McDonald's

McDonald's is the worlds leading Hamburger fast-food franchise, with over 32,000 restaurants in over 118 countries worldwide. McDonald's serves over 58 Million people daily, and offers them a simple, easy and enjoyable food experience for customers. McDonald's pushes the importance of its main core values quality, service, cleanliness, and value and its target market includes families and children. Accordingly, marketing efforts are targeted at these groups, through Ronald McDonald and other characters including:

• Grimace
• the Hamburgler
• Mayor McCheese

McDonald's exhibits socially responsible attributes that customer relate well with through the creation of Ronald McDonald's house charities helping children with leukemia and strives to improve children's lives. Its value proposition is to offer customers hot, high quality food at a great value at the speed and convenience its customers require. Although, McDonald's offers its customers a high quality consumer experience rather than a quick and cheap fast food option.

It has recently changed its menu to a include healthier options and worked towards training staff better eradicating poor customer service and dirtier restaurants.

This insight helps me to understand that in the future if I was a manager there is great value in spending time to craft and execute a marketing plan that considers strategic insight on how to improve on the company's 5 P's - people, products,promotions, price and place. Especially to allow local stores to adapt to local preferences and cultures. For example: McDonald's introduced a premium M burger in France, and a pepper McPuff in China. Some food changes recently helped to turn the company around. These included offering more chicken options as beef consumption started to decline and removing super size options after the documentary "Super Size Me" which targeted McDonald's and its link to Obesity. While many of the healthier options targeted Mums, McDonald's introduced a snack menu which targeted the lower-income bracket and teenagers.

Further more in the future there is a great lesson to be taken from McDonald's ability to re market the brand, and adapt the company to its marketing challenges. I think that it has successfully used marketing to re establish its "second wave" McDonald's brand, achieved through refurbishments, McCafe transformations to restaurants , and its current campaign jingle "I'm loving it".