Blog Post #10- FINALE!

I’m going to round the semester off by talking about global marketing and how multinational corporations changed their strategies according to national culture.

McDonald’s, one of the largest fastfood restaurant chains in the world has to adapt its product (slightly) to fit in with national tastes and culture. For example, in India where the cow is a sacred animal, they cannot sell their famed beef burgers. So instead, so as not to lose out on the fastfood market, they created the Maharaja Mac, (literally meaning King Mac) a chicken equivalent of their world recognized Big Mac. Although severely dated this article goes into detail on its popularity.

To further this, in continental Europe beer is sold at McDonald’s. To many North American’s this is an unthinkable concept, however to Europeans this is accepted as the standard. Beer is a large part of European culture, especially in Germany, which has the second highest amount of breweries in the world, and Belgium.

McDonald’s has realized this and captured an even broader market of consumers. Even within North America there is quite a bit of variability within what products they offer. Different drink, ice cream and coffees to name a few.

Overall, I think that it is important for firms to pay close attention to the local culture of their target market, because if they do it wrong, they can easily offend people and could cause them to lose substantial portions of their global market.