Ch. 15 - Retailing

Place visited: McDonalds

McDonalds being a franchise, offers almost the same product and services as any other McDonalds all depending on their location. For example, the way one product or service is practiced in one McDonalds may be different than others because of regional differences. Boasting a whopping 33,000+ restaurants around the world in 118 countries, McDonalds is one of the leading franchises. Being a restaurant type franchise, McDonalds doesn't use many retailing practices and relies solely on commercials and other picture orientated advertisements/retailing to help persuade people to buy the product. Along with most McDonald advertisements/retailing they usually talk about the prices being low and tend to over-exaggerate things when in reality the product you get is nothing like the pictures portrayed in the advertisement/retailing.

Although McDonalds does tend to disappoint people/customers when new products are released (mostly the burgers), they do have a good enough retailing mix to keep them coming back. Promotion of their products is a very important role to McDonalds because it will determine whether or not that product will sell or not. If they introduced a new product without promoting it beforehand then no one would know that such a product even existed. Along with promotion comes presentation and pricing. Like I discussed earlier, McDonalds relies heavily on picture orientated advertisements/retailing which are meant to give off a "delicious" or "worth the money" image. If all of McDonald's burgers were shown in their advertisements/retailing as the way they "really are/look like" then they would most definitely see a drop in sales because they don't give off much appeal. Same thing can be said about the pricing; if a product sells for $5, then by all means it better be worth $5. Lets use an example; the double cheeseburger:

What the product really looks like

What the product looks like in their advertisment

Because the double cheeseburger practically replaced the regular cheeseburger on the dollar menu (roughly $1.20 at most McDonalds), people don't care about the appearance of the product, they mostly care about the price. If the double cheeseburger wasn't on the dollar menu and costed lets say $3.00 instead of $1.00, the burger might actually still sell, however that would only happen if the product "looked the same as it did in the advertisement". If the double cheeseburger didn't sell for $3.00 McDonalds wouldn't be in much trouble because of the wide variety and mix of products being offered to the customers/consumers (diversity). Atmosphere also plays a important role in day to day McDonalds operations because it influences the mood of customers and employees. Ask yourself "would I want to sit down and eat here again if I had a choice?", if you answer yes then that means that particular venue (it can be any restaurant or etc.) has a good atmosphere. If a McDonalds looked like a run down restaurant with dust, cobwebs, and etc., it would give off a bad impression and vice versa. If a McDonalds restaurant looked classy, clean, and sophisticated, then it would give off a good impression which in turn would bring in more re-occurring customers.