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Executive Summary
McDonald’s stands out as one of the biggest global fast food retailer offering fasts foods in
more than119 customers all over the globe. McDonald’s restaurants and franchises, which
stand at about 33, 500, continue to grow as the organization penetrates new markets in
Asia.
This immense success of McDonald’s is attributed to several factors among them being an
incredible emphasis on the engagement of consumers, appropriate leadership that fits well
the business of the organization, and the exceptional investments of the organizational
resources in brand management.
The franchise business model of the company has managed to ensure that the products and
services offered at the franchises are consistent with the services offered at the companyowned restaurants.
McDonald’s brand inventories highlight the brand essentials of the corporation, which
drive the picture that clients have in their wits about the corporation’s products and
services. The company also conducts brand exploratory to determine how customers
perceive its products.
New products are innovated and designed to meet the emerging needs of consumers based
on the information derived from brand exploratory studies.
This paper recommends the innovation of new products as a major tool for driving the
economic advantage for McDonald’s and hence its brand equity.
Introduction
McDonald’s pays incredible attention to protect its brand image by responding to negative
critics of the company’s products, particularly with criticisms that fast foods are closely
associated with obesity and obesity-associated ailments.
Consequently, the company has incorporated several healthy menus. As part of brand
management strategy, the company also focuses on “repositioning itself to appeal to a
broader audience, particularly by redesigning its outlets and making them more modern,
comfortable, and upscale” (Wilhelm Para. 2).
In this extent, brand management and brand protection are among the strategies used by
McDonald’s to enhance its success in a competitive and dynamic fast food business
environment.
The aim of this paper is to dig deeper into the approaches of brand management used by
McDonald’s with a particular focus on its brand exploratory and brand inventory strategies.
Brand Inventory
Brand inventories are aimed at availing inclusive sketch of how goods coupled with
services of a given organization are tagged and distributed.
About Hill and Ettenson, profiling a product or a service “requires marketers to catalog in
both visual and written form product or service sold, the names, logos, symbols, characters,
packaging, slogans, or other trademarks used” (86).
The result of any product profile requires being precise, understandable, and reflective of
the status of a merchandise or overhaul make for a given organization.
Brand inventory constitutes some of the essential elements of brand audits that permit
examination of the origin of brand equities of an organization. Brand inventories serve
principle purposes of helping to profile branding approaches deployed by an organization
for its goods and services.
Brand inventories need to display the brand elements utilized to build brand loyalty, how
this goal is accomplished, and how it is reflected in any necessary marketing program.
At McDonald’s, competitive brand profiling is done to unveil the probable points of
difference coupled with points of parity. In this extent, brand inventory is valuable at
McDonald’s since “it helps to suggest that consumers’ current perceptions may be based
on” (Wilhelm Para.7).
Indeed, the association of consumers with various brands of an organization is deeply
seated in the meaning they attach to various brand elements.
Arguably, brand inventory is incredible in the provision of vital information that can be
deployed in the interpretation of various follow-up researches among them being brand
exploratory.
For McDonald’s, brand inventory is utilized in supplying crucial information for analysis
coupled with conducting initial insights in the manner in which brand equities can be best
managed for a company’s products to receive positive reception by both existing and
potential consumers.
This strategy is perhaps significant because, the more positively a brand is received, the
more likely an organization would make higher sales and hence higher profitability.
Current Brand Profile for McDonald’s
McDonald’s products have come under sharp criticism over the likelihood of foods to cause
health challenges associated with taking foods with high calories.
In the effort to ensure that customers of McDonald’s continue to be loyal to the brand of the
company, McDonald’s has developed healthy meals, which are provided in the menus, as an
effort to ensure that the company’s brand profile continues to have a competitive
advantage.
As customers’ tastes and preferences change because of intensive campaigns on the needs
for healthy foods, they will always have alternative products on offer.
The emerging cultural differences affect the performance of certain products that
constitute the overall brand of McDonald’s especially as it continues to seek larger markets.
For instance, the organization established that Chinese people prefer chicken to beef.
Consequently, the company has designed hamburgers made from the chicken as opposed
to beef. This current strategy ensures a high profile for the McDonald’s brand across all
markets.
The positioning of McDonald’s Brand
Brand positioning refers to how an organization wants its customers to think about its
products or services. McDonald’s stands out as one of the most successful brands across the
globe. This success is replicated wherever the company establishes a franchise or its
internally operated store.
To position itself, McDonald’s pays incredible attention to listening and communicating
with its customers in a consistent manner assuring them of quality and hygiene for its
products amid criticisms and competitive forces from other fast-food dealers seeking to cut
down on the market share of the company.
