The European Way

Before I actually get to the point of this entry (which is about how McDonald’s changed in Europe in order to keep and attract new customers) I have to say I’m not a fan of ‘junk food’. I don’t live on crisps, cookies, diet coke, chocolate, nachos, sauce and crispy strips but I enjoy them every once in a while – you know, the way every person likes to ‘indulge’ himself or herself when he or she can afford to. I certainly don’t mind them and I’m not filled with hate against various fast food chains unless there’s a proven theory that if I eat there I’ll get cancer and die one day. The same way I’m not a Mac evangelist or anything. I’m not a fanatic either, I know animals die and stuff but I won’t fall into the category of people that takes fast food restaurants to court because of cruelty to animals because there are more important animals we should be watching and caring for than the ones used to make us hamburgers and chicken nuggets. I really don’t like this hypocrisy at all.

Just the way I didn’t like the hypocrisy surrounding various cases of McD being taken to court by people from the United States that claimed the smallest of problems and blamed them on their restaurant. I’ve spilled my hot coffee on me, it’s not my fault I was clumsy but it was McDonalds’ fault the coffee was too hot. If it happened in my own home I certainly would have been fine and not forcing a company into giving me thousands of dollars reimbursement for the damage their coffee caused.

I don’t believe in ‘Supersize me’ kinds of movies either and the drama/attention they caused on the internet.

But today, it’s about an article in The New York Times – how McDonald’s has invested a lot of money in their European restaurants to woo customers. There’s so much to talk about here, I don’t know where to begin!

Aiming to create a more relaxed experience in a sophisticated atmosphere, McDonald’s is replacing bolted-down plastic yellow-and-white furniture with lime-green designer chairs and dark leather upholstery. It is the restaurant chain’s biggest overhaul in more than 20 years and, with its franchisees, it plans to spend more than 600 million euros ($828 million), remodeling 1,280 European restaurants by the end of this year.

That’s a lot of money to spend on redesigns but if you ask me it’s the smartest decision they’ve ever made. Most of the restaurants looked like they were taken from a photograph shot in the ’90s, with some silly looking chairs, furnishing and decorations. If there’s one reason why I didn’t like McD in the past it’s because I had this feeling I couldn’t go inside a restaurant of theirs and have a coffee with someone without feeling awkward or like in high school – because that’s the general impression it made.

McCafe in Germany

 

McDonald’s in Italy

You couldn’t go down to McD in a business suit and expect your partner to take you seriously. The small chairs and tables made it hard to create an impression in the past but now you can easily go to your local McD if you have this unprepared meeting and not have to look around to see if people are eyeing you in a funny way because you’ve taken your office look down there.

McDonald’s is introducing healthier foods and items that cater to regional tastes, like caffè lattes. Hoping to attract more young adults and professionals, in addition to its core customer base of children, the chain is also adding amenities like Internet access and rental iPods. As head of McDonald’s restaurants in his native France in the late 1990s, Mr. Hennequin had searched for ways to make fast food more appealing to a nation that prefers slow-simmered cassoulets and likes to savor a meal. In Britain, McDonald’s restaurants started to serve porridge for breakfast. In Portugal, they offer soup and in France, cheese saga — burgers with French cheeses.

I remember how it all started out with salads. Then with diet sauces, continued with products for people who were fasting and then moving on to products such as Royal Cheese, Greek Burger with the Olympics in Athen a while ago, Wedge Potatoes and some double pork hamburgers for people that enjoyed a lot of meat in their meals.

 

Their biggest risk is not stretching it to the point where it snaps, just like the article said – extending your menus with a lot of new products that have a local flavour can be a bit dangerous but as long as their hamburgers and fries remain their best sellers McD won’t have a problem. One thing that does feel like stretching it is the iPod rental. It would be a cool brand association (wouldn’t be long before Nike would fit into the picture, telling you how to stay fit after you’ve had your meal in there) but that’s already a wee bit too much.

Anyway, a nice step forward from McDonald’s and their European president. Surprisingly a French guy

News and pictures (1st two) via Influx Insights Blog (Ed Cotton – sorry if the pictures are meant to stay on Flickr, I’ll remove them if so) and an extra gallery at the NY Times

Barefoot

Apparently 48% of women have walked home barefoot because of painful shoes. It’s a scary thought, isn’t it? I admit to having done this once – not all the way home but all the way to the car because I just couldn’t stand it after five or six hours of not being able to sit anywhere.

