Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent Read Online Free PDF Page B

… er … well, helpful to all concerned. While we are in the old city, we grab a look at the famous Shroud (or, at least, a life-sized replica). Everybody has his or her own theories as to its origin and whether it is fake or real. So have I – it looks like a prank played by one of the Bee Gees in the 1970s after a heavy post-concert party. One of them covered himself in treacle and fell asleep.
    With my limited Italian, I try to read La Stampa , the local newspaper. Suddenly I find myself trembling, with a dreadful constriction in my throat. Unless my translation is way off, just over the Alps and across the border in Switzerland, the first McDonald’s hotel has opened. One picture tells me everything I can’t translate – the headboards on the beds in the double rooms are shaped like golden arches. The only restaurant in the hotel is a McDonald’s. This is Switzerland, remember: a tiny country with France and Italy as neighbours – nations responsible for two of the planet’s great culinary cultures. It gets worse. I think I translate the last sentences of the article correctly: McDonald’s is targeting business travellers.
    Now then, should this earth ever require a stereotypical business traveller to send to an inter-planetary business travelling convention, it would be me. I have spent much of my adult life in planes and hotels. I have visited more than thirty countries on business. They are, therefore, and by definition, targeting me. So, let me tell you what they are up against. Should I be lucky enough to have a business visit to Switzerland, and my searches on the web tell me that there are 6,512 hotel options, a McDonald’s hotel would not even be my 6,512th choice. No, sir. If all the other 6,511 were full, I would book a room in Northern Italy, get up early, and walk (if there was no elephant to hand) across the Alps to my meeting.
    Are they mad? The answer, I suspect, is no . There are some odd bits and pieces going on in McDonald’s, which, if you look at them as a whole, suggest something quite revolutionary might be going on. It might also be a quick-service industry first. By any measurement, McDonald’s is one of the world’s great brands. The science of branding has changed irrevocably in the past decade, and my observation is that we are seeing the first of the quick-serve giants recognizing this.
    For the last century or so, branding has been about products. Coca-Cola is the classical exponent of this approach – and Mars, Ford and Heinz are but three of many other examples. Branding is about differentiation – distinction – in cluttered and competitive markets. What has changed is how you get that distinction effectively and efficiently. Much less emphasis is being placed on what you do (the specification and price of your product or service). What’s winning and retaining business today is how you go about delivering that to the market. What you do still matters, of course, but it is the price of entering the game. To win it, you must add style to substance. What you stand for as a business, and the company’s ‘personality’, are becoming critical differentiators. Branding by reputation, not product, is the name of the new game.
    I cannot think of one product that could sustain a mighty corporation today, let alone give it a platform to grow. Coca-Cola led the way in the cola wars throughout the 1990s, but has now been overhauled by Pepsi. If you look at Pepsi’s armoury of drink products today, many of which are (gasp!) non-carbonated, you will see a very different approach to brand ownership and management evolving.
    Now let’s go back to McDonald’s. It was forever associated with a one-dimensional product and corporate personality. Now look what’s happening. The company is into gourmet coffee, and has signalled it is targeting one of the spiritual homes of espresso coffee – Austria – to develop this potential growth sector. McDonald’s is duelling with the French,