(Please click on the highlighted words to see the videos)
What is the first thing come to your mind when I show you the letter “M” with a red background? Yup, McDonald’s. The world’s largest chain of hamburger fast food restaurants, serving around
68 millions customers daily in 119 countries.
Their main target market is aiming right at kids and teenagers.
Among the commercials filmed by McDonald’s, almost 80% of them are
targeting to young kids audiences who do not have the ability to recognize
between yummy and healthy.
- Behinds the ethical theme of this video, McDonald’s turned the fact of having
unhealthy food into a form of reward.They attempt to lure the kids away from
the traditional reward. - Kids are more matured than ever nowadays, not only because the ingredients
of the fast food they eat, but also the exposure to the commercials. - Wrong examples! The commercials show what it is to be a kid having fun,
which is of course at McDonald’s. - Another unethical part is they shape their taste preferences, which will gain
a tremendous amount of long loyalty customers and market places.
Researches found out a lot scary results. Kids as young as three years old saying
that they prefer the taste of food coming out of a mcdonld’s paper bag to the taste of the
same food coming out from a plain bag. McDonlad’s really did a good job in this sense.
Lo and behold, what have McDonlad’s done to the kids!
On the bright side of the story,
McDonald’s could use its global influence to convey a positive image of food and diet
to the kids all over the world. Intergrating ethics into planning phase, change the content of “happy meal” into more healthy food, like fruit or salad. Besides, lowering the sugar content of the soft drinks, and changing the ingredients into low-salt and low-fat ingredients.
Really agree about the idea of having McDonald’s brand influence to make more children to have health food instead of what McDonald’s is doing now, direct children to have unhealthy food through indirect commercial advertisements.