McDonald’s international marketing strategy is famous for being one of the most relevant examples of glocalization. The video below provides you with a nice and brief explanation of how this fast food giant has been able to successfully penetrate so many different markets during the years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCG7ScRP1ws
Now McDonald’s glocalization strategy is landing in the digital marketing world, with a brand new and intriguing challenge. Mr. Martinelli, the US digital marketing manager at McDonald’s, has announced that the company’s new goal is to roll out about 14.500 Facebook pages before 2015, with the aim of getting as close as possible to customers. Moreover, they are planning to launch Twitter accounts for all the main restaurants to improve the quality of the CRM. The local marketing teams will take care of the pages using a program called Salesforce Social Studio.
This ambitious plan is supposed to give to McDonald’s the possibility of thoroughly monitoring all customer conversations about local stores and considerably increase the one-to-one engagement. In fact, the digital manager recognized the outright relevance of being able to deliver “a relevant content at the right time to the right people” and also to play an active role in their conversations. They aim to establish a constant and immediate interaction with the customer base. This is particularly relevant for a company like McDonald’s, that is constantly fighting against rumors regarding the quality of the food it sells, since it will enable them to stop the diffusion of harmful buzz very quickly.
This is not the first time that an international brand has used a similar approach with Facebook. For example, WalMart launched 3.500 pages on the social network for its local retail stores in 2011, but the results in terms of engagement didn’t meet the expectations. Even though McDonald’s claims to have a deeper understanding of the situation and of the related risks, an hyper-localization strategy as this one could end up to be incredibly effective, but it surely entails various risks and difficulties. It will doubtlessly require high investments in staffing and a significant dose of trust between headquarters and local management.
These are the main challenges that the international burger retailer will have to face:
- Be consistent in the content
- Produce tailored messages
- Don’t cannibalize themselves on social media
- Don’t let the customers feel confused
- Have a very well-prepared local marketing staff
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Nice information about McDonald.
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