Such is the price women pay. Solutions? Get a second pair with you or do like mrs. Victoria-Deadlylookinghighheels-Beckham does, wear some wool socks with your new shoes around the house till you get used to them!

Social Networking Sites in The UK

Well, at least now there are some real numbers out there. Even though they count persons aged 15+ it’s still a (good and refreshing) sign that the UK doesn’t really fancy networking sites with weird mexicans and fatties leaving promiscous 12 year old girls comments on their pages.

Sort of related to my previous post.

Mature users prefer Bebo and Facebook over MySpace and Faceparty! That’s definitely good news.

Facebook, MySpace, Second Life

Ok so I said I’ll be doing in-depth research on trends – either on the Internet or in real life. I must start with two cases I really really like and I think I’m more entitled to talk about rather than any other 30+ year old marketer that thinks he’s discovered hot water by investing time and resources into these two-three networking sites.

What I really like about companies is that everyone feels this need to be ‘ahead’ of everyone else and to have this sixth sense to discover what the internet will move on to next, what the ‘hype’ is and all these other cool words used in powerpoint presentations by planners and others to explain things to people that have never heard of them.

I’ve seen and heard so many (presentations) and only a few of them actually grasped the idea and meaning of facebook, myspace, bebo and other networking portals.

So, this is how it works.

Like a song used to say, we’re hollow human beings. We’re hollow and selfish to a certain extent. Whenever we take decisions we act like we don’t care about what others say, how much something will cost us if it makes us happy etc. but in fact we do. We do care but will never admit it. Whenever we take a decision, according to Trout, there comes in a factor called ‘perceived risk‘. Perceived risk is financial, functional, physical, social or psychological (Will it cost too much for what it’s worth? Will it work? It looks a bit dangerous.. what will others say? Will I feel guilty?)We like it when others admire us for our decision or look up to us and compliment us on our looks, car, children, house, anything really. We’re also pretty vain and like to flaunt our own assets even to the point where it goes beyond blowing our horn, some even in a rude manner.

If you open up MySpace or Hi5 or Piczo or really any other free website that doesn’t take much knowledge of HTML but just knowledge of how to copy and paste a premade design from some other free website, you’ll see it looks like prehistorical internet. Animated gifs that will flash and burn your eyes or just designs that look so god damn awful no one can actually stand the view. You know, we weren’t all born graphic designers and we can’t figure out for ourselves that blue doesn’t go well with orange, red and green don’t mix, Comic Sans MS is an old crappy font and so and so on. If it looks cool to the user, anything goes.

1. MySpace

So MySpace gave users the freedom to do whatever they wanted to the original (mind you, boring) template, to paint it pink and green with glittering gifs and allowed HTML comments. Privacy settings are only for the smart MySpace user that has figured out he/she can enable them and use them accordingly. MySpace looked cool at first. Then the internet started being filled up with fake profiles of fake people – there were actually websites where you could ‘buy’ friends to look popular since your total number of acquaintances was displayed on your main page. It was ‘cool’ being on MySpace and having a lot of friends but then it got even worse. Bands started making MySpace pages. It was ok for musicians to have a MySpace place to store a few songs which you could add to your profile and everythign but then every anonymous garage band could have one as well. Craving popularity, bands would just add you as a friend in a rude manner and the second day you’d get spammed by some hundreds of friend requests from bands you never heard of and never wanted to hear about either. Obviously in privacy settings you could change this but only a few did and only when it became a nuissance.

 

After the band hype you could add about everything to your profile and display it in ‘top friends’. Brands, movies, artists, whatever. It became less of a networking website but a place to express your likes and dislikes and just follow the flock instead of being in control of your own preferences. Mature users started to dislike MySpace. It became a mess exactly when more and more marketers and 13-16 year old teenagers filled it up with ’show us your Clairol hairstyle’ and pictures of ‘this is me and my friend at the mall’, ‘this is us eating’, ‘this is me when I woke up today’. Enough was enough.

