Case Study #McDStories

McDonald’s is a fast food company, which was created in 1940 by Dic and Mac McDonald in San Esteban, California, USA. However, Ray Kroc was the person who created the first McDonald’s franchise in 1955. Today, McDonald’s is located  in 119 countries and has 33,000 restaurants worldwide. For many years, McDonald’s has developed different types of campaigns using different media such as print, television, street marketing, and digital. Before promoting its products, McDonald’s strategy has always been focused on promoting McDonald’s as a lifestyle that fits any human being experiences. Some of its slogans are McDonald’s is Your Kind of Place, What You Want is What You Get, We Love to See You Smile, and I’m lovin’ it. However, its reputation has been affected for the negative effects that its food has, which made the company to execute a public relations campaign to engage audience.

#McDStories Campaign

McDonald’s, like many brands, had sought to open a space in social networking sites to establish an open and direct channel of communication with its consumers.  However, the famous fast food chain gave a lesson regarding why companies should never lose control of conversations on platforms such as Twitter. On January 18, 2012, McDonald’s launched the #MeetTheFarmers digital public relations campaign with the purpose of creating awareness of how McDonald’s offers fresh vegetables and high quality meat on its menu.

McDonald’s public relations team saw that their campaign did not have the impact they expected. Then, the company modified the name of its hashtag, from #MeetTheFarmers to #McDStories implicitly encouraged current consumers to share their own stories with the burgers and fries franchise achieving its main goal, to increase consumer engagement. The company wanted to show the level of sympathy that stakeholders had for the brand through anecdotes about their experiences with the restaurant.  However, not only its current consumers decided to share their experiences, but also non-consumers expressed its negative feelings towards the company, and they made comments about the poor service and bad food of the chain.  Although the company paid to be number one in the trends list on Twitter, the results of this campaign had a negative impact on the image of the chain because in less than an hour, consumers published 72.788 tweets with negative comments about the company. The company did not respond to the tweets, but created a new hashtag, #littlethings.

Analysis

Although, McDonald’s purpose was to engage its public in the reputation management of the company, the McDonald’s public relations team made a variety of mistakes, since #McDStories campaign was launched negatively affecting the relationship between the organization and its internal and external publics. First, the team used the same digital tactic to increase awareness and engage its customers, without previously having a situation analysis to have insights of what people think and feel about the organization prior to planning, designing, and executing a public relations campaign.

Second, the organization did not monitor customers’ tweets, which allowed people spread negative perceptions of the organization. The company used Twitter, which is a communication channel on which the public relations team did not have complete control of the situation because it is open to all Twitter users, whether they like or dislike the brand. Although the team wanted to include their contingency plan implementing a new trend called #littlethings, customers continued linking the company with negative words. For example, one of the tweets was “#McDStories learn all about McDonalds using pigs from gestation crates #McCruelty”.

Third, the company refused to discuss its failure to respond to consumer’s tweets, which showed that the company was promoting its brand instead of creating a two-way communication with its audience, damaging the relationship between the company and that audience because of the public relations team incorrect application of issue management strategies. Mcdonald’s public relations team used Twitter to empower, involve, and engage its audience giving them the opportunity to tell their stories and be part of the campaign. However, the public relations team did not demonstrate the relationship-building efforts because they did not adequately use the online tools to communicate with the company’s audience, failing in reinforcing the company’s online commitment to maintain relationships with its audience.

The company could have switched this situation from obstacle to opportunity, if it had had a crisis communication plan providing a timely response to each of the complaints and highlighting the positive stories of some fans. McDonald’s should show its preoccupation for customers’ feelings. It is crucial to establish a strategy to manage social networking sites and to train company’s employees to respond adequately to customers’ comments managing correctly company’s reputation to avoid crises in the online environment.

Strengths and weakness of the campaign

  After analyzing the execution of #McDStories campaign, the public relations practitioner conclude that the campaign had many weaknesses in its planning.

1. Wrong assumptions: Leader in sales does not mean is leader in affections

McDonald’s is a multinational fast food chain, which is leader in sales around the world. When McDonald’s public relations team created this digital campaign using social networking sites, it was with the assumption that the company because leads the industry across the world, many people would be engaged with the campaign. However, they did not consider McDonald’s negative impact regarding obesity, poor nutrition, labor exploitation, and hygiene. A weakness of the campaign was assuming that people would respond to a hashtag like # McDStories without considering its negative image.

Public relations practitioners would have been able to execute a digital public relations campaign encouraging customers to submit a document telling their positive experiences with McDonald’s. After receiving all the stories, they could have published the most emotive ones on McDonald’s Website or on its Facebook page, transmitting the positives feelings that people had towards the company.

2. General Hashtag

The name of the hashtag # McDStories was ambiguous, which made twitter users to decide the direction that the trend would have. People have many opinions about the negative effect that the fast food industry has, which generated a wide response to this topic. The public relations team wanted to encourage people to make comments about the company; however, they did not realize that a general #hashtag could also inspire opposite reactions to what they were expecting.  A weakness of the campaign was using a general hashtag on a promoting trend like Twitter, allowing people, who were against the company and McDonald’s fans to make comments that affected the company’s reputation.In order to execute a digital campaign of this magnitude, the public relations team should require prior testing using McDonald’s Facebook page, to have insights about the positive or negative results of this campaign. Also, they could use a specific hashtag such as #McDimlovinit or #loveMcDonalds to incite people to make just positive comments.

3. The effects of new media

Although McDonald’s public relations team has executed interesting public relations campaigns through traditional media like McDonald’s chalkboard campaign, they cannot generalize the positive or negative effects that traditional and new media have. The main problem of implementing new media in a public relations campaign is that the message is not controlled by the company, and in many cases public relations practitioners need to be reactive. Although the public relations team had a contingency plan, they neither executed it on time nor managed positive and negative perceptions towards the organization in a meaningful way. A weakness of the campaign was lacking of experience in managing crises in the online environment.  .

The public relations team should conduct research regarding successful or unsuccessful campaigns through social networking sites to be successful in the digital campaign and to train the social media team to respond adequately.

4. Scope of the campaign 

During #McDStories campaign people, not only in the United States but across the world, who tasted or knew about Mcdonald’s products could make comments about the company, amplifying the campaign results wider and faster than using traditional communication channels. Before the campaign, the brand received between 25000 and 30.000 tweets; however, in this campaign the company reached 72.788 tweets. In addition, the factor of paying to be the number one on Twitter trends allowed the company’s campaign to grow in the online community. The scope of #McDStories was wide, which made this campaign global, which is a strength for #McDStories campaign.