Day 037 - 14 Oct 94 - Page 15
1 421; there is a small quote here; the second complete
2 paragraph about halfway through; they are talking about
3 one of McDonald's earliest experiences in foreign markets
4 in the Netherlands. It starts: "And instead of
5 introducing the standard McDonald's menu, the joint
6 venture eliminated the popular Quarter Pounder and added a
7 couple of Dutch favourites - applesauce and deep-fried
8 chicken croquettes." Then a comment from a McDonald's
9 executive: "'We got spooked into thinking that we had to
10 have indigenous foods,' Turner says."
11
12 Again, when I read this several years ago it set warning
13 bells up in my mind. This is not traditional marketing of
14 any sense at all. Traditional marketing would have
15 listened to what the local market was interested in
16 having. It would not have attempted to force its own
17 product range down, as it is rather inelegantly expressed,
18 the indigenous market's throat. But this is clearly what
19 is happening. In fact, it could well be argued that in
20 traditional marketing McDonald's is a total and abject
21 failure. They do not understand how to listen to their
22 consumers; instead they prefer to subvert them. That is a
23 word I will be using again in a moment.
24
25 If I can refer you to page 224, again the second complete
26 paragraph. This talks about their earliest experiences in
27 the Canadian market: "Frustrated by a string of losing
28 years and by his failure to raise his stores' average
29 sales volumes to anything approaching those in the United
30 States, Cohon and Turner agreed that a much bolder measure
31 was needed. Thus, in 1971, Cohon took a step McDonald's
32 had never taken in the United States and likely would not
33 have taken in Canada if the operation had been run out of
34 Oak Brook: he cut prices 20 percent across the board. 'We
35 had to do something dramatic to get Canadians to come in
36 and try the product,' Cohon says."
37
38 Again, a very clear example that the indigenous market in
39 McDonald's marketing speak that they were going into was
40 simply not interested in them. They had lost countless of
41 millions of dollars in that market, and were taking
42 desperate measures to try and persuade the local consumer
43 to taste their product.
44
45 On page 426 we can see how McDonald's again marketed
46 themselves in a highly unethical way in the Japanese
47 market. Once more it is the second complete paragraph on
48 that page. Their local person was somebody called
49 Fujita: "Fujita had the entrepreneurial credentials
50 McDonald's was now looking for abroad. So, in 1971, it
51 agreed to form a Japanese joint venture with McDonald's
52 controlling 50 percent and Fujita and Daiichiya Baking
53 Company splitting the other 50 per cent. Fujita was made
54 president and chief executive of McDonald's Japan, and he
55 soon bought out Daiichiya's interest. From the beginning
56 Fujita called the shots in introducing McDonald's to
57 Japan. Confident that he could import a concept as
58 foreign as the hamburger to a culture whose diet was
59 oriented to fish and rice, he insisted that there was no
60 need to tailor McDonald's menu to Japanese tastes in the
