Unit 2 Marketing Essentials: McDonald's Marketing Plan Report

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of McDonald's marketing strategies, covering key marketing concepts such as production, product, selling, social, and marketing concepts in the context of current and future trends. It outlines the roles and responsibilities of a marketing manager, emphasizing their importance in identifying potential markets, creating marketing plans, and fostering interdepartmental collaboration. The report compares McDonald's marketing mix (7Ps) with other organizations like Barclays (4Ps) to achieve business objectives, highlighting McDonald's success due to its customer-focused approach. The report also details different marketing processes like lead tracking, social media marketing, content marketing, and website optimization. It further discusses the significance of effective interrelationships between functional departments, emphasizing how marketing influences and is influenced by departments such as finance, HR, and production. Finally, the report includes a marketing plan for McDonald's, demonstrating how the company utilizes the extended marketing mix to achieve its goals.

UNIT 2 MARKETING
ESSENTIALS

TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1
P1 Concept of marketing in context of current and future trends..........................................1
P2 Roles and Responsibilities of a marketing manager.........................................................2
P3 Comparison of marketing mix with different organizations to achieve business objectives.5
P4 Outlining marketing plan for McDonald's .......................................................................8
CONCLUSION..............................................................................................................................10
REFERENCES..............................................................................................................................11

INTRODUCTION
Marketing plays crucial role in company in order to promote and advertise its products in
a better way. Present report focuses on McDonald's which is an international fast food retailer
providing higher level of satisfaction to customers. Overview of different marketing process has
been provided along with marketing concept with regards to current and future trends. Roles and
responsibilities of marketing manager are enumerated. Explanation of influence of marketing
and interrelation with functional departments are made. Importance of marketing and
significance of having interrelationship between units are explained. Lastly marketing plan for
McDonald's is being produced.
P1 Concept of marketing in context of current and future trends.
Marketing concepts could be divided into five main concepts which shows core process
of marketing in McDonald's. Following are the concepts of current and future trends which are
involved in marketing:
 Production concept: This concept of marketing put emphasis to consumer perception
regarding choice of products, which signifies that consumers prefer products which are
easily available in bulk quantity in market at inexpensive prices (Alt and Iversen, 2017).
Thus, it could be said that operational capacity of the company should put more focus on
increasing the production rate.
 Product concept: It is noticeable that consumers relate and choose the products which
have good value for money, innovative approach and quality. This concept shows that by
providing products and services which are beneficial for consumers their retention could
be facilitated.
 Selling concept: Modern consumers have a common mindset which attracts them
through promotions. So, by promoting the product and services in market aggressively
focus of consumers could be attained.
 Social Marketing concept: This concept signifies the needs and requirements of targeted
consumer in order to win their preference of choosing McDonald's over other
contemporaries in the market.
 Marketing concept: This concept elaborates the need and requirement of focus over the
target consumers in order to deliver their products and services.
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Different marketing processes
Following mentioned are different types of marketing process that can be considered by
McDonald's in order to have automation in marketing:
 Lead tracking and nurturing: It is impossible to nurture leads with the help of manual
processes, CRM in must in marketing technology arsenal of organization. Companies
should make use of Marketing automation tools and newsletter & email marketing apps.
 Social media marketing: There exists three critical components of social media
engagement and marketing; posting content on social accounts, building up of
community and conversations on social (Ang and Rusli, 2018).
 Content marketing: It is harder to automate content marketing, but automation of time
consuming activities like content research and idea generation could be technology
enabled.
 User on boarding and engagement: Converting the user is not the only thing which
should be done, rather it is important to retain the user and ensuring that he/she stays
engaged and find more opportunities for expanding the relationships.
 Website operation and optimization: Web and mobile interfaces are the most important
marketing assets of a company which offer many opportunities of improving conversions
and capturing users.
Company is suggested to make use of social media marketing, as it is more advanced and
trending between youths and adults. It would be a better option for McDonald's to market its
food products through social marketing to reach maximum people.
P2 Roles and Responsibilities of a marketing manager
Following are the roles and responsibilities of marketing manager of McDonald's:
 Work with top management: Marketing manager has to help top management in
determining and identifying marketing policies, plan and strategies in order to solve
problems of planning process and to foster formulation of plans and policies.
 Identify potential Markets: In order to increase the demands of the goods and services
which are produced by the enterprise, it is the function of marketing manager to identify
new potential markets where products could be promoted.