2. Facebook

Facebook came as a sleek and elegant solution to what people that had left MySpace wanted. By the time Facebook was getting popular among university/college students and graduates, MySpace was desperately trying to bring them back by letting them add 300 pictures to their profiles. Because you know loyalty – it’s easier to retain customers than to attract new ones.

Facebook looked good, you couldn’t edit it and colour it pink with polka dots which made people happy. You had way better privacy settings and better control over unsolicited email received from them. They were the cool guys to say ‘Hey, we know how you feel about MySpace, why not like us instead, we’ll be everything you lacked there’.

Facebook wasn’t much different – comment, leave comments, have wall-to-wall conversations and see them in a more simplified manner. It was better because you could control who you wanted in your friend list. You didn’t have everyone seeing your profile, you had the freedom to choose whether it was only your friends that could see it, your networks, nobody and so and so on.

 

Sounds good but all good things have to come to an end. Sadly because of the same thing called customization and personalisation of your own tiny space on the internet. If Facebook hadn’t allowed you to add 3rd party applications and hadn’t become such a crappy mess, it would have survived. All sorts of programs were added and of course people were eager to try them – fortune cookies, movie sharing, hugs, colouring boards, zombie armies and all sorts of things filled Facebook in no time. Another thing that upset the majority of Facebook users, apart from being invited to add application X, Y, Z to their profiles and share things with their mates was that everyone and their mums had a facebook profile. It became popular with the mums and dads because they could benefit from a work network, such as the companies that they worked for. You would find your mum and dad and friends of friends you didn’t want to know about adding you as their friends and seeing you in degrading poses in your profile pictures. Having privacy options which allowed you to limit the profile other people saw when they accessed it could have helped but again, it was a matter of complicating things – choosing who sees a full profile and who sees a limited one. Your information wasn’t really as secure as you thought it was.

3. Second Life

And now, for something totally unrelated. Second Life, the most complex of all networking schemes, has attracted a number of marketers as well. It was cool in 2006 and even in 2007, four years after it was created. It was cool to have a Second Life avatar, to have ingame (?) money and other things but again. Business could have marketed in Second Life but people have revolted against it – they didn’t want ingame Walmart, they didn’t want the same brands ingame as in real life, they wanted the game to be a game and not to reflect their real life. I think this is where people were mistaken – people didn’t want their political parties, newspapers in Second Life, they wanted to make their own. It was hard to do that and people to just like it. They felt invaded by these companies and most likely it won’t last long.

The most annoying thing is probably the fact that some people have only recently heard of the fact that they can extend their business into Second Life or some ‘trendy’ networking site.

Second Life’s dead, baby, Second Life’s dead.

 

But critics are certainly right that the vast majority of traditional marketers are totally clueless about the Internet in general and social media in particular. Otherwise, how could you explain the fact that so many sites are still full of flashing banner ads and spiders and roaches racing across articles you’re trying to read? (Did you ever click on one of those? I sure haven’t)

back from the dead

So I haven’t used this blog a lot because I thought I could write in Romanian for a while, again, after four years of blogging in that language. I just can’t. Words don’t come easy at all. Maybe they do sometimes but it’s just a shit attempt to combine English and Romanian that most people hate so I’d rather not do that.

Anyway, a bit of an update would be that I had a very crap baccalaureate exam – I almost failed one of the modules (maths) because I was probably not interested enough and didn’t try hard enough, maybe because I was expecting to pass anyway and so and so on. One new thing I’ve learnt is never trust anyone that says every idiot can pass an exam because it’s not true!

After a while my mum became ill and I had a few hectic weeks, she’s still yellow from hepatitis but anyway…slowly recovering!

My dad is divorcing his second wife after 15 years of marriage and two kids which IS a bit awkward but just like that song says … hate to say I told you so BUT I TOLD YOU SO .

I’m one month away from starting university and I’ve been doing a bit of pre-research about what I want to do later and I’ve been offered a very interesting position as trend analyst with a rather well-known company, except it was in Romania. I couldn’t have accepted it anyway but I still think it’d be interesting to mull things over and think if trend watching and analysis is worth the effort. In theory my uni course is advertising and brand management but I think I should manage and it has definitely sparked up my interest.

Anyway, in about a month I should be moving to Manchester and starting uni. Till then a few things I HAVE to comment on.