In this context, Holt and Quelch reckon that McDonald’s uses “marketing communication
methods such as advertising and promotions to create colors, designs, and images, which
give the brand its familiar logo” (69).
This strategy means that, whenever customers see the golden arches for the McDonald’s
logo, an image that comes into mind is the products and services offered by the company.
Such an image is useful in constructing customer loyalty to a given brand.
Brand Elements
The brand is used to identify and distinguish an organization from other organizations
even when two or more organizations offer similar products or services. Organizations do
not only sell products or charge for just their services. They also sell their brands.
Brands are identified by several elements including the brand name, logo sounds, tagline,
tastes, and scents among others. McDonald’s endeavors to protect its worldwide brand
name consisting of Ma and Mac.
Any attempt to use a brand name possessing these two prefixes amounts to a legal
challenge by the organization. Holt and Quelch amplify this argument by asserting, “several
cases have evoked McDonald’s to sue many traders who have used these two words in their
trading names” (71).
The company uses a logo made up of golden arches. As part of brand elements, McDonald’s
has used several strap lines that take the form of slogans, which have been changing over
time.
One of such slogans is the ‘I am in love with it,’ which is meant to solicit for happy thoughts
among customers whenever they experience the organization’s products and services.
Profile of Competitive Brand Elements
Once an organization has developed and profiled several brand elements, which while
effort is made to position the brand, a substantial clientele would be anticipated to be won,
it becomes necessary to profile the most competitive brand elements.
This strategy ensures that marketing efforts are channeled proportionately to the relative
significance of a particular brand element’s capacity to produce more returns in terms of
future sale levels.
For McDonald’s, the company’s logo and strapline slogans are profiled as some of the most
effective brand elements in yielding the success of the company. For this purpose, all
franchises do their business through the company’s logo.
Indeed, the logo of the company is used at all outlets where McDonald’s products are sold
whether the outlets are company-owned or not. Slogans such as ‘I am in love with it’ and
‘happy meal’ are also unique to the company. They are essential in the McDonald’s brand
success.
In the words of Wilhelm, the slogans act as “a personal salute to everything McDonald’s
stands for and serves to achieve for its customers and the brand itself” (Para.3). Such
slogans are meant to echo the preference of McDonald’s foods across the globe.
How McDonald Brand is supported
For the success of any brand, a means of supporting it to ensure that its preferences among
customers do not fall when new competitors in the same industry emerge must be created.
For McDonald’s, brand promotion is a central component for supporting its brand.
Promotion is done through various ways such as sponsorships. The main aim of sponsoring
sports such as Fifa world cup and Olympics is to create a global image for the existence of
McDonald’s brand.
Indeed, in 1968, “McDonald’s first got involved with the Olympics by airlifting hamburgers
to athletes in Grenoble, France” (Holt and Quelch 71). During the Olympics held in
Montreal in 1976, McDonald’s became an official sponsor of the games.
In 1994, the company also sponsored the world cup tournaments that were then held in
the U.S.
As Wilhelm notes, McDonald’s also “recently renewed its long-term deal with Fifa until
2014, with global rights to the recent 2010 World Cup South Africa and the 2014 World
Cup in South America” (Para.10).
In all these deals, the company is entitled to special rights for advertisements during the
tournaments apart from supplying its foods to spectators. Since such tournaments bring
together people from the global fronts, the company can support its brand on global
perspectives.
How Brand Equity for McDonald’s can be improved
Ensuring that customers are connected and maintained requires the creation of a dialogue
that is sensible with the customers. “The importance of brand in a business strategy affirms
a paradigm of calculating its economic value called brand equity” (Holt and Quelch 73).
Brand equity encompasses a long-term investment that an organization has to manage
effectively since it is the measure of economic value for the organization. Without effective
management of the brand equity of an organization, it is practically impossible to gain
optimal profitability.
Consequently, it is important for McDonald’s to consider a myriad of ways to improve its
brand equity. Further, personal opinions on these aspects are considered in the
recommendation.
Brand Exploratory
Brand exploratory refers to any research that is conducted by an organization to garner
information, which upon analysis, helps to indicate how customers feel and or think about
a given product or service and their associated classes of brand equity sources.
Conducting brand exploratory requires several preliminary activities to be conducted. They
include conducting an interview with an organization’s personnel to “gain an
understanding of their beliefs about customer perceptions” (Hill and Ettenson 87).
Opinions accruing from such interviews are normally diverse since they serve several
functions in the determination of how consumers of given products or services may be
feeling or thinking about them.
Such functions include the generation of vital and informing ideas about products from an
organization’s perspective and providing likelihoods for understanding any preconceived
internal misconceptions and inconsistencies on the way people internally perceive the
products and services of an organization.
This information is necessary since customers think about the products that they consume
depending on how the communications personnel within an organization portray the
products.
