the general consciousness, and Yakult has become the well-known product it is today. In recent years, though, its makers have identified a new need.

Sleep.

Napoleon is reputed to have said: ‘Six hours for a man, seven for a woman, eight for a fool’. And it wasn’t so long ago that there was genuine social credit in bragging about how little you slept. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher was noted for her ability to get by on only four to five hours. Less sleep meant you took life and work seriously. That you weren’t a slacker. 

Yet in the last ten years, the value of sleep has changed. It’s no longer seen as a necessary evil, something to be dispensed with as quickly as possible. Now it’s seen as the smart person's choice — something to protect so you can function effectively in a 24/7 world. Getting eight hours’ sleep isn't lazy anymore. It's sensible.

And Yakult recognised this. It caught that shift in society and poured new meaning into an old category. In 2021, it introduced Yakult 1000 to the market, and based it around a specific new promise: Improves sleep quality. With that shift in emphasis, a familiar product became something completely different in the market's eyes. And it succeeded. Massively. Since its launch, Yakult 1000 has become almost impossible to find on shelves. In fact, it’s now so scarce that resellers list it online at a premium price. 

As with the McDonalds, who identified a desire for fast service and provided it, so the makers of Yakult realised that nobody was asking for a probiotic drink that helped them sleep - but yet would actually like to be able to sleep better. And once they provided it, customers lined up to buy it. 

The underlying desire hadn't changed — the meaning of it had. Looking for those changes is what Tactic 2 is all about.

Tactic 3: Look at the old desires that never fade

If a customer has never seen a car, they will never ask for one. Something Henry Ford understood. But here's the part that usually gets missed. The underlying desire — move faster and more comfortably than walking — wasn't new when he made his famous observation. It's been with us humans since we stood upright. Henry Ford didn't invent a new desire; he offered a new solution to an old one with a new mechanism.

For a more recent example, consider AKB48.

AKB48 is Japanese musical girl group founded in 2005 on the concept of ‘the idols you can meet in person’. The group has its own theatre and performs daily, so fans can see them live. This a pointed break with more standard approach of other pop groups, who can mostly be seen on television, and at an occasional live concert. And it has been a massive success: AKB48  are one the highest-earning musical acts in Japan, and one of the top ten best-selling girl groups worldwide.

But if this sounds like a 21st-century invention, it isn't. The concept is at least 250 years old.

In Edo-era Tokyo, in the Yanaka district, there was a tea-house waitress named Kasamori Osen. The ukiyo-e master Suzuki Harunobu painted her repeatedly. Portraits of her sold out across the city. There were even dolls of her likeness for sale. And if you wanted to see Osen in person, you could go to the tea house — and do just that. She was the ‘idol you could meet’ of her day. AKB48's concept is, functionally, 250 years old.

Human desires — from the basic (health, mobility) to the emotional (I want to support an idol I can actually reach) — are much more stable than we assume. What changes is the mechanism that delivers them. Which is why digging into the past is often the fastest shortcut to the next product idea. This is Tactic 3.

Back to the tennis court

Listening to customer feedback is not the starting point of product development. That isn’t enough. What’s needed is for you to watch what customers do. To listen for how society is shifting around them. And to remember and examine old desires that have never gone away. Only when you take these three steps does an unspoken desire begin to take shape.

So the next time you're tempted to write ‘By popular request’ in a product brief — stop for a second and picture a chalk drawing on a tennis court. And remember that while it might have looked like the McDonald brothers were just drawing the outline of a kitchen, what they were really sketching was a desire their customers