Moms Blog for McDonald’s
McDonald’s is taking a hint from mainstream media when it comes to reinventing itself as the go-to place for busy Moms. While mainstream media asked, “who would you rather have a beer with?” to determine a candidates trustworthiness, McDonald’s is asking, “who would you make a play date with?” Beginning last year, McDonald’s has been enrolling Moms in their “Quality Correspondents” program. Moms get a behind-the-scene look at McDonald’s restaurants and factories with guided tours and information sessions. Then they blog and make confessional video diaries about their experiences, and amazingly none of them are paid to do so. Regardless of whether the Moms’ commentary is negative or not, McDonald’s apparently believes they will get bonus points and kudos for the program’s transparency.
McDonald’s says the program not a response to the negative portrayal of its restaurants in “Super Size Me“, nor is it in response to New York’s new menu laws where its 380 calorie medium fry bares its shame to the world. “This program wasn’t in response to anything,” said Tara Hayes, manager of U.S. communications at McDonald’s. “We saw this as a great opportunity to give the facts and let people make up their minds for themselves. You can take it or leave it.” Even as Debra DeMuth, McDonald’s global nutrition director, tells Moms the fries “are also a really good source of fiber,” they are hardly convinced. A Mom retorts, “Once you throw them in grease, you kind of ruin it.”
The company still has explaining to do on fries, which contain not only potatoes, and all their fiber, but citric acid, dextrose and sodium acid pyrophosphate. “Why do the french fries have so many ingredients in them? Seeing all those ingredients listed raises some red flags for me,” LaShawna Fitzpatrick of Encino, Calif., wrote on the Quality Correspondent Web site.
With the camera rolling, DeMuth stood her ground. “There is just a lot of misunderstanding out there,” she said. “You really need to look at the facts.”
Gilmore, a mother of three, replied, “You’re not going to be able to sell me on fries.”
No one, Nestle said, is saying fast food doesn’t have nutritional value: “What it also has is a great deal of processing, which removes nutrients, and a great deal of things added that you don’t need in order to make it more palatable.”
Many Moms will agree that deep-fried evil is still deep-fried evil. But, the campaign seems to be making some inroads into reassuring parents that McDonald’s food is not as bad as they think. With absurdly low expectations, though, McDonald’s doesn’t have to try very hard to impress. Moms are impressed by the fact that one McDonald’s they visit has real eggs in the storage room. A visit to a slaughterhouse proves that they use real chicken in the McNuggets. One Mom is delightfully surprised to see a salad maker following food-safety laws by wearing gloves while handling individual bags of lettuce. (To wit, while McDonald’s makes their Egg McMuffins with real eggs, the scrambled eggs are made with the liquid type. And the Mom impressed with the glove-wearing salad-maker was grossed out a couple weeks later at another McDonald’s where the worker was handling lettuce with her bare hands.) Still, thanks to a bun factory tour, some blogger-Moms have a new found emotional attachment to the processed foodstuffs:
On the Web, much bandwidth is devoted to a tour of the nearby bun bakery. The mothers donned white lab coats and hairnets to tour the factory, where the temperature was more than 100 degrees. The video uploaded from the tour occasionally shows the camera focusing on food-safety signs. The moms are also shown how the machines bounce unworthy buns off the conveyer belts.
In her journal entry, Michele Crosby, a Greenbelt mother of two boys, wrote that on her way home she stopped for a burger at McDonald’s.
“I looked at the bun with new eyes,” she wrote. “This time I was amazed that the bun I received looked just like the ones I had seen produced at the factory earlier. I definitely thought of all the safety standards, production innovations and pride that went into making it. Corny as it sounds, I will never look at a McDonald’s bun the same way again!”
All buns aside, the McDonald’s corporation is obviously hedging its bets on emotional resonance busy Moms will have with the bloggers. The camaraderie of parents facing difficult food choices will surely help Moms see the true goodness in Ronald McDonald’s heart. The emotional “they’re just like me” appeal will even let parents overcome the ‘bad parent’ image. Mothers can rationalize, “since these average Moms can take their kids to McDonald’s and still consider themselves good parents, I too will still be a good parent if I take my kids to Micky Dees.”
November 22, 2008
Tags: blogging, blogs, fast-food, food, Health, marketing, McDonald's, moms Posted in: Health
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