Mcdonald's marketing campaign 2012

McDonalds Marketing Campaign In a recent campaign, McDonalds has encouraged people to come up with any question that they want answered by writing to the company. This was done in an attempt to distort the concept that McDonalds has always kept everything secret which made people speculate many unfavorable things happening behind the curtain. Although the campaign shows McDonalds’s confidence in its procedures and operations that can only come when a company’s practices are really environment friendly and conforming to the standards desired by the people, yet the campaign can also ruin McDonalds’s image even more if it fails to live up to consumers’ standards in the campaign. Consumers want transparency and high standard of service. People want to take this as an opportunity to clarify all sorts of doubts and controversies that they have been hearing with regards to McDonalds over the years like the processing of chicken waste in the making of McNuggets etcetera. “ Things from beef grades to the pink slime controversy are being questioned, and at first glance it seems as though McDonald’s is going to do something radical about our concerns” (Falconi, 2012).
McDonalds might have achieved the intended aim behind running this campaign had all questions been answered objectively. However, McDonalds has still not confirmed its plans of addressing the concerns of the consumers. Lack of addressing of the questions has made the consumers think that McDonalds is doing false advertising. Many answers are cynical and manipulative rather than simple and straight-forward. Rather than answering the consumers’ questions, McDonalds is trying to find its way out smartly which is as frustrating for the consumers as difficult it is for McDonalds. Many answers are merely correction of the questions rather than answers (Falconi, 2012). The tricky answers have even shaken the trust of those consumers who had placed confidence in McDonalds meals before the campaign.
Consumers are always curious to know more about a brand whether or not they are loyal to it. Any campaign that invites any question from the consumers without any restraint is bound to fail because consumers tend to take benefit of the situation and come up with cheesy questions. An organization has to establish limits somewhere because if everything is made transparent, it becomes very hard to make profits. Every organization has certain secret strategies that help the organization get competitive advantage. Complete transparency slips everything over to the stakeholders and the organization loses those secrets. In McDonald’s case, everything from the raw ingredients to production units, sizing and pricing of meals is a result of McDonald’s strategies that must be maintained to sustain the business. Rather than allowing consumers to ask anything, a more rational approach is to get the business and work processes certified by organizations that are trusted by the consumers. Such strategies include but are not limited to ISO 14001 certification and eco-labelling. This way, the control of business is shifted upstream i. e. to the quality assurance organizations rather than downstream i. e. to the consumers, so the organizations can develop better relationships with and image among the consumers.
References:
Falconi, M. (2012, Oct. 13). MCTHINK. Retrieved from
http://www. marisafalconinutrition. com/mcthink/.