Introduction
Organisations deploy different methodologies to communicate their brand to the existing and potential new customers. The complexity of the marketing environment, especially for organisations that operate in a competitive market, calls for the integration of marketing communication (IMC). Keller (2009) defines IMC as the incorporation and harmonising of diverse communication alternatives to set up the required consciousness and picture that appears in the mentality of customers. This paper explores how McDonald’s can deploy IMC to ensure that it attains acceptance of its products and services in the fast-food industry across the globe by proposing a possible IMC campaign folio.
Research and Situation Analysis
McDonald’s is one of the leading global fast-food retailers that offer fast foods in more than 119 countries all over the globe. McDonald’s restaurants and franchises, which stand at about 33, 500 continue to grow as the organisation penetrates new markets in Asia. This immense success of McDonald’s is attributed to incredible emphasis of consumer engagement, appropriate leaderships that fits well the business of the organisation, and the exceptional investment of the organisational resources to enhance successful integrated marketing communications.
McDonald’s has strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in its operational environment. Thus, a SWOT analysis can unveil the ability of the corporation to implement an effective IMC project. SWOT analysis is a strategic planning approach for evaluating the strengths, limitations, opportunities, and threats that business establishments encounter (Hill & Westbrook 1997). The main aim of conducting a SWOT analysis for any organisation is to ensure that threats are turned around to become opportunities whilst ensuring that weaknesses become strengths. Strengths are the traits that enable an organisation to have an advantage in comparison with other organisations (Hill & Westbrook 1997). McDonald’s has already built a strong brand image. Many people regard it as offering hygienically prepared products.
Although McDonald’s possesses the above strengths, it has some weakness. Weaknesses are the traits that place it at a disadvantage in comparison with other organisations in the same industry (Hill & Westbrook 1997). One of McDonald’s subtle weaknesses is its bureaucratic structure, which affects its effective communication of strategies of executing IMC projects.
One of its major opportunities is increasing customers’ behavioural responses with reference to the number of people who are becoming cautious about their eating habits in the effort to avoid health risks that are associated with unhealthy eating behaviours. People are also becoming concerned with the manner in which foods are served in addition to the speed of serving the foods at the company’s restaurants. McDonald’s has a big score in all these areas. However, it faces the threat of external competitive market forces.
Objective Setting and Translating Objectives
For new products and services to have market appeal, different marketing communication approaches must be deployed to reach different target audiences (Luck & Moffatt 2009). McDonald’s needs to come up with SMART objectives whose implementation will translate the company into a first-class food zone for clients around the globe. For instance, it has to set advertising strategies. Advertising needs to create brand appeal.
Micu and Pentina (2014, p.159) studied the impacts of ‘paid advertising (banner ad plus banner ad) and publicity (news article plus banner ad) on attitude towards the brand in the context of different product categorisation approaches’. They did this by deploying ELM and economics theory of information testing via which various communication modes affect the attitude of consumers towards different brand categories. The research findings indicated that ELM creates an effective attitude towards a product compared to information economics (Micu & Pentina 2014).
According to Micu and Pentina (2014), inclusion of information that concerns brand in an online advertising environment communication mix has more impacts on brand attitude towards products that have a low or moderate involvement product. For high involvement products, more impacts are made by ELM when credible information is included in the advertisement mix. Ewing (2009) insists that measurement is crucial to determine the effectiveness of different IMC synergies.
The goal of McDonald’s integrated marketing communication entails seeking strategies for developing and building strong brands. Keller (2009) provides a model for brand equity evaluation in the effort to enable marketers develop and/or manage brands in a changing marketing environment. He provides and reconsiders product significance pyramid to help in pathway promotion connections within an organisation to make customer allegiance and continuous interactions.
While creating effective IMC projects, Mallia and Windels (2013) assert that organisations experience challenges in leadership roles of directing such campaigns. Basing their research on 43 interviews, the researchers conclude that effective and creative directors in advertising agencies deploy expertise in strategy development, creativity, and valuable interpersonal communications to motivate and mentor their co-workers to develop brand communication whilst managing brand identity that matches the organisation’s vision and mission.
