“Rebecca offers a perspective on McDonald’s faux pas”
Lately a few of you have written to me asking what I thought of McDonald’s food scare. While I jokingly coined it McScary I also offered the below and would like to share with those who have an interest in exploring further into the scandal’s PR perspective:
McDonald’s is a fastfood chain that has grown with Hong Kong for the best part of the city’s history. It came to the city in mid-70′s and since then, it has grown to 235 stores [1], and kind of “nurtured” what we see as the most upbeat and affluent generation. What it has sold us all along is its reliability. For the fastfood chain, its service is about providing an excellent customer experience, which involves putting systems in place so that customers get a consistent, high quality experience no matter which employee is working that day.
So, no matter who is working there that day, you will always get the same experience as they will always put X amount of salt into Y amount of fries and serve you within Z number of minutes. What’s more, even the employees there always greet you the same way in the same tone and manners with the same smile regardless of his or her emotions : )) – right?
For McDonald’s, that’s how they want their business to be. And for us (the normal, everyday customers), we call it reliability. Now if such reliability is no longer there, we can imagine how hard it is for us to swallow indeed.
Have a happy and healthy summer!