However, even though it is important to unveil an organization’s internal inconsistencies
and misconceptions about products, such an endeavor is not adequate to develop brand
explorations.
Additional research is necessary to be conducted on customers with the intentions of
determining how their own experiences with the products or services of an organization
shape their thoughts and feelings about the products as the central concerns of brand
exploratory at McDonald’s.
In today’s global economy, people are becoming too busy to have adequate time to prepare
meals during lunch hours and even breakfasts because of increasing job demands.
Consequently, they opt to have their meals at fast food eat outs where they can eat while at
restaurants, or have meals packed up for them to eat while at their workstations. However,
it is important to note that consumers do not just buy any fast food.
Customers have tastes and preferences. This case implies that they develop brand loyalties
to specific products that best meet their needs. McDonald’s focuses on making sure that it
delivers values that are desired by the customers for them to have repeated sales to them
Increasing an organization’s market share is impossible without attracting new potential
customers.
While an effort of attracting perceived potential customers is necessary through marketing,
studying the sources of motives to eat-outs at fast food coupled with the service and
products anticipated at the fast food stores is necessary.
The sales and communications personnel would handle the clients in a manner that would
satisfy these anticipations.
For this reason, McDonald’s considers its customers and employees as the most crucial
elements for the success of its brand in the highly competitive fast food industry.
This strategy is done by ensuring that customers having first time experience with the
organization’s products perceive the products as the most favorable products in
comparison to a range of similar products offered in the market.
In fact, “getting and keeping customers who are loyal to a particular brand is most useful
when they are both gross users of the products” (Hill and Ettenson 87).
For McDonald’s, depending on various perceptions of brand loyalties for its products, the
company employs valid strategies to enhance uniqueness, favorability, and awareness of its
products and services.
In this context, Holt and Quelch reckon, “when the profitable segment is loyal with the rate
of using, the focus is on changing loyalty in favor of McDonald’s brand” (74).
When the company realizes that there is an immense use of a single product on offer, the
organization resorts to the deployment of the brand name of the organization to develop
new and innovative relative competitive advantages.
From my survey of the consumers of McDonald’s, it is evident that the company has to
respond to the needs of valid groups of people in terms of demographic factors such as age,
cultural, and religion among others. These customers have different dietary needs.
The company has responded appropriately to ensure it is appealing to all people amid their
demographic attributes, which include happy meals for children and special meals for old
people comprising high-fiber vegetables.
The fact that McDonald’s can respond to different market dynamics and emerging needs of
consumers means that the brand equity of the company will remain ever high.
This argument perhaps will match with the strategic aim of McDonald’s to remain a global
leader in the fast food industry.
Recommendations and Conclusion
Research on customer perceptions and associations with certain brands reveal that most
people tend to associate themselves with global brands because they believe that global
products have better qualities.
Consequently, it is recommended that McDonald’s can improve its brand equity by
continuing with its efforts to establish a global presence in all continents.
Since different people have different cultural affiliations, increasing brand equity for the
company this way will also call for designing of new products to meet various cultural
contexts with the intention of ensuring that McDonald’s would appeal to all people
irrespective of religious or any other cultural affiliations across the globe.
Brand equity for an organization is often threatened by the emergence of new concerns in
disfavor of an organization’s products and services. Concerns on healthy eating have not
spared the customer’s perceptions about McDonald’s brand.
This case has not impaired substantively the brand equity of McDonald’s since the
company has responded to these concerns by designing healthy meals, which are
incorporated in the menus.
It is recommended for the company to conduct a thorough analysis of the information
spreading to the existing and potential customers about foods that should be considered
unhealthy.
Armed with this information, the company can develop more products, which fit the
definition of healthy foods as offered by health professionals.
This strategy is an attempt to design and deliver products and services based on customer
demand, which is an incredible plan for driving improvement and success of brand equity.
In conclusion, McDonald’s remains a global leader in the fast food industry. In the paper,
this advantage was attributed to the innovative strategies of the company in shaping and
protecting its brand name and equity.
While juggling with the question on how the McDonald’s has managed to ensure that its
brand is not out powered by other competitors, the paper paid incredible attention to
discuss approaches of brand management used by McDonald’s with emphasis on brand
exploratory and brand inventory.
Works Cited
Hill, Stephen, and Tyson Ettenson. “Achieving the Ideal Brand Portfolio.” Sloan
Management Review 2.1(2005): 85-90. Print.
Holt, Anthony, and Taylor Quelch. “How Global Brands Compete.” Harvard Business
Review 7.3(2004): 68-75. Print.
Wilhelm, Remold. McDonald Formal Business Structure, 2011. Web.
Symptoms of Supply Chain Problems
Human Resource Management in Modern World