Marketing Plan McDonald's North America Research Paper

Marketing Plan McDonald's North America - Research Paper Example The mascot of the store Ronald McDonalds is a global icon. He has been instrumental in the firm’s ability to achieve the highest market share among kids in the industry. The organization has a huge customer base that allowed the store to serve 64 million customers on a daily basis (Aboutmcdonalds, 2011). The financial performance of the company in 2010 was outstanding. The net income and net margin of the firm in 2010 were $4,946 million and 20.54% respectively. The product variety of the company is excellent. This provides the customers with many eating alternatives to choose from. The company just like any other business has weaknesses. One of the weaknesses of McDonalds is that it competes in an extremely saturated industry. There are approximately 160,000 fast food restaurants in the United States. A second weakness of the firm is that a lot of its food products are not nutritional since they have high contents of fat. As the industry leader the company is a target of its followers who often include anti-McDonald’s campaigns in their advertisements. The high cost of acquiring a McDonald’s franchise has become a weakness that will make it harder for the company in the future to find a large pool of franchisee applicants. The organization also charges extremely high royalties. Franchisees have to pay a 12% royalty on sales and a 4% advertising fee. This means that the franchisee gets to keep only 84% of the revenues generated by the store. There are opportunities that McDonald’s can capitalize on to continue to achieve growth and prosperity and to improve the brand value of the company. The firm can increase its product offering to include more products that have lower fat content. The use of wheat flatbread and tortillas can be used to add several healthy products that can attract dieters, diabetics, and healthy eaters. Another opportunity for McDonalds is to create a new customer reward program. The new customer reward program wo uld give its customers a 6% food credit for future purchases. The creation of this program would beat the best program in the industry which is the Burger King’s BK reward which gives customers in certain states and US territories a 5% credit towards future purchases (Mybkrewardscard, 2011). A growth opportunity for the company is mobile food trucks. McDonalds should design and aggressively market mobile McDonald’s food vending trucks. These food trucks would offer a limited McDonalds menu. Two advantages of offering these trucks are lower franchisee entry cost and lower operating costs. Distress in the US and global economy is a threat to McDonalds. The rising unemployment in the United States is decreasing the disposable income of its citizens. The unemployment rate in the United States in August of 2011 was 9.1% (Tradingeconomics, 2011). When the population has lower income people spend less money eating outside of home. The trend towards healthier eating is another threat to McDonalds. Fast foods are by nature an unhealthy meal. Another threat to McDonalds is increased education among the population about the health dangers of high consumption of red meats. High consumption of red meat increases risk of cancer, heart disease and it lower life expectancy (Brody, 2009). Competition McDonalds faces direct and indirect competition from many sectors. There are thousands of fast food restaurant competing in the fast food industry. Many cafes, bakeries, mobile food