Ignore the McHaters & focus on ‘human truths’.
Addiction Economy Thought for Today - the sheer sophistication of the Economic Model or Predatory Marketing and Disinformation at work here, really eye-opening.
Remember Morgan Spurlock and Super-sized Me who nearly died from eating at McDonald's every day, and Eric Scholosser's Fast Food Nation? In 1992 we were really shocked. This was terrible, it had to stop. Fast food was killing us at an alarming rate.
Guess what nothing happened and McDonald's got richer. Their shared-price has gone up 1000% since then and we are significantly more unhealthy than we were back then.
How did they do it? Marketing. (Predatory Marketing is Number 2 in our 4 Drivers of the Economic Model)
They decided not to worry any more about the 'McHaters' and just focus on making McDonalds associated with a warm fuzzy feeling of being human. Hey we humans we eat bad stuff every so often. So what.
“They’re hyperfocusing on what they call fan-favorite moments, trying to essentially identify how we emotionally connect to McDonald’s,” said Kaitlin Ceckowski, who researches fast-food marketing strategies at Mintel, a market research agency. “What ‘human truths’ exist around their brand?”
The Human Truth is they are killing us.
One of the projects we would like to do this year, is going to see the Ad Agencies to understand the Cognitive Dissonance that lets them do this work with either a clear conscience or at least not unclear enough to say no to the work.
Thanks Jonathan Andrew, PhD for the heads up on this. A really shocking read.
Here in the New York Times