From would to could: Ray Kroc, McDonaldisation & the case for cultural marketing

The de-McDonaldisation of society: cultural disruption and marketing within category conventions

“If I had of asked customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”
- Thomas Ford

Despite McDonald’s cultural success, or perhaps as a result of it, at some point in the early 90’s, as Markus Giesler puts it, “politicians, nutritional experts, and food activists began to de-McDonaldise society, which led to the undoing of many of these taken-for-granted consumer rituals (takeaways and fast food).” These rituals that were so embedded in our modern lives, and which had for the most part gone unquestioned, were to become very culturally off-code over the next two decades — including the birthday parties, the sponsoring of children’s sport, and even the restaurants as a space for families.

And so began a cultural movement away from the fast food system that McDonald’s had best come to represent – the seeds of which first appeared in the Slow Food Movement, which began on the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986, when McDonald's planned to open a franchise there. Today, there is a fundamental category-culture disconnect between the values and worldview of a significant and growing segment of Western society, and the everyday business of the fast food giant.

But it was never a given that the cultural shift would make this disconnect inevitable. In fact, the shift represented a cultural opportunity to innovate and build a new and better market for fast food, aligned with newly emerging cultural codes, movements, and subcultures – to reinvent the company and re-McDonaldise society, but this time based around a different set of values, ideals, and experiences. However, this would not be possible with McDonald’s marketing approach of incrementally maintaining the market within category conventions, rather than culturally reenacting a new and better market.

As Markus Giesler puts it: 

”The management team lost itself in the nitty-gritty of touch, sense, feel aspects of the experience delivery. They changed the menu, ingredients, the restaurant atmosphere, and many other things. Not that these things don’t matter, they absolutely do. But they can’t turn the ship around if the company forgets to re-McDonaldise society."

In short, McDonald’s looked in at themselves and focused on what their customers thought was wrong with the business’ operation. What they needed to do was look outside the business and do cultural research: listening to people to deeply understand their collective lives and emerging culture, and realise the opportunities to connect with this.

The re-McDonaldisation of society? Re-enacting the market for fast food in the 21st century and the challenge for McDonald’s

“The rub is the invention of genuinely new products, of game changers, never comes from refining our analysis of existing consumer trends.”
- Douglas Rushkoff

While McDonald’s were busy introducing salads and turning restaurants into coffee houses, they missed that the real opportunity to connect with changing culture lay far closer to their roots. Today a ‘Bygone Fast Food Revival’, as coined by JWT Intelligence, is well underway that emphasises the craveability and unadulterated nature of fast food we all love (big juicy burgers) but does so in a way that is aligned with the values of today – handmade, locally sourced, quality but affordably priced. This revival is booming not just in the US – the home of the burger – but in New Zealand too with restaurants like Better Burger and Burger Burger.

This might seem like a recent trend, but the macro cultural seeds of this movement lie in a major cultural shift that began in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s: a yearning for yesteryear  combined with disillusionment with big business standardisation of everything, and worker’s dissatisfaction with their own corporate lives. This became evident in many aspects of culture including a folk music revival in the face of over-produced mainstream music. It was also seen in many people leaving the corporate world to lead more artisanal lives, a move that became known as the “bourgeoise bohemian”. Today this idealised subculture has now become mainstream and we see manifestations of this and the micro cultural currents that are spinning off it in much of the work we do, as well as by monitoring social media channels through Zavy.

McDonald’s needed to have been doing this cultural research back then. Their challenge now is to play cultural catchup and understand the cultural shift behind the ‘Bygone Fast Food Revival’ better than anyone: to re-McDonaldise society and play an authentic role in culturally enacting the market for this different brand of 21st Century fast food. McDonald’s has scale and heritage at their disposal. But they must start daring to imagine what people could do (not simply what they will do) and be bold cultural creatives once again. For this they can take inspiration from Kroc.

Burger Burger’s recent home burger making prize kits tap into the cultural codes of food box systems first found in the Local Food Movement and home dining of the Slow Food Movement. Could McDonald’s, with its presence in almost every community, scale this? Think retrofitting restaurants into distribution hubs of radically improved quality and locally sourced ingredients for its famous burger recipes. We know this is on code for culture, and families could engage with this on mass. It is up to a restaurant chain with appropriate scale and capacity to innovate models to enact this cultural opportunity. Thinking too big? Ray Kroc wouldn’t think so.