Marketing Management: Strategies for Launching a New Product by McDonald's

This article discusses the strategies that McDonald's can use to launch a new product in the highly competitive fast food market of Australia. It emphasizes on the importance of product development and local adaptation strategy. It also suggests the use of social media platforms for effective communication and consumer engagement.

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McDonald’s has been a prominent name in the fast food market around the world.
Therefore any big brand needs to constantly experiment and innovate with its products to suit the
changing and dynamic needs of its target audience. With KFC and Burger King being a strong
competitor to the brand McDonald’s constantly works towards making its brand communication
more objective and consumer centric.
Launching a new product demands equal effort on the part of the brand to communicate
effectively to the audience. Thus McDonald’s can use its social media platform be it through
Facebook, Instagram or their Twitter account (Ashley and Tutenn, 2015). Social Media
undoubtedly has the most effective and wider reach compared to any other node of
Communication and with a 61 million like on the brand’s official Facebook page, the markets
can use this platform not only to promote its new product but also to gauge how much
acceptance the present consumers show towards a new food product (He, et al. 2016). This can
be done by creating an audience poll over their official Facebook page and then a new sales
promotion campaign to promote the new launch. The consumers can also learn about the new
product through television, newspaper or bill board advertisement which can be placed in
shopping malls or in and around the McDonald’s store present in the city.
As already mentioned, the fast food market of Australia is highly competitive so it might
take longer for the brand to get a high amount of acceptance regarding its new launch of burger.
Therefore the primary success of McDonald’s lies in its product development strategy. While
there are several products on their menu which are permanent and never change, there are varied
seasonal products like McRib or The Big Ocean burger which are offered only occasionally.
However the mot unique feature that McDonald’s follows is its local adaptation strategy.

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Whenever the company intends to launch a new product it emphasize on modifying it according
to the local taste buds (Meyer and Estrin, 2014). For instance the Big Mac Burger has been
modified into Maharaja Mac for the Indian customers with no beef to suit the local taste. This is
a very important aspect of McDonald’s consumer adaptation process. The second most important
step is raising consumer awareness. The consumers must be made aware of how unique is the
product in comparison to the existing ones in the market for an easy adaptation the degree of
adaptation of course depends on an individual consumer’s behavior patterns (Tuškej Golob and
Podnar, 2013). While some consumers definitely posses a strong brand loyalty and show a better
awareness towards accepting anything new that their favorite brand has to off others might
switch brands or show a rigidity towards accepting any such change (Romaniuk and Nenycz-
Thiel, 2013.). Therefore the markets need to conduct a thorough market research to understand
these consumer behavior patterns and strategies accordingly.
McDonald’s must strategies different introduction and adoption strategies when it comes
to launching a new product. For instance for early adopters they might include exclusive
discount offers on the newly launched product while for the late or rigid customers the new
products can be clubbed with some existing product to check how much acceptance does the new
product gain from this range of customers

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References
Ashley, C. and Tuten, T., 2015. Creative strategies in social media marketing: An exploratory
study of branded social content and consumer engagement. Psychology & Marketing, 32(1),
pp.15-27.
He, W., Xu, G., Coursaris, C.K., van Osch, W. and Balogh, B.A., 2016. Informing brand
messaging strategies via social media analytics. Online Information Review.
Meyer, K.E. and Estrin, S., 2014. Local context and global strategy: Extending the integration
responsiveness framework to subsidiary strategy. Global Strategy Journal, 4(1), pp.1-19.
Romaniuk, J. and Nenycz-Thiel, M., 2013. Behavioral brand loyalty and consumer brand
associations. Journal of Business Research, 66(1), pp.67-72.
Tuškej, U., Golob, U. and Podnar, K., 2013. The role of consumer–brand identification in
building brand relationships. Journal of business research, 66(1), pp.53-59.