What Can McDonald’s Learn from “McCrisis”?
If you have a problem finding which brand is having trouble recently, McDonald’s will never let you down. When I tried to dig out some recent news about McDonald’s, I went to Youtube, a great search engine! I found exactly what I want less than 1 second after I typed “McDonald’s” in the search box. As a veteran Youtube user, a brand plus a location appearing in the search prediction, like “McDonald’s Louisiana”, usually means something bad happened.
McDonald’s Employee Attacking Customers in New Orleans Went Viral on Youtube
A customer uploaded a video on Youtube showing one McDonald’s employee chocking and punching him in New Orleans earlier this September. This video went viral on Youtube with 487K views and 932 comments. The reviews under the video show that people are upset, but not surprised about McDonald’s frequent involvement with violence.
McDonald’s Remains Silent
There’s also no surprise that the franchise owner responded to this incident without any apology and conclusion. According to WWL-TV, the owner only said the behavior in the video was not what he expected and he would investigate this incident. The update of the investigation outcome is never released. McDonald’s remains silent and pretends as nothing happened.
Impact of Social Media
As a regular fast-food customer, I don’t understand why a fast-food giant like McDonald’s handled this issue without deep consideration. In the era of social media, any brand can suffer terrible losses from a post or tweet by an anonymous user. Maintaining a good reputation is crucial in the food industry. Apparently, McDonald’s does not really care and underestimates the influence of social media. It does not put customer experience in the first place. At least, it did not educate and manage its employees in a good way. Otherwise, those violent incidents can be easily avoided.
PR vs Marketing
In a digital world, I think PR people should be more responsible to handle social media crises. Marketing people have more to do before the good and service sold. But both parts should work together during the crisis. PR specialists help companies to build and maintain good reputations on social media and other platforms. I’m pretty sure that big companies like McDonald’s also spend a good amount of money to do SEO to make sure its business maintaining good brand recognition and association in searching results. However, does McDonald’s ever notice or recognize why it still constantly associates with negative news? I understand that the fast-food industry is naturally fast and furious. Actually, McDonald’s has done lots of great marketing campaigns in the past. It also has the famous product McRib back to stores this October. I hope McDonald’s could think more about improving its customer service and PR skills to restore its reputation.
Thanks for your reading and hope you had a great weekend!
Reference of the news: https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/local/orleans/customer-attacked-in-new-orleans-mcdonalds-video-demands-criminal-charges/289-29fc533c-ac13-4cd2-8ec1-1236a860863b
Youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SF8z9fgjoA
