Mc donald's and obesity

1. 1. How do the brand equity of McDonald’s get affected when lifestyles
featuring Ronald McDonald are equated with Camel and Cigarette Ads?
McDonald’s brand equity was developed with trust for quality, service, cleanliness and food
value. The first choice of customer is McDonald’s burgers and other high calorie based food.
When kids enter into McDonald’s, they feel happy. It is a fun place of friends and family. It
ensures healthy industrial relations between management and labour.
Ronald McDonald is an iconic character of McDonald’s. The purpose of this character is to
convince children. For this reason, McDonald’s send this cartoon character, Ronald
McDonald to schools to preach about nutrition. But as McDonald’s main products like
burgers, ham burgers were calorie based, it caused obesity issues all around the world. So,
people thought it to be harmful for health just like cigarettes do to our body.
At one point, it seemed that as nicotine of tobacco was contagious to health, calorie of fast
food items do the same. So, the character, Ronald McDonald was compared with the
character, Joe camel which is a character for convincing the smokers by the RJ Reynolds
tobacco company. So, this certainly damaged the brand equity of McDonald’s.

2. 2. List down the steps taken by McDonald’s to address the blames of
obesity? Does it affect the Brand Mantra?
McDonald’s had taken some steps to address the blame of obesity.
The steps are given below:
 McDonald’s broke the U.K. campaign called “Changes” with poster Ads that omit the
Golden Arches for the first time, replacing them with a question mark in the same
typeface and the tagline “McDonald’s”.
 They changed the ongoing menu, posters, features, items such as salad, pile of free-
range eggshells, pieces of fruit and cups of cappuccino.
 They conducted a direct mail campaign to 17 million household informing them about
their healthy food menus.
 They turned their food items from bigger to smaller.
 They included a unique item like white meat chicken and fruit bags in their menu.
McDonald’s brand mantra is: “Food, Folks and Fun”. But when their food menu is changed
due to blame of obesity, it affects their brand manta. McDonald’s designed their brand
mantra on the basis of those three elements. This brand mantra is closely related with their
Golden arches logo. But when they changed their logo for “Changes” campaign, it also
created an impact on their brand mantra.

3. 3. Do you think the brand McDonald’s did not concern well regarding
health issues while expanding business? In future international endeavors,
how should the brand proceed?
Yes, we think the brand McDonald’s did not concern well regarding health issues while
expanding their business initially. They focused on profit maximization offering big size
burgers and high calorie food. They also focused on children at their advertising so that they
could be a target group. But when the people all over the world became aware of the obesity
issue, then they were compelled to change their strategies.
In future international endeavours, the brand should proceed in the following ways:
 They should Offer healthier menu with association of the core items.
 They should consider obesity and other health issues.
 Their market promotion system must be averted from children based advertising.
 They have to maintain different ingredients and flavour according to the demand of
different country.

4. 4. Is there any scope for Leveraging secondary associations for responding
to the problem McDonald’s faces? Explain and critique its various
approaches to solve the problems.
McDonalds can adopt the following steps to leverage secondary associations for
responding to the problem regarding obesity issues:
 They can ally with another brand which has no complain on negative of issues.
 McDonald’s can arrange different events with the association of UNICEF, WHO,
FAO and other social organization.
 McDonald’s can engage persons who are well known worldwide for health and safety
conscious as their spokesperson.
 McDonald’s can introduce new characters which discourage obesity and encourage
physical exercise.
Critiques on McDonald’s approaches to solve the problem:
 They changed their food menu drastically. So, they lost some of their existing
customers who were passionate about the core McDonald’s product.
 In the campaign named changes in the U.K. McDonald’s even changed their identical
logo of Golden Arches. It affected the brand equity.
 When McDonald’s faced a lot of banning from different governments, they could not
negotiate with them successfully.
 In Sweden, Norway and Quebec food ads are banned from kids’ TV, but there is no
evidence that obesity rates declined. But McDonald’s could not raise these issues
worldwide.
 McDonald’s created a character Ronald McDonald for the children specially. Rather
they could create a separate character to generalize their customer base.
 McDonalds arranged different campaigns on healthy food menu and physical exercise
which was a time friendly initiative.
 McDonalds adopted a very good defensive strategies like advertising full-page on
newspapers mentioning about the movie “Super Size Me” which was supposed to
hamper the popularity of McDonalds.