Message Formulation, Channel Selection, Construction of Communication Infrastructure
McDonald’s has to use new media and traditional media to position its products and services. The organisation experiences myriads of challenges in its operational environment, especially based on the increasing emphasis on the need to formulate messages that will push clients towards changing their eating behaviours. The selected messaging channel has to capture the danger of health risks that are associated with eating unhealthy foods. In fact, health specialists regard foods that contain high calories such as fast foods, which form McDonald’s menus, as unhealthy. Campaigns that have been initiated by health organisations against such products have resulted in the emergence of demand for fibre-rich foods.
In a bid to ensure customer satisfaction in a marketing environment that is dominated by changing eating habits, the organisation needs to ensure that it markets products that meet this changing trend. For this purpose, McDonald’s values creativity and innovation in an effort to come up with new products that meet the emerging customer needs. Finne and Gronroos (2009) assert that organisations need to consider integration of messages about a product. To create meaning, the researchers insist that historical, future, internal, and external factors have to be considered in an IMC campaign that any organisation plans to adopt (Finne & Gronroos 2009).
McDonald’s should use integrated communication channels such as newspapers, television, and online media. These advertisements should focus on marketing healthy foods to help meet the 21st century marketing needs, which focus on building a competitive advantage. Failure to respond to the issue of developing and marketing foods that meet customer expectations places McDonald’s market segment at the threat of being taken away by its competitors. McDonald’s should focus on various mechanisms of ensuring that it provides healthy foods in its menus whilst reflecting such changes in its marketing plans or integrated communication plans through new and traditional media. Such change of pattern in the market planning of the company is important to ensure that the company continues to be the global market leader.
Implementation, Phasing Of ‘Events, and Assigning Key Milestones
Any marketing effort needs to leave remarkable indentations in the minds of the target audience in the effort to create a strong brand image, especially while attempting to introduce new products. For this reason, in a bid to induce customer satisfaction with McDonald’s products, it should use different or new marketing plans whenever it attempts to introduce a new product (Yelkur 2007). Faced with dynamics of changing tastes and ‘unhealthy’ perceptions of fast foods, McDonald’s has to deal with the challenge of building clientele for new products, especially where the new products are unpopular and inconsistent with the brand image of the company.
The organisation has the capability to deal with this challenge as evidenced by its efforts to handle and protect its brand image to enhance customer satisfaction as a catalyst of building a competitive advantage through IMC. Varey (2001) supports this approach by claiming that integrated marketing techniques can increase the profitability of a corporation through increased customer satisfaction when utilised to achieve the needs of buyers or customers.
McDonald’s has to implement advertising policies and strategies. Advertising as a component of integrated marketing can be highly effective for McDonald’s due to its immense reach of various mass communication media such as television, magazines, and newspapers. Indeed, Menon (1999) confirms that some integrated communication marketing techniques such as personal selling, special product and service packaging, and sales promotions among others are ineffective where large populations are targeted by product communications. The main aim of integrated communication at McDonald’s should be to position its brand in a manner that enables the company to make more sales in all its operational areas. Brand positioning should function as the main source of brand image by creating strong and permanent product associations in the minds of its customers.
McDonald’s stands out as one of the most successful brands across the globe. This success is replicated wherever the company establishes a franchise or any internally operated store. To position itself, McDonald’s must pay incredible attention to listening and communicating with its customers in a consistent manner by assuring them of quality and hygiene for its products amid criticisms and competitive forces from other fast-food dealers who are seeking to cut down the company’s market share.
In this context, Holt and Quelch (2004, p. 71) reckon that McDonald’s uses ‘marketing communication methods such as advertising and promotions to create colours, designs, and images, which give the brand its familiar logo’. This observation means that whenever customers see the golden arches in McDonald’s logo, an image that comes into mind includes the company’s products and services. Such an image is useful in constructing customer loyalty to a given brand. McDonald’s can also invest in creating strong brand inventories through IMC (Arvidsson 2005).
With regard to Hill and Ettenson (2005, p.86), profiling a product or a service ‘requires marketers to catalogue in both visual and written form of the sold products or services, the names, logos, symbols, characters, packaging, slogans, or other trademarks’. The outcome of any product profile for McDonald’s requires accuracy, precision, comprehensiveness, and a reflection of the status of a product or service brand for a given organisation. Brand inventory constitutes some of the essential elements of brand audits that permit the examination of the origin of brand equities of an organisation. Brand inventories serve a principal purpose of helping to profile branding approaches that are deployed by an organisation for its goods and services.
