1. New buildings have helped burnish McDonald’s image. This is change directed at everyone. On a narrower front, meanwhile, the company has also begun courting a specific, important class of customer: mothers. Central to this strategy is one of McDonald’s most prominent moms, Jan Fields, the president of McDonald’s U.S.A.
Fields, who is 56, assumed leadership over the company’s American business nearly three years ago and soon earned the respect of her colleagues for her focused but hands-off leadership style and for her personal story. When she was 23, Fields, a young mother and the wife of a military serviceman stationed in Dayton, Ohio, got a job at McDonald’s cooking French fries on the night shift. The work was harder than she expected. The smell of the fries stuck to her, she recalled, and there seemed to be so many rules. “I went home and cried,” Fields said, remembering that first night. “I thought, Boy, I don’t even know if I’m going to be able to make it at McDonald’s.”
She briefly considered quitting, she said, but thought better of it. And over the course of three decades, she worked her way up. It’s a success story that, at McDonald’s anyway, isn’t all that unusual; countless other executives have what industry analysts like to call “ketchup in their veins.” Many started with jobs behind the cash register, often earning minimum wage.
The company seems especially fond of telling Fields’s story in public, perhaps because, in person, Fields doesn’t come off as some scripted corporate type trying to change negative perceptions of McDonald’s but as a chatty soccer mom charming wary customers with a folksiness that appears genuine. As Rick Wion put it, “Jan is just a plain old nice person.” But the strategy, Wion added, isn’t just about Fields’s personality. “It’s about the principles she’s bringing to the table,” he told me, “and the openness of the conversation.”
2. Fields has also made herself available to everyday mothers — especially those who happen to have blogs. The company has been reaching out to them, giving them personal access to Fields and other company V.I.P.’s and essentially trying to influence — McDonald’s would say “inform,” critics would say “spin” — the influencers in the blogosphere.
In mid-2010,the company invited 15 bloggers to visit the Oak Brook headquarters, flying them and their families to Chicago, putting them up at a nice hotel and giving them the grand tour: a meeting with Fields, a chance to make McFlurries in the test kitchen, a visit to a nearby Ronald McDonald House and photo sessions for the kids with Ronald. “There was just a great deal of care taken with my family,” Loralee Choate, a mother and Utah-based blogger, says of the trip. “I did not have one expense,” she adds. “They even took into consideration that I was two hours away from the airport, so they sent a car to take me. It was very, very gracious of them.”
According to Wion, a creator of the strategy, the premise was simple. “Bloggers, and specifically mom bloggers, talk a lot about McDonald’s,” he says. “They’re customers. They’re going to restaurants.” And even more important, these women have loyal followings. Why not let them behind the curtain, hope they like what they see and let them tell readers about it? “We identified them and said: ‘These are our key customers. These are key influencers for our brand,’ ” Wion says. “We need to make sure we’re working with them.”
3. In the blogging world, this is called brand work. In exchange for perks like free trips, access to important people and sometimes financial compensation, bloggers are encouraged or even contractually bound to write about a company, says Thales Teixeira, an assistant professor of marketing at Harvard Business School who has studied the trend. Some bloggers, he notes, get paid as much as $20,000 for the work, which by McDonald’s ad-campaign standards isn’t much money.
The benefits go both ways. Through bloggers, Teixeira says, corporations like McDonald’s believe they are reaching an audience that has become wary of slick ad campaigns. “It’s basically an advertisement sometimes but not directly from the company,” Teixeira says. “Instead they are receiving it from somebody they trust.”
Wion, who joined the company’s public relations team two years ago, told me that McDonald’s has on occasion paid travel expenses for bloggers attending conferences. But the company, he says, does not pay bloggers for content, require that they write anything specific or edit their posts in any way. The bloggers who came to Oak Brook, for example, were asked to write one post recapping their trip. “Beyond that,” Wion says, “we gave them, and we wanted them to have, free rein.”
The posts that followed — each accompanied by a disclaimer noting their sponsorship by McDonald’s — were overwhelmingly positive, however. And late last summer, McDonald’s was courting the bloggers yet again. The company sent Fields, Wion and Cindy Goody, the company’s U.S. senior director of nutrition, to San Diego for the BlogHer conference, an annual meeting that last year attracted 4,100 bloggers, most of whom were women.
4. About 25 of them were invited to a private luncheon with Fields and other executives. The conversation there focused on the improved nutritional content of Happy Meals. McDonald’s had recently announced that it was reducing the size of the French fries and putting apple slices in every meal, changes that took effect nationally in March and that earned praise from even the company’s critics.
Bridgette Duplantis, one of the bloggers in the room that day, was impressed. When I met with her months later over a wild berry smoothie at a McDonald’s near her home in suburban New Orleans, Duplantis admitted that she still has complaints about the fast-food chain. She’d like McDonald’s to offer carrot sticks for kids and more healthful, whole-grain buns. And she recognized that it was savvy marketing for the company to hold the luncheon.
Duplantis said she felt a connection with Fields that day, something personal, mother to mother. “Now I relate to her,” Duplantis told me, “and in turn I relate to McDonald’s.” Which means, more than likely, that the Duplantis family will be seeking out one of its restaurants for its next fast-food outing instead of going somewhere else — a small victory, perhaps, but one that McDonald’s will take and try to replicate.
— Keith O’Brien, “How McDonald’s Came Back Bigger Than Ever,” New York Times Magazine, May 4 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/magazine/how-mcdonalds-came-back-bigger-than-ever.html?_r=1&hp
