Marketing and Pop Culture
While Helen and Dave were telling McDonald's they had become economically consumed with marketing to children and teens, hip hop marketing executive and the “McKinsey of pop culture” Steve Stoute, was at work creating uniforms for McDonald's' employees that would meld the urban style of America's youth, with the functionality needed of a uniform. Now vice president of U.S. marketing for General Motors, Stoute markets to the young urban trendsetter for companies like Chevrolet and Crest. Stoute coined the phrase, “I'm lovin' it” for McDonald's and helped open the companies eyes to a proposed urban uniformity. “They have a million-plus young people working for them who come to the job every day ashamed of what they are wearing…the uniforms are ugly” Stoute says. With this marketing mogul at the helm, suggested designers, FUBU, American Apparel, and Tommy Hilfiger will drape these young service workers in style. Stoute asserts, “If workers were actually proud of what they were wearing, it could be a huge opportunity to promote the brand”. Marketing to teens, by teens is certainly a shrewd move, but is it kosher?
Billboard Statement Art
So far, I'm not lovin' it. This gigantic multinational company deliberately markets to children with the knowledge that parents will have little leverage with their tantrum-throwing children, if they don't give in to the all-powerful Happy Meal. And the major executives are being paid the big bucks to not only solicit your money, by way of your children, they are now luring their young workers in with hip uniforms that translate into strategic after hours marketing. So, yes, the hip-hop urban market has been infiltrated by the all-supreme corporation. It was all just a matter of time before the gold mine of the pop culture element was tapped. But before that, there was Ronald. His dated image is still culturally relevant, and satirical images of him are popping up everywhere from blog spots to billboards. Ronald is encountering as much negative press as Lindsey Lohan's drinking escapades. Some of these parodies have taken on a cult-like progression by one movement, The Billboard Liberation Front. The Front, “improves” billboards with relevant parodies of pop culture icons and the like. One of their most ambitious endeavors took the stage, so to speak, in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco in 2005 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of McDonald's. Ron English, a celebrated and controversial billboard artist was in tow for the creation of the animatronic design entitled “To Serve Man”(Billboard Liberation Front) depicting Ronald McDonald force-feeding a portly child hamburgers, while an Alien predator schemes from above. The BLF, in an immediate press release following the launching of the piece, stated that “ After 50 years of eating more and more Big Macs, French Fries, and McNugget's designed to enhance our servability, we are finally ready! Untold billions of meals consumed by billions of people throughout the world, have sufficiently enlarged the girth and tenderness of the average McDonald's' patron (i.e. you) to reveal The True Meaning of life on Earth!” (2005). Sounds a little far fetched, and indeed it is. But the feeling that McDonald's is taking over the world, I know, is felt by many more than just myself. The Billboard Liberation Front, which shares this ideology with many, has brazenly attempted at a socio-cultural protest, which very clearly illustrates a feeling of collective disenchantment. “No matter how much authority we think we exert over our own lives, even the most trivial elements of our existence are governed by superstructures we cannot perceive to produce preprogrammed results- as much as we strive to be unique, each of us just might be a “Depressing assemblage of pop culture influences and cancelled emotions, driven by the sputtering engine of only the most banal form of capitalism”, as quoted anonymously in a press relaeawse by the Bill Board Liberation Front directly following the unleashing of this artistic protes . Dave Itzkoff, writer for The New York Times book review, describes Douglas Coupland's latest novel, jpod and his disillusioned take on our world shaped by capitalism and technology. These “superstructures” that are being parodied on billboards and written into books, confirm to us just how popular being unpopular can be. If this is true, McDonald's must be the prom queen of Fast Food High. One of the most abhorred corporate giants of the anti globalization movement, McDonald's, is the beneficiary of a substantial amount of negative press, which rivals that of the marketing they spend billions on. All while the corridors of our arteries narrow, and the waistlines of our children, broaden.
McDonald's Defends Rumors
A blog called “Open for Discussion”, McDonald's Corporate Responsibility Blog, endeavors to reveal the “virtuous” plan of corporate responsibility through the eyes of Vice President, Bob Langert. In McDonald's most recent post, JC Gonzalez-Mendez, Vice President of the North American Supply Chain, combated the allegation of e-mail generated rumors that questioned the beef purchasing practices of McDonald's. He dismissed all of the claims as being false and went on to say, “Our customers can trust us to provide them with freshly prepared beef made with real, high quality ingredients.” He went on further to add,” We source from the most trusted industry suppliers and serve 100% USDA-inspected beef.” Since when has molding the truth to the masses become “responsible”? Certainly politicians and the like have been shaping version of the truth since man could stand erect. These “versions”, are the very same models that cipher from us our incomes and our rights. Why should these corporations that are so intimately linked to the governmental standards allow such behavior, be any different.
