McDonalds/T-Shirts/Water

I have been rather amused at the response to the recently released study on McDonalds and the loyalty its brand fosters among children, some of the opinions that people around me have expressed about the “startling finding” have left me really having to bite my lip and try not to burst out with a tirade of abuse. Leaving aside the questionable ethicality of advertising to children, people were very quick to look at the study and smugly think to themselves “oh kids, they sure are stupid”

When I first head about a study that showed that children would on the most part claim preference towards a branded item over an identical unbranded one, the news did not shock me, not even a teeny weeny bit. And when I hear “grown ups” tell me how stupid kids are for that sort of behaviour and how “its unfair because children are so impressionable” it tends to make me laugh, as the person I am speaking to tends to, more likely than not, be a complete hypocrite.

Let me get one thing clear, as far as I am concerned we are all those children and some of those grown ups among us have much worse tendencies to go for the branded item, it may change in time from preference for a fast food brand, like say McDonalds to an undying loyalty for a clothing company like Topshop.

The difference between the two? The excuses get a little better, and it becomes so widespread that it becomes more acceptable and less frowned upon by people to indulge in your blind preference for one branded product over an essentially identical equivalent.

I use Topshop as an example due to the recent revelation that some of its clothing manufacturing was taking place in sweatshops in the third world, I’m sure this will dissuade some customers of Topshop, but you can rest assured that most fashion conscious people will assure you that a White 100% cotton t-shirt made in a sweatshop from Topshop is better than a White 100% cotton Nike t-shirt made in a sweatshop and certainly better than a White 100% cotton t-shirt made in a sweatshop sold in Penney’s for 1/10th of the cost.

I don’t mean to pick on clothing, or indeed on Topshop the examples get worse and the excuses that accompany them become more and more incredible. My personal favourite is bottled water, something about believing water tastes better from a €1.50 Evian bottle than it does from a €0.30 Tesco bottle, or even… from a tap, makes me really despair about peoples level of intelligence.

We are all the children … our excuses and wallets get bigger.

Study reveals kids like McDonalds...better than McDonalds

This week saw the release of an extremely interesting report on the effect of advertising on children by Stanford College researcher Dr Tom Robinson. The study concentrated in particular on the brand strength and effective marketing of fast food giant McDonald's, and the effect it had on the participant’s perception on the taste of the food presented to them.

In the study, over 60 children between the ages of 3 and 5 years of age were presented with fries, burgers, apple juice and carrots some accompanied by McDonald's packaging and some in plain blank packaging. Bearing in mind the products were completely identical it was interesting to see that the children far preferred the “McDonald's’s” food to its plain equivalent across the board.
Below you can see that the McDonald's fries were named the superior product by a huge majority of the children, and even carrots wrapped in the famous golden arches were preferred by over half of the participants with 54% preferring “McDonald's” carrots, 23% the blank alternative and only 23% claiming they tasted the same.
In the short time this study has been out is has caused uproar among parents who say that MacDonald's, who spends in the region of $1 billion in marketing per annum, is practicing unethical advertising by aiming its marketing efforts at their children, in what the author Dr Robinson refers to as “an unfair playing field” because young children are unaware of the persuasive intent of marketing.
In my opinion the playing field may not be entirely fair but it is a field in which others could be a part of, Its high time we saw fruit and healthy alternatives markets and branded properly to evoke the same response, rather than stand around pointing the finger and whining about someone who is preforming their job effectively