USA, May 4, 2012 (NY Times): [HPI note: This is a long piece about how McDonalds slowly reversed its negative image of the world’s largest seller of unhealthy food. Read the whole article at the source, above. The core of it is summarized below.]
The company’s bottom-line success in recent years has been unmatched by its traditional burger-chain competitors. McDonald’s has been growing steadily. Last year, sales nearly doubled the industry’s projected growth rate.
Advertising no doubt has something to do with all this success. The company’s annual advertising budget has been estimated to exceed $2 billion — making it “unmatched in the industry,” according to BMO Capital Markets, and roughly the size of the gross domestic product of Aruba. That allows McDonald’s to reach an audience far larger than the one that saw “Super Size Me.”
Executives believe that it is not about simply offering better food, but changing the whole eating experience. Restaurants have been revamped to look more inviting.
Persuasion is at least as important as cooking. The goal, according to Neil Golden, the company’s chief marketing officer for its American restaurants, is to win over the holdouts. One way to do that is by improving the food itself. Another way is to change how we think about that food. He said, “We believe that there are more people that would want to come — if they could feel better about the product.”
In the last year alone, nuns in Philadelphia, Seventh-day Adventists in California, doctors in Chicago and activists in Boston have warred with McDonald’s over its menu, its marketing, its mission or all of the above. Critics say McDonald’s minimizes its role in America’s obesity epidemic while continuing to market its food to children through Happy Meals. More recently, the presence in McDonald’s hamburgers of “pink slime” — beef scraps turned into a paste and treated with an ammonia solution — became a cause celebre. (McDonald’s reported in January that it discontinued using pink slime last summer.) And later this month at this year’s annual meeting, activists will get shareholders to vote on a proposal that would require the company to respond to the growing evidence linking fast food to obesity and other diseases.