McDonald's Case Study

...

more healthy food. Besides, McDonald’s should get itself involved in more charities events and promote healthy lifestyles in public to maintain their brand image.

I don’t think McDonald’s should eliminate Ronald McDonald’s in its ads. Firstly, Ronald McDonald is a successful brand mascot which symbolizes its brand concepts. More importantly, people emotionally connected to Ronald McDonald, kids love taking photos with him, they love to see him in the ads. Eliminate him will impair McDonald’s brand strength.

2.The merits of the law proposed by France: It gave the companies more choices which means more its more flexible.

Strategy for McDonald’s: Add health messages. This approach is enable to show the public that McDonald’s really concerns about clients’ health and is willing to fulfill its social responsibility. Besides, it a great opportunity to change the “junk food” image of McDonald’s. Adding health messages to the commercials is certainly a good way to improve the brand image.

3.When it comes to public relationship, sometimes it’s not about what the fact is, it’s about how people think about it. Even though there is no evidence that banning food advertising to children can really lead a fall of obesity rates, with the publicity of government and specialists saying how detrimental it is to do food commercials targeting at children, considering the high rate of obesity among kids, companies are under pressures to take some actions and it’s their social responsibilities for food companies to warm people and advocate healthy lifestyles.

4.The problems facing McDonald’s and critiques about its approaches to solve the problems:

1)The growing awareness of healthy issues of people in U.K. especially the obesity problem and people’s reaction to the film Super Size Me. Under this circumstances, McDonald’s U.K. launched a campaign call “Changes”, without the Golden Arches on the ads of this campaign, they also promoted healthier menu items and smaller portion sizes. I think the new menu and smaller portion sizes are smart moves which perfectly fit the topic of its campaign. However, omitting the Golden Arches seemed not that necessary.

2)The market position and market stature in U.K. is not as strong as in U.S., in this case, choose to stick with the “Changes” campaign is worth to do.

3)McDonald’s U.K. doesn’t have loyal customers because their frequent users refuse to admit eating at McDonald’s. Despite of the new menu that contains healthy products, McDonald’s U.K. can be more localize like what they did in Scandinavia, adding more local healthy food in the menu.

4)When they were facing the release of the film Super Size Me in U.k., McDonald’s defended itself by promoting an ad on newspaper discussing the film and claimed that “ What we don’t agree with is the idea that eating eating at McDonald’s is bad for you.” As far as I’m concerned, McDonald’s U.K. Needs to fight back but not in this way. This could hurt its own brand image. Instead of saying its opinion, it would be better if McDonald’s just take some actions to support their statement.

5)The U.K. government calls for food marketers to promote a more active lifestyle. To respond this, McDonald’s U.K. created an animated character callehd Yums to urge “eat right and stay active”. It’s a mutually beneficial solution. Not only can it meet the requirements of the government, but also change the image of McDonald’s U.K. from “junk food” to “healthy food”.

5.Long-range plan: Keep using new character Yum in their commercials to publicize its concepts of health, promote more healthy minded ads to make people think McDonald’s more differently. Be more localized in U.K. or other overseas market, try to build a stronger image.

Short-range plan: Develop more new products which contain less fattening ingredients and calories. Support some health care related charities events, like charity marathon or some other