Brand Failures

30 Brand failures
4 McDonald’s Arch
Deluxe
As well as the McLibel Trial (covered in Chapter 5), McDonald’s has also
experienced a number of more conventional marketing problems in recent
years. Most of these problems have been new products that have failed to
inspire consumers. McLean Deluxe (an attempt to cater for the healthconscious
customer) and McSoup are two obvious examples, but it was with
the Arch Deluxe burger that McDonald’s experienced its most embarrassing
flop.
Marketed as the ‘Burger with the Grown-up Taste’, the idea was to have a
burger which wasn’t associated with children. Indeed, the advertising
campaign for the Arch Deluxe rammed the message home with various
images of kids shunning the ‘sophisticated’ product.
The trouble was that nobody goes to McDonald’s for sophistication, they
go for convenience. Part of this convenience is knowing exactly what to
expect. McDonald’s restaurants may serve up gazpacho in Spain and lamb
burgers in India, but on the whole they are the same the world over. Most
people who walk into a McDonald’s restaurant know what they are going to
order before they reach the counter. They don’t want to be bombarded with
a million and one variations on what is essentially the same product – a
hamburger.
The other problem with the Arch Deluxe was the fact that it was sold on
taste. Everybody knows that McDonald’s is never going to be awarded a
Michelin star, yet everybody still comes back. In an article headlined
‘McDonald’s Missing the Mark,’ which appeared in Brand Week on 12