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 Create a market plan: Marketing manager creates an action plan in order to determine
when, where and how the marketing activities would be carried out to achieve marketing
goals (Responsibilities of Marketing Department, 2018).
Responsibilities of marketing manager towards business:
 Towards society: To provide new goods and services according to the demand and needs
of the society, maintain supply of goods and services at reasonable prices in the market,
to increase employment opportunities.
 Towards customers: To fulfil demands of consumers according to their needs and
wants, to provide after sale services and to remove consumer grievances.
 Towards employees: To commence welfare strategy, to motivate them, coordination of
activities with different employees, etc.
Interrelation with other functional units
Interrelation between marketing functions with other functional units could be explained
with the help of an example of finance department.
 Marketing and Finance: All the economic resources which are required by marketing
function to implement planning, evaluation of marketing strategies and research are
provided by finance department of the company. Accurate description is required from
production department by marketing function regarding products and services to provide
a marketing plan (O'Neill, Beauvais and Scholl, 2016).
 Marketing and HR: Further, they require human resource from HR department,
resources from finance department, logistics from distribution network, etc.
 Marketing and Production: If marketing function is unknown regarding the raw
materials of inventory or production capacity of the company, then marketing plan will
result into blunder and losses.
Thus, it could be said that marketing functions are interrelated with other functional units of the
McDonald's. Above mentioned instances clearly depicts the image that marketing and other
functional departments of an organization are needed to be inter linked in order to succeed.
McDonald's make use of extended marketing mix of 7 P's which requires assistance from each
and every department of the organization, hence without support effective marketing cannot be
done.
Importance of marketing
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1. Increases awareness: Marketing raises awareness through which company can build an
audience of their potential customers who are ready to purchase company's products or
services.
2. Increases sales: When people get to know about products and services of business they
are more likely to become customers, if marketing campaigns are doing their job
properly. It will result in increase of sales shortly after getting started with it.
3. Creates trust: Consumers want to buy products from a trustworthy business. In clear
sense they want to know that they can trust the business they are buying from, as it takes
time to build the trust and reputation for any business (Cross, Belich and Rudelius, 2015).
Word of mouth is one of the most effective type of marketing and it does not include any
type of expenses as well.
Significance of effective interrelationships between different functional departments
In order to perform effectively marketing functions are needed to be backed up by the
other operational departments of McDonald's. Significance of having effective interrelationship
between other functional departments could be explained as; if a business organization needs to
plan and implement a marketing plan then support or assistance is to be taken from finance
department of the company, sales department, HR department and production department. In the
context of Mc-d, marketing department is highly interrelated with other functional departments.
Moreover, marketing department provides input to different functional units such as R&D,
finance etc. This in turn helps them in developing competent strategies and policies which makes
contribution in the goal attainment.
Marketing influences and interrelation of it with other functional departments
Following are the marketing elements which influences marketing function:
 Research: It is considered to be the most important function of marketing and the most
crucial too. Doing business in nearly impossible without conducting proper market
research (Venter, Wright and Dibb, 2015). Thus, it is considered to be a crucial key
element of market which influence marketing function.
 Strategy: After collection of all possible information and data from the research, it is
processes to find all the possible strengths and weaknesses among the business
operations.
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 Planning: The marketing department involves financial planning, distribution,
forecasting of sales figures, communication and other factors of business.
 Tactics: These are short term or small plans which are implemented to attract the target
consumers. It also helps in concerning the initial pressure from the competitors and boost
in the sales.
P3 Comparison of marketing mix with different organizations to achieve business objectives
In McDonald's marketing mix is applied in the marketing planning procedure in order to
achieve organizational goals and objective. The marketing mix is a tool which assists marketers
to understand the product. Commonly 4 P's are involved in the application of marketing mix
which are; product, price, place and promotion.
The customer focused efforts assists McDonald's to evolve around and make its
impression in international markets over the years. Many business organizations irrespective of
big or small are spending large amount of money over the marketing process, research,
advertisement and development but are unable to get a response such as McDonald's (Malhotra,
2015). The sole reason behind the success of McDonald's is the understanding of customer and
market with the help of marketing essential tools and by building up organizational goals and
strategies accompanied by customer satisfaction approach. This utilization of extended
marketing mix has lead to the great success achievement of McDonald's as compared to other
organizations. It can be said that McDonald's applies segmented strategy for appealing customers
to enjoy their meals. This helps company to attain stated goals and marketing activities is
achieved with ease.
