McDonald's case Essay examples

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MacDonald’s case

1-The main issue facing McDonalds is that the products of McDonald’s are one of many reasons behind overweight, statistics shows that 30 percent of American children are overweight or obese, and Big Macs and super-size French fries have drawn criticism and lawsuits for McDonald’s promoting obesity.
Governments and influential health advocates around the world blame the marketers for explosion in childhood obesity. Many countries have taken some measures to ban fast food TV advertisings with the cartoon character directly to children, force fast food advertisings to include healthy-eating messages, or take greater self-regulations.
However McDonald’s has already done a lot of active marketing and communication strategies to avoid such negative effects on the brand image: broke a “Change” campaign that replaced McDonald’s Golden Arches with a question mark to show its dramatic change on food nutrition structure, promoted menu changes with healthier salad, fruit...and small portion size, offered “Happy Meal” for adults and children, encouraging a balanced and healthy lifestyle.
Personally, I don’t think that MacDonald’s is behind this health situation because people know a lot about the balanced food and healthy lifestyle just from the ads on TV, newspaper or the programs of how to eat healthy on Facebook or Instagram, but it still very difficult to change their behavior of keeping on taking unhealthy foods in McDonald’s or other fast food companies and also to associate McDonald’s brand image with healthy food.
2- McDonalds along other fast food companies, is facing various accusations from different sources, not only in America but in Europe as well. The European Health Commission is threatening to ban advertising icons such as Ronald McDonald, because they believe these characters are aiming directly to children and is contributing to the escalating global epidemic of child obesity. They are comparing Ronald McDonald and McDonalds to the tobacco industry explaining how in the past tobacco companies would use characters to promote smoking and have now realized the harm that smoking can cause; the same way fast food can cause obesity among other problems in the long run. It may seem exaggerated but the message they want to send is the fact that if people (children) specifically continue to live a lifestyle where you eat fast food more often than not, it will cause serious problems. Also under fire is TV advertisement, Denmark’s National Board of Nutritional Science is trying to ban TV advertising that is directly aiming children again, children are very easily persuaded so the want to prevent child obesity by changing the way companies such as McDonalds advertise on TV. The film Super-Size Me was created to demonstrate consumers the effects that fast food does to your body and how fast and easily it affects you. After watching the film it definitely changed my personal opinion about McDonalds, and it was really shocking how unhealthy it is to eat fast food. Since the film McDonalds did start a campaign called “Changes”, which is all about adding healthier choices to the menu and creating awareness of a better, healthier McDonalds, the tagline being “McDonalds. But not as you know it. This is a great way to star heading the right direction an offering children healthier choices, but it may not be enough they still have to somehow find a way to convince children that eating healthy is very important and it’s not good to it fast food all the time. However McDonalds is responding to all the accusations by creating an overall healthier menu with various healthy choices. As well as running a campaign aimed to kids where they promote active lifestyle. “It’s fun when you eat right and stay active.”
3- McDonalds has reacted to the obesity issues in several ways:
In the UK , they changed the menu to a much healthier food (changes the campaign) in order to change the way