Corporate Identity and Reputation - McDonalds

Corporate Identity and Reputation

McDonalds Case

1. Introduce your case (background information, what incident occurred?) (192 words)
   

The famous Golden arches also known as McDonalds, a global fast food restaurant, was under attack after critics hijacked a promotional hash-tag that caused an outburst of rancorous hatred on Twitter regarding personal McDonald stories. McDonald's kicked things off when tweeting a post with the hash-tag #MeetTheFarmers. The purpose of the paid hashtag in a campaign, was meant to draw attention to the brand's guarantee of fresh food and to promote the fast food restaurant. However, later that day, the fast food giant continued to post a following tweet using a more dangerously vague hashtag #McDstories. With such a general hashtag, the campaign began to backfire when critics seized on this hashtag #McDStories as an opportunity to share their personal horror stories that they had experienced at McDonalds. One of the fierce critics even claimed 'I haven’t been to McDonalds in years, because I’d rather eat my own diarrhoea.' Posts such as these really made people think twice when ordering their food. The hash-tag went viral as crowd-sourced campaigns are hard to control. McDonalds has since then learned from their experience with their platform and engagement opportunities as they weren’t lovin’ it.

1. Consider the importance of aligning the vision, image and culture in an organization.
   A) What image did McDonald’s try to create in this case? (154 words)
   McDonalds started off with the hashtag #MeetTheFarmers on social media website Twitter, in which they sent out payed for tweets where they showcased the stories of their farmers. They did this with the goal of introducing their farmers as people with a backstory who only want to produce the best of the best. But this hashtag didn’t get the impact and response they expected it to have. The McDonald’s public relations team wanted to have a more interactive experience, so they changed to hashtag to #McDStories with the hopes of hearing positive stories from the customers next to the positive stories their farmers have. This backfired because the PR team didn’t anticipate the negative image their company has with health, hygiene and personal issues people had with McDonald’s. With putting out such an open hashtag, and inviting people to join in they didn’t count in the fact that people are not always as positive.    
   
   B) Is there a gap between some of the aforementioned elements in this case? Justify your answer. (340 words)
   
   The gap is the big communication issue McDonalds’ marketers overlooked is the fact that they overlooked (ignored) the negative image the fast food giant has. They were so focussed on pushing out a positive story that they forgot that their customers all have different opinions and experiences with the fast food chain.

According to Hatch and Schultz you can align the corporate image, identity and reputation with three different gaps: vision-image, vision-culture and image-culture.

In this case the vision-image came tells us that McDonalds’ stakeholders are all the customers, this includes those with negative experiences. They wanted to share their personal experiences with the fast food chain, to showcase that they weren’t pleased with them. The farmers, because they told their stories and got overlooked by the negative response. They wanted to get some recognition for their hard work from the campaign. And McDonalds themselves because they are the ones that caused the crisis, and had to handle it the right way. They wanted to show their new vision and wanted to show that there is an identity and image change happening.  

For the vision-culture gap, they weren’t practicing the values they were promoting yet as much it was needed. They wanted to show that they care about their products, but in the shops the customers were still experiencing their old behaviour. McDonalds were one of the first fast food chains that inspired a more green and caring outlook to their subcultures. Being one of the market leaders, they are looked to as competition by many others. Since they changed to a more green and positive image, they differentiated themselves from the others again.
With the image-culture gap McDonalds’ stakeholders all have different associations with the organization depending on where their standing with their opinions of the organization.  The employees serve the stakeholders every day in their restaurants, they also interact with advertisements. At the time of the case it seemed like the employees didn’t care about what the stakeholders thought because of the poor response they were giving them.