One thing that’s mind-blowing is just how much of a presence McDonald’s has in the entire world.
In the United States alone (Except for Montpelier, Vermont), they have over 14,000 restaurants. That’s about 4,000 more than the number of hospitals established countrywide.
One interesting thing I recently learned about them is how they get us hooked into their world at a young age.
Listen to this.
There was an article written two months ago on Mashed titled, “The Dangerous Truth Lurking Inside Every McDonald’s Happy Meal“ where a neuroscientist named Dr. Nicole Avena dove deep into the psychology of McDonald’s Happy Meals.
To keep things short and sweet, I’ll condense the article into a few lines.
The entire goal is to associate happiness with their food, and that basically creates an effect in the brain that’s similar to drug addiction. They do that with children by giving toys along with the food, and since children naturally love toys, they associate the happiness of toys with McDonald’s food.
And it works
There’s a reason why even though McDonald’s is a fast food business, they’re considered the largest toy distributor worldwide, distributing over 1.5 billion toys a year.
Some people even say that their golden M is more recognized than the holy cross.
It’s crazy.
But regardless of how grim this sounds, there’s a valuable lesson to learn here.
Getting people hooked on something early, as in, as soon as they’re first introduced to it, they’re very likely to stick around for the long term.
That applies to a lot of things. Email is no exception.
If you get your subscribers to realize that your emails are valuable and fun to read, then I can almost guarantee that they’ll stay on your list for a good while.
And if you want to learn how to write those valuable and fun to read emails that’ll get your subscribers almost addicted to reading them, How to Become an Email Titan teaches you just that.
You can learn more about the book here.