Get Involved: McMarketing to Minors (by Mark Cavdar)

Our modern consumer culture is fueled by the incessant desire for convenience products, creating industries that exclusively provide simplified, streamlined, and accessible goods and services. The past fifty years have seen the proliferation and rapid expansion of one such industry that caters exclusively to the consumer with too little time on their hands. The last half-century has borne witness to the advent of the fast food mentality, compromising the old world nutritional virtues of home cooked meals and replacing them with refried and freeze-dried sustenance loaded with preservatives and chemicals. When companies try to provide food that tastes good at a low price on such a grand scale of distribution, the nutritional content is compromised and the end product is often loaded with detrimental fats, refined carbohydrates, hypertension-inducing sodium and loads of GMOs.

With the global obesity rate rising to epidemic-like proportions, a world fueled by the food provided from fast food outlets is one with grim prospects of future health. A number of serious medical ailments are tied directly to obesity, including heart disease, diabetes, respiratory problems, asthma, and various different cancers. Yet the fast food industry continues to grow, creating an insatiable demand among consumers and hooking new generations of prospective customers. McDonalds, the archetype of the modern fast food restaurant, is notorious for its insidious marketing techniques; a means of working around the moral armour of well-intentioned consumers. A fast way to fill the tummy, is fast food one of the leading causes in the global obesity problem? Better judgment be damned, is it not the responsibility of the end consumer to decide what in the long run is and is not to be consumed for their respective well-being?

The issue is created by the means with which McDonalds chooses to sell its products to consumers through its marketing ethics. McDonalds runs up an annual budget of $1.4 billion dollars in marketing costs, the bulk of which is targeted towards selling the McDonalds ideal to children. While far from being the only fast food conglomerate guilty of excessive marketing efforts directed towards minors, McDonalds is easily the largest and most proficient game in town, as evidenced by its dominion of indoor playgrounds, myriad collection of action figures and its ubiquitous clown figurehead. An example that perfectly exemplifies the ethical debate: the standard McDonalds meal order for children, a hamburger Happy Meal (consisting of a hamburger, a child size beverage, a small order of French fries and a cheap plastic toy), contains 600 calories and over 20 grams of fat accounting for more than half of a 5-12 year old child’s recommended daily intake levels.

It is apparent and known that the consumption of fast food on a regular basis is unhealthy and harmful, and McDonalds does everything but make this fact aware to the consumer in their advertising campaigns. Is it wrong for McDonalds to glorify and gloss over the unhealthy aspects of their products to bolster sales and appeal to children? Should the deteriorating health of the nation vindicate an increase in market share and brand recognition? Is it underhanded and immoral for a corporation to scientifically develop methods of marketing unhealthy food to children who haven’t yet developed the tools of critical analysis to decide for themselves whether it should or should not be eaten?

Children are susceptible to marketing techniques that exploit the impressionable nature of childhood, and are often lured to McDonalds by everything save for the actual food. McDonalds employs a number of long-running stalwart traditions in its repertoire of techniques to associate itself to the experience of childhood, even latching itself on to the most sacred of childhood holidays, the birthday. By creating a self-promotional tool, one that moonlights as a failsafe birthday party, McDonalds has created something that is both simple in planning for parents and sensually indulgent for children. The ultimate goal of all the child-oriented marketing is to establish a brand loyalty in the consumer, so that later in life when an individual gets hungry he or she will remember all the positive subliminal connotations attached to the golden arches and head over to McDonalds for lunch. It is then that the individual, at an adult age, will have made the conscious decision to consume McDonalds; what needs to be acknowledged are the predetermined societal factors that came into play in reaching this decision. Do people really want to eat something unhealthy and nutrient-deficient, or have they simply been programmed to crave it from as early as they can remember?

The issue, as it stands, is a debate between profit and health. If we view the practices of the McDonalds Corporation strictly through the lens of capitalistic enterprise, none of the aforementioned business practices are immoral. Rather, they should be lauded and revered, and every firm should aspire to develop a marketing network as comprehensive and all-encompassing as the McDonalds business model. McDonalds has grafted itself to the core of Americana, becoming an international symbol of what it is to eat like an American.

Along the way, it has made America the world’s fattest nation, with the highest percentage of overweight and obese children per capita. While more research will have to be done to show a concrete positive correlation between the ascent of fast food and the bulging of young American waistlines, one cannot ignore the huge implications that fast food’s prominence has had on the health of the nation. Yet, McDonalds has every right, under law, to target whatever market it feels. Can a governing body justifiably impede upon McDonalds Corporation’s guaranteed right to operating practices by regulating the heavy flow of advertising aimed towards children?

First and foremost, an understanding must be reached in regards to the ethical missteps McDonalds has made. Is McDonalds acting in an unethical fashion? Alternatives are open for consumers, and it can be clearly stated that nobody is forcing children through the door and up to the counter to place an order. It is here that McDonalds’ particular brand of marketing magic is especially potent, in the way it dually exploits the parents of children and their young ones alike.

A disconnect between parents and children started occurring in the 1980s where parents felt they could buy their children’s love rather than work hard to build and earn it. McDonalds quickly shifted from a once-in-a-blue-moon reward to a weekly trip for those families who cared little for cooking and even less for good nutrition. Parents weren’t complaining; their children are enamored with the fact that they get to be like the idealistic examples they observed on television, and the food definitely tasted good (albeit through the usage of chemicals and truckloads of salt).

If any sort of modern moral compass exists in the realm of marketing, McDonalds should halt, of its own accord, the advertising of unhealthy food to children who don’t know what is and is not good for them yet. While McDonalds has the right to target whichever demographic it feels has the most buying power, the practice of targeting children with frilly gimmicks to sell unhealthy food is immoral and blatantly disregards a universal moral obligation that we owe younger generations: that of a proper education.

A secondary and peripheral recommendation would be legislative intervention in this regard, unitarily enforced across the board. If legislation limiting the amount of advertisements for potentially harmful products that children are vulnerable to were enacted, we could effectively place the onus of parenting children back on parents. Parents would then be charged with the task of educating their children as to what is and is not healthy, without extraneous corporately-motivated influences modeling the thoughts of youths.

Sources

"Obesity Statistics for Adults & Children." Anne Collins Weight Loss Program. 5 March 2005 <http://www.annecollins.com/obesity/statistics-obesity.htm>.

Schlosser, Eric. Fast Food Nation. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.

Spurlock, Morgan. Suprer Size Me. Samuel Goldwyn Films, 2004.

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