Felicia Firdaus's Blog

Today in our marketing class we talk about branding. A brand is an asset of a company. It’s what distinguishes a company from its competitors and signifies the quality that the company promises to bring in their product or service.

In the class, we discussed about some popular global brand and one of them is McDonald. Most of the students have negative impression toward this brand, remembering that they are selling unhealthy junk food. However, our instructor told us that recently McDonald added their brand value in by using green marketing effort. Unfortunately, this marketing strategy hasn’t received much attention from its customers. In fact, I just knew it today when she told us and I was surprised to found out that this company really does pay attention to the environment.

Here are some examples of actions that McDonald does to preserve the environment:

1. They provide recycling bins in their stores. I know it is very common but then it’s the very basic stuffs that you need to have to show that you concern about the environment. More importantly; they educate the customers by putting signs of which trash goes to which bin.
2. Recycling their waste. Every year, the US Restaurants’ recycled approximately 13,000 pounds of cooking oil. Used cooking oils are turned to biodiesels which used for fuel for their logistic fleets. In addition, they also recycle their cardboards.
3. Environmental friendly packaging. Most of their packaging is made using recyclable material. About 80 percent of Europe’s McDonald packaging is made using recycled materials.
4. Energy efficient. McDonald uses low energy light bulbs and their stoves are installed with sonic alerts to remind staffs to put it back in energy saving mode when they are not using them.
5. Green Restaurant Designs. McDonalds successfully reduced the energy consumption in the restaurant by promoting natural lighting and enhancing the indoor air quality in their green restaurants.  As reported by UK Times Online, the green McDonald restaurant in Chicago uses 25 percent less energy than similar location.

Here is a video that you could watch to see more what McDonald has done in sustainability

So, do you have a better impression for McDonald now?

data and image sources : http://www.mcdonalds.co.uk/, http://www.mcdonalds.com/us