Brand Failures
Brand Failures Brand Failures
124 Brand failures 41 McDonald’s – the McLibel trial As brands go, McDonald’s is a biggie. Along with Coca-Cola and Marlboro, it is one of the few brands which is recognized in almost every country. As McDonald’s itself proclaims, its chain of fast food restaurants represents the ‘most successful food service organization in the world.’ There are now approximately 25,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the globe, catering for around 40 million people every single day. The brand reached this position of dominance by arriving at a simple formula, and pushing it hard. As Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer explain in The Ultimate Book of Business Brands, simplicity is the secret behind the brand’s success: Henry Ford mastered mass product production; McDonald’s has mastered mass service production. It has done so through strict adherence to simple beliefs. Quality, cleanliness and uniformity are the basis of the McDonald’s brand. [. . .] A McDonald’s restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya looks much the same as one in Warsaw, Poland or Battle Creek, Michigan. [. . .] In effect, the very uniformity of the brand is the crucial differentiating factor. However, by the 1990s McDonald’s smooth ride became rather more turbulent. Although it still held onto the crown as king of fast food, the company experienced a number of setbacks. There were new product failures, such as the Arch Deluxe (discussed in Chapter 2), and various run-ins with
PR failures 125 environmentalists, anti-capitalists and other activists. One of the most notorious, and certainly one of the most protracted of these confrontations was the libel case involving Helen Steel and Dave Morris. Although the trial didn’t reach court until 1994, the case revolved around a pamphlet first published in 1986 by London Greenpeace, a splinter group of Greenpeace International. The pamphlet focused on a variety of social and environmental issues such as animal cruelty, exploitative marketing (in McDonald’s advertising campaigns aimed at children), rain forest depletion and the perceived negative health value of McDonald’s products. However, very few people would now know about the contents of that pamphlet if McDonald’s hadn’t taken the matter to court. Even Naomi Klein, the anti-branding commentator and author of No Logo, claims that the pamphlet distributed by Helen Steel and Dave Morris lacked ‘hard evidence’ and was ‘dated’ in its concerns: London Greenpeace’s campaign against the company clearly came from the standpoint of meat-is-murder vegetarianism: a valid perspective, but one for which there is a limited political constituency. What made McLibel take off as a campaign on a par with the ones targeting Nike and Shell was not what the fast-food chain did to cows, forests or even its own workers. The McLibel movement took off because of what McDonald’s did to Helen Steel and David Morris. McDonald’s first sought action against ‘the McLibel two’ over the leaflet in 1990. In fact, the company initially issued libel writs against five activists but three backed down and apologized. For Steel and Morris, however, the threat of legal action also represented an opportunity. The trial could, and indeed did, provide a much larger platform for their views than they would ever have been given standing outside McDonald’s restaurants distributing pamphlets. As it turned out, the trial became the longest in English history, with a staggering total of 313 days in court. And as the trial developed, so too did the media interest. Pretty soon, millions of people knew exactly what was being discussed in that courtroom. Every single statement made in the original pamphlet was discussed and dissected not only in court, but in news studios around the world. In No Logo, Naomi Klein highlights the protracted nature of the case:
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- Page 115 and 116: 31 Ben-Gay Aspirin Ben-Gay is anoth
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124 <strong>Brand</strong> failures<br />
41 McDonald’s – the<br />
McLibel trial<br />
As brands go, McDonald’s is a biggie. Along with Coca-Cola and Marlboro,<br />
it is one of the few brands which is recognized in almost every country. As<br />
McDonald’s itself proclaims, its chain of fast food restaurants represents the<br />
‘most successful food service organization in the world.’ There are now<br />
approximately 25,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the globe, catering for<br />
around 40 million people every single day.<br />
The brand reached this position of dominance by arriving at a simple<br />
formula, and pushing it hard. As Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer explain<br />
in The Ultimate Book of Business <strong>Brand</strong>s, simplicity is the secret behind the<br />
brand’s success:<br />
Henry Ford mastered mass product production; McDonald’s has<br />
mastered mass service production. It has done so through strict adherence<br />
to simple beliefs. Quality, cleanliness and uniformity are the basis<br />
of the McDonald’s brand. [. . .] A McDonald’s restaurant in Nairobi,<br />
Kenya looks much the same as one in Warsaw, Poland or Battle Creek,<br />
Michigan. [. . .] In effect, the very uniformity of the brand is the crucial<br />
differentiating factor.<br />
However, by the 1990s McDonald’s smooth ride became rather more<br />
turbulent. Although it still held onto the crown as king of fast food, the<br />
company experienced a number of setbacks. There were new product failures,<br />
such as the Arch Deluxe (discussed in Chapter 2), and various run-ins with
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