Budgeting
With reference to McDonald’s IMC campaign folio, brand inventories need to highlight the brand elements that are utilised to build brand loyalty, the manner in which this task is accomplished, and/or how it is reflected on the IMC campaign. However, such aspects need to be ethical (Fordyce & Ryn 2014). At McDonald’s, aggressive product outlining and budgeting should be done to unveil the probable situations of demarcation and correspondence.
In this extent, a top-down budgeting strategy will work for McDonald’s since it follows a chain where the higher-ranking managerial departments will be tasked with the formulation of the company’s high-end deliverable and agenda before being dispatched to the other departments for execution. Such a budgeting plan gives the lower departments an excellent opportunity ‘to suggest what consumers’ current perceptions may be based on’ (Wilhelm 2011, Para.7). Association of consumers with various brands of an organisation is deeply ingrained in the meaning that they attach to various brand elements.
Brand inventory is incredible in the provision of vital information that can be deployed in the interpretation of various follow-up researches such as brand exploratory. For McDonald’s, brand inventory should be utilised in supplying crucial information for analysis and/or conducting initial insights in the manner in which brand equities can be managed for a company’s products to receive a positive reception by the existing and potential consumers. This move is perhaps significant because the more positively a brand is received, the more likely an organisation will make higher sales and hence higher profitability. However, amid the investment in creating effective brand inventories through IMC, the organisation still experiences some challenges.
As a component of IMC, organisations should endeavour to support their brand through various mechanisms, which also help to create brand awareness. For McDonald’s, brand promotion should comprise the central component for supporting its brand. Promotion is done through various ways such as sponsorship. The main aim of sponsoring sports such as the FIFA world cup and the Olympics is to create a global image for the existence of McDonald’s brand. Indeed, in 1968, ‘McDonald’s first got involved with the Olympics, by airlifting hamburgers to athletes in Grenoble, France’ (Holt & Quelch 2004, p. 71). During the Olympics that were held in Montreal in 1976, McDonald’s became an official sponsor of the games.
In 1994, the company sponsored the world cup tournaments in the US. As Wilhelm (2011, Para.10) confirms, McDonald’s also ‘recently renewed its long-term deal with FIFA until 2014, with global rights to the recent 2010 World Cup South Africa and the 2014 World Cup in South America’. The company has the right to various confederation cup competitions. In all these deals, the company is entitled to special advertisement rights during the games apart from supplying its food to spectators.
Since such games attract people from the global fronts, the company should communicate its brand on the global perspectives. Personal promotions should also constitute important aspects of IMC. Customer satisfaction is a critical element of retaining the existing clients whilst attracting new ones (Yelkur 2007). In case of McDonald’s, customers who possess good organisational reputation can share it with other people. This situation creates the urge amongst potential customers to experience the service or product that is offered by an organisation.
Monitoring and Evaluation
An affective IMC needs to develop a coherent meaning of the communicated brand through different methodologies. Such effectiveness can only be guaranteed once monitoring and evaluation of the IMC plan. Monitoring and evaluation of the plan has to be assessed based on the set objectives to determine whether McDonald’s is in or out of track. IMC projects that yield success in the long-term need to be creative and innovative to help in addressing the things that consumers look for in the marketplace. However, Stuhlfault and Yoo (2013) confirm that many organisations test and evaluate their IMC alternatives in the late stages so that such evaluations and testing become wasteful and expensive. Nevertheless, when timed well, McDonald’s can develop IMC alternatives that have humour, novelty, effect, and utility.
Conclusion
IMC is a special tool that McDonald’s can adopt as a measure of its efficiency and quality of services based on the reported customers’ experience with the company’s services. The company builds customer satisfaction around aspects such as the provision of quality foods that meet the clients’ tastes and preferences whilst ensuring speedy service.
Customers are the main sources of organisational success because a company’s success depends on the capacity of customers to consume its products and/or services so that it can continue with its daily goods and service production routines. For repeated sales, it is necessary for the company to ensure that its customers are satisfied with the products and services. Consistent with this assertion, McDonald’s should recognise that without building good customer relationships, it risks losing its competitive advantage.
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