Other organizations such as Barclays of UK which is a contemporary to McDonald's,
utilises a marketing segmentation process to achieve their organizational goals. Following is the
marketing segmentation process of Barclays:
 Firstly, targeted market is defined by them.
 Secondly, market segments are created.
 For specific criteria, evaluation is done of different market segments.
 Construction of segment process takes place.
 Attractiveness is evaluated of the segments.
 Selection of target markets.
 Positional strategy is developed and implemented.
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 Feedback and evaluation of segmentation process.
Whereas, McDonald's make use of extended marketing mix in its organization in order to
achieve goals and objectives, following is its process:
 Product: The produced product must be appropriate according to the customers needs
and wants. Its main objective is to give satisfactory results to consumers.
 Place: It must be very simple and available for the consumers to buy required products
and services of the company (Schmidt, 2017). There must be prompt delivery in case of
e-commerce shop.
 Price: This is a crucial strategy which must be representing the value to consumer and
also compete with the competitors with better offer. The price of product and services
must provide with the value for money experience to the consumer. Currently,
penetration pricing strategy has been adopted by Mc-D.
 Promotion: It includes advertising, social media promotions, sales promotion, etc.
McDonald's is a B2C company which put more emphasis to personal selling apart from
advertising and sales promotion.
 Process: McDonald's delivers its products and services to the customers by using
standardized process in order to create better buying experience for the consumer. It also
represents how services are consumed.
 People: It involves; employees, management, customer service and organizational
culture of McDonald's are essential part of organization.
 Physical Evidence: It includes comfort, facilities and user interface in the organization.
Above mentioned instances and examples clearly shows that McDonald's is the best in its
industry for using extended marketing mix to achieve business objectives as compared to other
organizations.
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McDonald's Barclays
Organisation follows 7P's of marketing mix by
which it is able to attain overall efficiency in
marketing of products.
However, Barclays follows 4 P's of marketing
mix and offers wide range of banking services
to customers in effective manner.
Since, it offers fast food products to
consumers, firm follows traditional method of
making products.
Barclays offers variety of services to customers
and it follows modern method for offering
banking services through internet banking,
mobile banking and related ways.
McDonald's targets mainly customers of
younger generation which are attracted because
of variety of food items being provided it.
Barclays, on the other hand, targets young and
adult people and provides them reliable and
quality services for increasing their level of
satisfaction.
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Illustration 1: Extended Marketing Mix
Source: (The extended marketing mix, 2018)

McDonald's usually use intensive growth
strategies in order to capture more
marketplaces and attain more consumer base
with higher sales revenue in effective manner.
On the other side, Barclays uses differentiated
target market strategy and as a result, it gains
revenue and enhances customer satisfaction.
It can be analysed from above comparisons of Barclays and McDonald's that both targets
their customers for accomplishing desired sales. However, it can be said that McDonald's differs
from Barclays as it does not follow modern methods for further attracting customers. Another
limitation of McDonald's is that it does not offer home delivery services which are applied by
almost all its rivals such as Dominos, Subway etc. Thus, it can be summarized that for gaining
more customers, modern methods of marketing should be applied by it.
P4 Outlining marketing plan for McDonald's
Marketing Plan
Overview
McDonald is popular food retail organization with numerous outlets in more than 120
countries. It is one of the largest food chain in world. From many years ago, it has prepared
various food products and given to its customers for accomplishing their dietary demand. In the
present scenario, it is leading market in fast food restaurant along with huge diversification and
variety of foods and brand. In this scenario, it would be coming in Chinese food items which are
very popular in this present generation.
Objectives
 To provide easy access to services and product to its consumers
 To raise sales by 25% in coming quarter.
 To raise return on equity by 5% in coming quarter.
 To expand its outlet in different location.
STP
Segmentation
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McDonald's would be using demographic segmentation strategy as age replicated as basic
parameter for segmentation. Chinese food has gained popularity in this era. Hence, for the
attainment of success young people who likes Chinese food will be targeted.
Target
McDonald has targeted young generation, children and young urban family members. In
United Kingdom, high proportion of population is of college students and working professionals.
Positioning
McDonald has positioned itself by setting value pricing of Chinese food products. As in
this present scenario, everybody is rational consumers who are demanding quality products at
cheap price.
