Imc Tools of McDonalds

Problems and Suggestions

Although the IMC tools of McDonald’s looks very perfect, it still remains a big loophole in crisis public relationships, which is an indispensable aspect in integrated marketing communication.

It is easy to understand for everyone that food safety is the most significant factor in food industry, especially for McDonald’s, as one of the leaders in fast food industry. When a food company’s edibility safety and nutrition quality has been questioned, just issued a statement simply is not enough at all. Unfortunately, McDonald’s experienced such an event and handled its crisis public relationships in a terrible way. Reviewing the whole event, McDonald’s issued four statements from beginning to end after the media exposure that Shanghai Fuxi company has offered expired raw materials to McDonald’s and KFC in 20th, July in 2014. At the same time, McDonald’s issued their first statement, which has the least mistake and to define its attitude firmly. Sadly, this statement forgot to mention some stakeholders like government, media and customer, which inferior to their biggest rival, KFC. Then barely ten hours later, a second statement had been issued in haste, which looks totally the same as Yum’s statement. The last two statements issued on 24th, July and 28th, July respectively, are full of mistake and logic chaos.

In some ways, how a company handled with emergencies can reflect its IMC capability and capacity. The problems of McDonald’s crisis public relationship processing methods is mainly in the following aspects:

1. The lack of sincerity.

Actually, attitude is the most important thing in managing unexpected emergency. Throughout the whole “Fuxi” event, what McDonald’s have shown is insincere and shrinking responsibility. They even add a link that could not be opened by customers to a picture on their Sina Weibo. This will inevitably make people feel that their apology are hypocrisy and too casual.