Cockroaches & McDonald’s Will Survive the Apocalypse
Even in this turbulent economy, Ronald McDonald is smiling behind the clown face. McD’s reported a whopper of a same-store sales increase last year - 8.2% worldwide! The company is betting that it will do very well in the next few years. In Europe, its prospects look even better. With food prices going up, people are abandoning the bistro for the big Mac.
So what’s the ingredients to success? The Marketing Doctor highlights McDonald’s strongest attributes:
- Consistently delivering clear value against its brand identity
- Building their brand around their customers
- Adapting products to changing needs
- The goofy clown-brand never changes, and remains rock-solid
Then again, there’s McDonalds’ wacky experiments…
In Tokyo, McDonald’s has launched a high-fallutin’ restaurant that sells nothing but Quarter-Pounders. That’s it. With cheese or without. Clowns are replaced with chrome. Golden arches are replaced with bold red & black packaging. Add to this a viral campaign that has something to do with a big japanese secret…
Only Quarter Pounders. Awesome!
I hear that there’s also a shop in England that sells only cheese! 
Popularity: 21%
A press release from McDonald’s (at least according to a few other blogs) says that this is just to create buzz marketing for the Quarter Pounder (not yet on menus at McDonald’s in Japan) as it’s introduced.
Even though this is supposed to just be temporary/buzz marketing, I wonder if cultivating this sort of aesthetic wouldn’t make sense for them–a move to diversify their holdings (they own a significant portion of Chipotle, or did last I knew) and expand/diversify their customer base (Ex. their ‘unsnobby coffee’ campaign. Tantillo also did a post on
Starbucks/Dunkin’ Donuts mentioning McDonald’s coffee, too.