Analysis of Contemporary Marketing Implementation

Analysis of contemporary marketing implementation

Steve Easterbrook, McDonald’s global president and chief executive, confirmed the Australian branch has recorded up to ‘10 consecutive months to June of positive comparable store sales and guest counts’. In the months preceding these results McDonald’s completed the installation of touch screen kiosks to facilitate the ‘create your taste’ feature and associated campaign in 750 stores, focused mainly within Victoria, enabling it to launch a nationwide media promotion strategy. The article ‘McDonald's Australia drops branding to take advantage of 'local factor' was published by the Sydney Morning Herald Business Day in May of 2015; journalist Alana Shetzer outlines the multinational’s seemingly counterintuitive rejection of the ‘familiar golden arches’ and McDonald’s notoriety in a bid to salvage and maximise their share of the market.

Shetzer acknowledges that the notion of ‘anti-branding’ is not a revolutionary technique within the market, with the brand’s value rapidly regressing, McDonald’s would like to appear –as the campaign states explicitly- ‘very unMcDonald’s’. While the director of corporate communications for McDonald’s Australia, Laura Keith, says the company’s almost unrecognisable branding is simply a means of ‘innovation’ for the fast food giant, by focusing on one of the key components of brand image: favourability of the brand and their associations, McDonald’s acted to disassociate from their established reputation and the commonplace opinion of the company’s products and services. The chief marketing officer for McDonald’s Australia, Mark Lollback admitted ‘the core of our brief to our agencies was to disrupt the market and keep Australians talking about this new venture’, the company’s desire to attain ‘people who didn't think McDonald's was for them’ required them to accept their sullied brand image and spelt out in the caption, ‘How very unMcDonald’s’, to a degree align themselves with the customer’s view that the brand’s affiliations were prior to this not coherent with the consumer’s desires.

Brand reputation is argued to be one of the important factors influencing firm performance (Herbig and Milewicz, 1997), in the case of McDonalds whose brand has been regularly sanctioned and tarnished since the corporation’s humble formation in Illinois, 1955, the brand was forced to adopt an extreme brand voice, that is ‘the writing and communication style of a brand…how it speaks… not what it says’ according to Brandchannel. Brand positioning is defined as 'the distinctive position that a brand adopts in the marketplace to ensure differentiation’, McDonald’s technique of marketing the company as the opposite of itself, intended to reinvigorate the brand image: ‘the cluster of attributes and associations that consumers connect to the brand name’ (Ho Yin and Bill, 2007) so that those associations evoked, both tangible and emotional, initiate and encourage positive consumer behaviour in favour of the brand.

In order to re-emerge as a ‘strong brand’ (Leavitt, 1987) McDonald’s had to address and challenge the three components of their image: that of the corporation, the user and the product itself (Ho Yin and Bill, 2007). Shetzer highlighted the consumers’ preference for small businesses referencing a Galaxy pol that revealed ‘45 per cent of people said they provide better customer service than big chains’, given the knowledge of this consumer predisposition and the essential nature of positioning (Wong and Merilees, 2007) in establishing the companies position as one that optimises its appeal recognised by the targeted user segment, McDonalds naturally sought to trial a ‘local look’, on trend alternative setting to the mass produced, iconic chain restaurant environment. Shetzer also indicated that this was encouraged by their understanding of emerging consumer behaviour, she noted that in 2009 Forbes said multinationals such as McDonald’s had ‘cottoned onto the "strong consumer movement" towards picking local and "looked for ways to cater to this new consumer desire."’ This is evident in McDonald’s addition of The Corner to the franchise’s presence in NSW, described as ‘a slick cafe serving lentils, chipotle pulled pork and craft soft drink’. This is in accordance with the recent boom in small businesses, with IBISWorld reporting a 3.2 per cent increase in the number of locally-owned cafes between 2010 and 2015 and the simultaneous 7.3 per cent fall of second quarter sales for McDonald’s Asia Pacific Middle East and Africa which includes the Australian arm.

Although McDonald’s – coined ‘Maccas’ by their Australian consumers- has maintained their position, dominating the nation’s fast food sector, with IBISWorld equivocating McDonald’s prominence to a 16.5 per cent share of the $14.2 billion industry, their revenue although increasing, is experiencing a decrease in growth rate annually, to 2.2 per cent in 2015 from as high as 7.1 per cent in 2011. Their formerly aggressive, omnipresence within the media, sporting and even philanthropic sectors