Perception of McDonald’s Essay -- Business, Unhealthy Food

Perception of McDonald’s McDonald’s has expanded globally into 31,000 worldwide outlets and employed more than 1.5 million people in more than 119 countries (Kulkarni, Lassar, Sridhar & Venkitachalam, 2009). Nevertheless, McDonald’s always faces negative perception and commonly related in serving unhealthy and junk foods amongst its customers around the world (Currie, Dellavigna, Moretti, & Pathania, 2009). It is not only the negative perception of public, but McDonald’s have been attacked and accused of selling unhealthy food in several countries, including the US, China, Belgium, Holland, India, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom (Wilson, 2009). Meanwhile, the core of the current problem is that customers’ still buy fast foods, even though they have negative perceptions on McDonald’s as regards to unhealthy foods. At this point, customers are confused about fast food nutrition messages provided by McDonald’s, while it is still perceived as bad images (Deng, 2 009). In order to overcome this issue, there are changes in McDonald’s marketing and communication strategies as they have started to plan strategic action with two objectives; first, to change the image of McDonald’s from junk food restaurant to a healthy food restaurant, as this will attract health conscious customers and at the same time can enlarge the market scope. Secondly, to change behavior of the existing customers who keep on taking only junk foods, and to persuade frequent fast food users to change their lifestyle by buying balanced meal with McDonald’s new healthy foods (Deng, 2009). ). Perception of McDonald’s Icon-Based Nutrition Label The increasing number of developments in the nutrition field and technologies give a great contribution and invol... ... protein, fat, carbohydrates, and salt (Hoffmann, 2007). Illustration in the Table 1 below shows the icon-based nutritional label used by McDonald’s on their food wrapper, pamphlet and restaurant website. Similar thought can be argued on the display area or position that McDonald’s present their nutrition label. For instance, McDonald’s posted their nutrition label through diverse medium such as in restaurant website, on tray liners, pamphlet, in-store displays and interestingly printed on the food wrappers. As compared to other fast food, McDonald’s take an active steps to create an awareness of nutrition label through different channel and this is explained by Hoffman (2007) that this different channel purposely to generate repeated exposure to the nutrition label, and customers should eventually grasp their meaning, with or without printed labels presented.