McDonalds Visual Case Analysis

    McDonald’s Twitter was clearly a failure and they are not the first corporation to face defeat on twitter. One of the most successful fast food chain restaurants on twitter is Wendy’s. By interacting with people in a sarcastic way and using comedy to promote their products, Wendy’s has completely changed how corporations should interact on social media. Wendy’s is not only able to promote their products, but they continuously target competitors like McDonald’s and Burger King through their tweets. McDonald’s should have seen how Wendy’s interacted with customers on social media and followed a similar example. A big reason for this campaign’s failure was that no one saw the potential that people have bad experiences they would want to share on social media. As a firm, before you decide to go ahead with a plan, you must brainstorm the positives and negatives of this situation. With such a big firm, there must have been someone on the McDonald’s marketing who saw the potential for how the campaign turned negative but did not speak up. I believe it is up to the manager to create the environment where people feel comfortable sharing their opinion and such failures can be avoided. Social media is very tricky to navigate especially for corporations, McDonald’s should have learned from their competitors before jumping in head first with #McDstories, it would have saved them money and embarrassment from such a failure.  [pic 1]

Marketing is all about research and being able to find out how people feel about a certain product. I believe that in this campaign the McDonald’s marketing team failed. In recent years, we have seen a rise of healthy food trends and push away from fast food as it is considered unhealthy. Regardless of this rise of healthy food, McDonald’s thrives in low poverty areas – thus that is where their customers are. The marketing team could have predicted this reaction from the public based on their YouTube comments on their videos. The videos developed as part of their campaign included a video of a man going through creation of chicken nugget process and at the end declaring that its real time. The comments on just that one specific video clearly show people’s dislike for McDonalds and lack of trust on this information provided in the video. Through market research it would have been obvious that if McDonald’s wants to reach its customer they will be in low poverty area and most likely not on twitter. The #MeetTheFarmers was a very positive campaign because it was focused on the people of McDonalds but #McDStories was about people experiences at McDonald. As a manger, I conduct thorough research before moving ahead with any campaign because you cannot decide the future but you are capable of anticipating certain aspects of it based on information you have. [pic 2]

Following on the concept of Market research, McDonald’s should figure out the profile for their brand. Before making the actual hotel, the marketing team at Kimpton Hotel creates a person whom they imagine would live at this hotel and the kind of experience they would want. The break the person down to how do they look, where do they shop, what activities do they like and what type of experience they look for. After the person is created it allows Kimpton to use this persona to design unique boutique hotels. To even do this first step of this, through sales and research, McDonald’s needs to find out where are their customers located. McDonald’s does not have to customize each location but if they are able to create profiles for the type of customers they have they can provide better marketing to target those customers.  [pic 3]

Another aspect McDonald’s needs to heavily invest in is healthy foods which people are willing to buy. Now a day, many people consider McDonald’s food as what you eat and then instantly regret. If McDonald’s wants to really attract more customers, its not just a new hashtag on twitter that will help them but instead revamping their menu. They need to introduce foods everyone would be willing to eat even if some of the items are high priced. To sustain themselves in the future, McDonald’s needs to move into healthy foods – a company need to change with trends otherwise it will be left behind. [pic 4]