Strategic Audit of McDonald's

I. Company Description, Structure & Products

The McDonald's Corporations is the largest chain of fast food restaurants in the world serving over 69 million people every day in 119 countries. With success in over 31,000 restaurants, McDonald's has designed a global strategy and committed to providing an exceptional customer experience. From the beginning, the corporation targeted families with children with the famous clown, McDonald, as their mascot. The basic menu has consistently included burgers, fries, ice cream and soft drinks, adding various menu items through the years to stay current with trends and lifestyles. In recent years, playgrounds have been added, as well as redesigning a more comfortable environment and adding iced fruit drinks and frappes to appeal more to the adult population. McDonalds' restaurants can be operated by the corporation, an affiliate or a franchisee. Not only do the revenues come from company sales, but from royalties, fees and rent paid by the franchisees. The SIC Code for McDonald's is 5812-Retail Eating Places.

II. Vision and Mission Statement

The Vision statement of the McDonald's Corporation is "None of us is as good as all of us". The plan they have adopted, strategically includes "People". This demonstrates the value that McDonald's places on the employees, customers, suppliers and the entire global community. he Mission statement of the McDonald's Corporation is to "be our customers' favorite place to eat." The" Plan to Win" strategy centers around the exceptional customer experience – People, Products, Place, Price and Promotion. This mission clearly keeps the opportunity for effective change and evolution to take place as is dictated by trends in society.

III. Strategy

McDonald's uses two main approaches which include the best-cost strategy and the broad differentiation strategy. he best-cost strategy is apparent when noting that McDonald's is taking measures to reduce employee training spending and lower employee turnover. When people are motivated and happy, they are more likely to be loyal employees. McDonald's training includes the "Big Brother" principle which empowers present employees as they train new employees. They know and understand the job from a first- hand experience. They feel valued by the employer for their knowledge and are compensated through incentives such as "Employee of the month (week)" or other such competitions. he broad differentiations strategy could possibly be the reason for the increased sales revenue as noted by McDonald's CFO in an interview. He stated that "sales of its iced fruit drinks and frappes helped boost traffic to its stores, and its fourth-quarter profit rose 2.1% to a sweet $1.24 billion."