The article in the url below demonstrates a rapid response from McDonald’s to the NYT article (“Straight A's, With a Burger as a Prize”) that was featured in last Thursday’s CSR Newsletter (Issues: Wages, p204; Special Cases of CSR: Fast-Food Industry, p283; McDonald’s, p295 and p305):
“McDonald's has decided to stop sponsoring Happy Meals as rewards for children with good grades and attendance records in elementary schools in Seminole County, Fla.”
To its credit, McDonald’s realized quickly the potential damage this story posed once the national media (i.e., NYT) got hold of it and the firm offered to re-print the school district’s report card jackets immediately. What I find most interesting about this story, however, is that it indicates the difficulties for corporations that license their global brand to relatively independent franchise operations who make decisions locally that have the potential to affect that brand:
“The ''food prize'' program, as it was called, for students of the Seminole County Public Schools in kindergarten through fifth grade was sponsored by the owners of the McDonald's restaurants in Seminole County, in central Florida northeast of Orlando. The decision to end the promotions for the program, appearing on children's report-card jackets, came from executives at McDonald's USA, part of the McDonald's Corporation, the world's largest fast-food business.”
The goal of implementing a strategic CSR perspective throughout an organization, of course, is to prevent such mistakes from arising in the first place and avoid the associated, often predictable, stakeholder backlash:
“In the absence of needed government regulation to protect schoolchildren from predatory companies like McDonald's,'' [Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood] added, ''the burden is on parents to be vigilant about exploitative marketing aimed at children.”
Have a good weekend.
Dave
Bill Werther & David Chandler
Strategic Corporate Social Responsibility
© Sage Publications, 2006
http://www.sagepub.com/Werther
McDonald's Ending Promotion on Jackets of Children's Report Cards
By STUART ELLIOTT
494 words
18 January 2008
The New York Times
Late Edition - Final
4
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/business/media/18card.html
