Problem description:
Information about McDonald's
Analysis:
Born in 1955, McDonald's fast food chain has developed into a multinational company with 30,000 branches around the world. McDonald's is the world's first brand in the catering industry. At the beginning of the year, McDonald's ranked second in the top 100 of the world's most influential brands in 2003 launched by the world brand laboratory, an internationally renowned brand research institution.
The success of McDonald's is due to its founder's creation of a business model that meets the requirements of the times, and its rapid replication and expansion by formulating unified and standardized standards. In the 1960s and 1970s, the United States entered the stage of rapid economic development, people's life and work accelerated, and the time for eating became shorter and shorter. Especially after individuals own a large number of cars, there is a demand for fast food on the way. McDonald's fast food restaurants set up at some airports and expressway intersections meet people's needs. With the rapid development of American economy, McDonald's has achieved great success, which has certain political and cultural significance. People think it represents the national image of the United States. At the same time, being able to eat at McDonald's is regarded as one of the lifestyle characteristics of the middle class. In the early development process, McDonald's gradually formed a CI system with strong American CI theory characteristics, with red and yellow as the basic tone and M as the brand symbol. The brand connotation of McDonald's includes its product quality, product market positioning, brand culture, product standardization production and quality assurance mechanism, brand image promotion, franchise market expansion model and so on. With its unique and successful business model, McDonald's won the first place in the world catering industry, which attracted strong attention from the world and became a hot topic that people talked about, enabling the brand to spread rapidly. Many people knew about McDonald's in books and movies before they met it, so when McDonald's entered a new market, it was often crowded with customers. For example, in China, when McDonald's landed in Beijing and Shanghai, more than 1 10,000 customers visited the single store that day. In contrast, KFC is not so lucky. As far as brand influence is concerned, it has always been in the shadow of McDonald's aura, highlighting the different opportunities of the boss and the second child.
With the end of the industrial age and the change of people's cultural psychology, the commercial image of McDonald's has attracted many criticisms. In order to attract customers, McDonald's takes children as the main target group and establishes the humorous image of McDonald's uncle. It is this wrong positioning that makes McDonald's performance decline continuously from 1998, and its stock has shrunk by 70% in a few years. From the second half of 2003, McDonald's began to focus on teenagers.
As a world-class brand giant, McDonald's has spent a lot of money on brand communication, but there are also many failures due to improper operation. The fundamental reason is that the enterprise itself ignores the psychological research of consumers, forcibly instills information that it thinks is valuable to consumers, and ignores the psychological reaction of consumers. To paraphrase a classic saying once said by an American entrepreneur, "I know that half of my advertising expenses are wasted, but unfortunately I still don't know which half", half or more of McDonald's advertising expenses are wasted on complacency and self-appreciation.
Unify global publicity strategies, ignoring regional and national differences.
As a multinational company with extensive influence in the world, McDonald's naturally adopts indiscriminate brand promotion strategy, which can certainly gain scale advantage, but due to the differences in culture, psychology and aesthetic customs of different countries, the effect is often unsatisfactory. For example, there are a lot of funny scenes in McDonald's commercials, which may conform to the appreciation habits of some American audiences, but may not be suitable for rational and pragmatic oriental consumers; McDonald's employs some big-name sports stars as brand spokespersons. These stars and their sports may be sought after by many people in America, but they may not be popular in other countries. McDonald's fast food restaurants in developed countries in Europe and America may only be low-end restaurants, with low-income consumers such as blue-collar workers, but in developing countries they are high-end restaurants, and the patrons are mostly white-collar workers with higher income and higher education. Obviously, their values and aesthetic habits will be different. Different races have different tastes. The food in McDonald's is mainly beef, while orientals are more interested in chicken. Even in McDonald's, the sales volume of chicken is seven times that of beef, which is an embarrassing fact that operators do not want to face. In the process of brand promotion, McDonald's intentionally or unintentionally exaggerates American cultural ideas and values, which has aroused the resentment of people in some countries with strong national consciousness. The stubborn global unification strategy is the fundamental reason why it encounters * * * in some countries and restricts its global expansion.
Brand positioning is not accurate, and publicity pays attention to one thing and one thing.
For a long time, McDonald's has targeted children. To this end, they created the image of Uncle McDonald, set up a children's playground in the restaurant, created a large number of cartoon characters and games through literary works and electronic technology, and often sent people to distribute small gifts with the M logo to children in parks and kindergartens, hoping to attract children-centered family consumers. Although the promotion was wonderful, the result was disappointing, and the proportion of children among customers was surprisingly low. The reason is that children have no self-consumption ability and have very limited influence on family consumption decisions. The harm of this strategy was only recognized by the management after McDonald's gradually stepped into trouble, which made them determined to shift the focus of publicity to teenagers. In addition, McDonald's, as a service organization engaged in providing convenient fast food, is the most obvious manifestation of its improper grasp of its own positioning and consumer positioning in order to diversify its operations and operate children's wear, which is far from its brand attributes.
The advertising concept is outdated and the advertising effect is poor.