Marketing Mix
Product: Products has different range of goods and business entity sell to their consumers
by satisfying their demand and needs in appropriate basis. It sells numerous products in UK such
as sandwiches, deserts, drinks, burgers etc. This business entity functions in industry of fast food
with different preferences and taste of frequent demand changes. The competition is increasing
in this industry. To achieve competitive advantage, it is coming forward for producing chinese
food items.
Price: It is high consideration which is charged with business entity for rendering its
services and products to its customer. In this rationale world, everybody considers price and
especially, young generation and young urban families. Competitive pricing strategy will be used
by Mc d for its new offerings.
Place: This specific food chain would establish its franchises at famous location and near
to colleges and offices. This policy of placement is very good and people can get its outlets at
main place of city. It is associated to different distribution strategies such as mode about
attaining its product to its customers. It will offer home delivery services and 24x7 hours service.
Promotion: The method how organization communicates its idea to its customers. In
simple words, it could be justified about ways for attracting its consumers to visit and buy
innovate goods. This restaurant will use newspapers, internet, television, magazines and other
media outlets to pass idea of customers. It would be using various other techniques of sales
promotion such as discount coupons and freebies for specific product.
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Process: It is associated to different set of activities which were performed for
accomplishing its objectives. It would undertake numerous activities for delivering its services to
customer. The overall process is to prepare food which is fully transparent.
People: In this present scenario, 70% of restaurants of McDonald in UK are operated and
owned through local business men and women. It would address specific issues which prioritize
both employees and customers as well. If employees are not happy then they will be delivering
bad customer service which will impact brand image of McDonald.
Physical evidence: It is associated to potential element of physical environment customer
and visitor experience. It does not only impact impressions of consumer of outlet but along with
role of McDonalds. Its interior is attractive which also maintains hygiene factor to its outlets.
Budget
Promotional tools Budgeted amount (in pounds)
Newspapers 1800
Advertising on television 2200
Social media 2500
CONCLUSION
Hereby it can be concluded that marketing is the main essence for increasing overall
performance of organisation. Promotional tools have greater impact on customers in achieving
higher sales. Roles and responsibilities of marketing manager and importance of marketing
prevails in McDonald's which has large customer base in markets. Marketing plan is devised
which represents that organisation will offer Chinese food for attracting consumers of UK.
Furthermore, it can be identified that interrelationships exists between functional departments
and if department do not perform well, its impact is seen over other. Thus, marketing would have
greater influence in future trends and good quantum of sales will be accomplished. Moreover,
marketing helps company to promote its new products through variety of channels by which
people may come to know about the same and sales are achieved with ease.
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REFERENCES
Books and Journals
Alt, J. and Iversen, T., 2017. Inequality, labor market segmentation, and preferences for
redistribution. American Journal of Political Science. 61(1). pp.21-36.
Ang, C. and Rusli, H., 2018. The Impact of Marketing Mix 4Ps and Consumer Behavior toward
Purchase Decision of Adidas Products. iBuss Management. 6(2).
Cross, J. C., Belich, T. J. and Rudelius, W., 2015. How marketing managers use market
segmentation: An exploratory study. In Proceedings of the 1990 Academy of Marketing
Science (AMS) Annual Conference (pp. 531-536). Springer, Cham.
Hamzah, S. B. and Sutanto, J. E., 2016. The Role of Marketing Mix (7P) for Consumer Buying
Decision Pastry Cake in Malang City.
Malhotra, N. K., 2015. Essentials of marketing research: A hands-on orientation. Essex:
Pearson.
Malik, K., 2015. The Balanced Scorecard and its Application to the Marketing Function.
O'Neill, J. W., Beauvais, L. L. and Scholl, R. W., 2016. The use of organizational culture and
structure to guide strategic behavior: An information processing perspective. Journal of
Behavioral and Applied Management. 2(2). p.816.
Schmidt, C. R., 2017. Technology’s Impact on the Marketing Function. STRATEGIC
MANAGEMENT. 22(3). pp.19-28.
Venter, P., Wright, A. and Dibb, S., 2015. Performing market segmentation: a performative
perspective. Journal of Marketing Management. 31(1-2). pp.62-83.
Online
Responsibilities of Marketing Department. 2018. [Online]. Available Through:
<https://smallbusiness.chron.com/responsibilities-marketing-department-69931.html>
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