Ronald McDonald loses his smile

Since its creation in 1940, McDonald’s has been growing until becoming one of the biggest companies of the world. But as every product, has an industry life cycle, and it seems that the brand image of McDonald’s is starting to decline. The benefits are a 15% lower regarding the last year and its competitors are catching more and more customers throughout the USA.

To face this situation, McDonald’s focused on international market and tried catching middle class customers in developing countries such as Brazil and China. But actually, the problem of McDonald’s is more complex than this. What it really happens is that the brand image of this company is not enough competitive as it used to be.

McDonald’s means cheap food, however, the new competitors are more attractive to young people who prefer to pay a little more for a better quality product which can also customize as they want to.

McDonald's included chicken sandwiches, salads and fruit in its meal, but the image of the company is built around the burger and fries, which is really difficult to change it.

If the cheap food industry is saturated in developed countries as the market tendencies seem to indicate, what should McDonald’s do?

This is not a problem of sales, intermediaries or price. The problem is about the product and how the brand image is located in mind’s customer.

In order to figure out this problem we suggest creating new products. But we are not talking about salads and fruit. Since the brand image of McDonald’s is too strong to change, we believe they should still making hamburgers but with a high quality. In this way the brand will still being related to the same product with only one difference: the quality would be better. Moreover, we believe that publicity will play an important role to change the mind’s customers.

Summing up, McDonald’s has to face with a new competitive environment with an old brand image that is not efficient any more. In order to be competitive we think they should invest in creating products with more quality but trying not to increase the price so much.