The advertising concept of McDonald's still stays in the expression of VI (visual CI) symbols instilled by strong American characteristics and almost the same business information, expressing the funny unfolding plot of western plus simple commodity promotion information. For example, in a TV advertisement, there is a couple sitting with a child who blows up a balloon. When the balloon became bigger, he lifted his body and his father caught him. Narrator: This is not surprising. Because of McDonald's, the double cheeseburger is only six yuan. This kind of funny advertisement, which seems to be creative and unique, can win the audience's curiosity occasionally, but it is not surprising that there are many similar advertisements. After all, being funny is not humor, and being funny is different from being funny. In the famous advertisement for baby swing, a baby sits on the swing. The baby grinned when the swing approached the window, and cried when the swing moved away from the window. At this time, when the camera turned, the audience saw a yellow M sign of McDonald's outside the window. Seeing this advertisement, we can't help asking, will a baby who has never eaten or eaten McDonald's know something about McDonald's? Obviously, in order to pursue the effect of grandstanding, the creator ignores the inherent logic of the advertising plot, while the baby who laughs when he sees M and cries when he doesn't see it is described as a small animal with only conditioned reflex. "More choices, more happiness" is the brand promise and experience that McDonald's advertisements want to convey, but it can't achieve the expected effect only through the accumulation of some funny plots. Although individual advertisements of McDonald's are creative, unique and novel, they lack depth as a whole. Although it can improve brand awareness and achieve the role of strengthening tips, it is not helpful to enhance brand image and improve brand loyalty and preference. It should be emphasized that the American CI theory, which focuses on strengthening the visual recognition system, has been proved to be unsuitable for Asians, while the Japanese CI system and mind identity CI system are more likely to succeed.
Ignoring consumers' feelings and lacking crisis public relations strategy.
"Customer is God" and "Customer satisfaction" seem to be too mediocre slogans, but "improving customer satisfaction" is indeed the highest business purpose of world-class companies today. Surprisingly, we found that McDonald's doesn't care much about whether customers are satisfied or not. There is an online survey on McDonald's satisfaction on the famous TOM Finance website, and the results are surprising:
6050 votes were very dissatisfied, accounting for 41.31%; That the general 5563 votes, accounting for 37.98%; 3034 votes think so, accounting for 20.7 1%. Only more than 20% of McDonald's customers are basically satisfied with it, which shows that although its brand awareness is high, its reputation and loyalty are low. Restaurant is the most basic and important place for customers to experience and communicate directly with brands. If the customer's consumption experience is far from their expectations, then no matter how well your brand is promoted, it will no longer work for them. Recently, there are many examples of customers complaining about McDonald's, such as "black tea disinfection water incident", "toxic oil leakage incident" and "customer bleeding incident" widely reported by the media. What has aroused public concern is not only that an internationally renowned enterprise like McDonald's should have such a vicious incident, but also that McDonald's is arrogant and rude when dealing with customer complaints. From a professional point of view, McDonald's avoidance of the Committee in response to the incident shows the shortcomings of its crisis public relations ability, which is very fatal to a well-known brand.
Can McDonald's be transformed and rejuvenated?
In the face of declining performance year after year, McDonald's tried many methods, but most of them failed because of unsatisfactory results. Repositioning the target group from children to teenagers is the biggest turning point in the transformation of McDonald's marketing strategy. It is undoubtedly correct to target teenagers, because teenagers have always supported more than half of McDonald's. In September, 2003, McDonald's brand was renewed all over the world. On September 25th, McDonald's brand LOGO, slogan, personality, TV advertisement, theme song and staff uniform were completely updated in China. Employees in more than 560 McDonald's stores in China took off their traditional clothes, put on black or red sports T-shirts and baseball caps. The "Laugh often and try McDonald's", which has lasted for nearly 50 years, has been completely updated to "I like it", and the fashionable and modern values have replaced the brand concept of "warmth" of McDonald's in the past. In order to cater to the psychological characteristics of the target group, which worships stars, pursues fashion trends and is slightly rebellious, McDonald's played a big sports card, not only sponsoring the Olympic Games, but also inviting Yao Ming and Wang Leehom as its spokespersons. This change is very correct from the overall strategy, but it is not satisfactory in actual implementation.
First of all, is it reasonable for McDonald's standard colors to change from golden yellow and red to golden yellow and black? Teenagers have the psychological characteristics of being unconventional and rebellious, and turning red into black is to express and cater to this psychological characteristic. Black can show otherness and magic, but black is not a positive color, it often represents destruction and evil. In literary and artistic works, we can easily find that many demons and schemers are often marked with black marks. The tendency of rebellion and even destruction is a part of the psychological characteristics of teenagers during their growth. Taking black as the standard color will strengthen teenagers' rebellious psychology. From the banning of the TV series Meteor Garden, we can easily draw a conclusion that it is unacceptable for society to cater to some shortcomings in teenagers' personality. For an international enterprise based on long-term development, McDonald's should obviously consider the relationship between business and social morality.
Secondly, as a service organization providing fast food, McDonald's brand attributes are different from general fast-moving consumer goods and sporting goods. Whether it is the best choice to tie sports together and whether it is the most appropriate choice to hire sports stars remains to be discussed. In the online survey of McDonald's website about the people who have the greatest influence on customers, the author got arguments to support his view: 43,560 people participated in the voting, and the people who thought that they had the greatest influence were: parents: 43.55438+04%, 18955 votes; Movie stars/singers: 6.42 1%, 2797 votes; Athletes: 6.053%, 2637 votes; Teachers: 26.003%, 1 1327 votes; Politicians: 6.046%2634 votes, others1.960% 5210 votes. It can be seen that most McDonald's customers are most easily influenced by parents and teachers, not stars or athletes. These celebrities may be charming, but their influence is very low. McDonald's shop assistants are dressed in black T-shirts and white basketball sportswear, which is a simple accumulation of various brand elements. After all, the restaurant is not a disco or a roadside pub. If you dance disco in McDonald's restaurant, or do two somersaults after eating two hamburgers, it is unthinkable.