Harry Tormey

A never ending source of fascination for me is why people eat what they do. In particular I find it most strange that a glorified burger joint is the world’s largest chain of fast food restaurants, serving nearly 47 million customers daily from Dublin to Tokyo. Of the endless variations of food evolved over thousands of years from a myriad of different cultures around the globe why did this one franchise do so well? A large part of this success clearly lies in superior marketing, in particular targeting children and by association their parents.

When considering the marketing phenomenon that is McDonald’s an interesting point to note can be found in a book written by Eric Clark called ‘The Real Toy Story’; In it the author claims that about 1/3 of all toys sold in America come from fast food restaurants and that McDonald’s has now become the world’s largest distributor of toys through its chain of 31,000 restaurants.

At McDonald’s toys are distributed with happy meal’s. A happy meal seems to cost between $3 to $5, making just the food part of the meal yourself would probably cost roughly $.97. Even taking into account marketing, rent, wages and other overhead expenses, economies of scale makes it seem doubtful that McDonald’s is spending much more than this figure per meal on the edibles. According to an article in the new york times, food and toy executives estimate these toys cost somewhere between 30 to 50 cents each to make. When the costs are seen in this light, a 30 to 50 cent toy is a significant investment.

In the same new york times article food industry consultants and former fast-food executives also claim that a popular toy can increase traffic in a fast-food restaurant by 4 percent and a very successful giveaway might drive up visits by 15 percent. Clearly happy meal’s are sold as a loss leader in order to draw kids and hence families in thus stimulating sales of other more profitable products.

An interview dealing with the topic of marketing to kids taken from the documentary the corporation, with Lucy Hughes a VP at Initiative Media casts this strategy in an insidious light:

“If we understand what motivates a parent to buy a product, that if we could develop a creative commercial, you know a 30 second commercial that encourages the child to whine or show some sort of importance in it that the child understands and is able to reiterate to the parents, then we’re successful.”

In the west child hood obesity is more and more being seen as a public health concern brought about by a combination of poor diet, sedentary lifestyle and genetics. In an effort to tackle one aspect of this problem a number of countries are calling for a ban on the distribution of such toys with food. In Brazil recently a prosecutor charging that toys sold with meals in fast-food outlets can lead children to develop bad eating habits, asked a judge to ban such sales nationally at chains including McDonald’s and Burger King (link). In Australia a group called the obesity policy coalition is also calling for a similar ban (link).

The above calls for legislative solutions beg a few important questions be asked. At what point does packaging end and product begin? Taken to its logical conclusion should all food deemed unhealthy be sold in soviet union style bland boxes with just the price embossed on the front. Also is distributing toys with junk food inherently bad? Setting irony aside for a moment, McDonald’s is the current sponsor of the World Cup, would distributing a football with a happy meal as part of a future promotion be a bad thing?

The tone of the above articles also kind of imply that only very young children are susceptible to such nefarious campaigns. This is not the case. An article in harpers discussing the toy industry in China and specifically one company (Red Magic) that provides similar toy swag to restaurant and drinks companies offers this insightful tidbit:

“Red Magic claims to have sold more than 20 million of these toys in twenty different countries,mostly to boys and men between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, by deploying a marketing technique that McDonald’s pioneered thirty years ago, when, in an effort to boost declining sales, it introduced the Happy Meal, luring children and therefore their parents to restaurants with the promise of cheap toys. It could be argued that the Happy Meal, and similar gimmicks, saved the fast-food business. Red Magic uses the same marketing technique on teenagers and adults. And it works. For a while in Hong Kong, when you bought eight bottles of San Miguel beer, you got one of fifteen different limited-edition Red Magic collectible dolls, but you couldn’t choose which one. This “gambling element” kept customers “drinking and drinking and drinking and paying,” Wong explained. “When I go to see the customer—they buy and buy and buy, and they can’t get the one they want—I feel very happy inside.””

So why do inedible things have such an effect on what we decide to eat? How does a little plastic figurine or a baseball card fit in with your self image? Does it matter if the actual toy is real or not? Would a digital gift, an extra level or character in some computer game, have just the same or better effect? Right now more ingenious ploys leveraging new technologies such as social networks are being devised and deployed on a daily basis. A good example of one such recent promotion was a facebook application that required you defriend 10 of your contacts in order to get a free whopper (link). I think this is only a crude beginning, in the future we will see social networks and other cost effective digital media being used to sell food.

At the end of the day marketing is an arms race, banning toys at best will only slow the spread of bad eating habits down for a short period of time. Short of an outright ban on advertising unhealthy food I don’t see any legislative solution that’s workable. Of course this raises yet another question, who gets to decide what is or is not healthy and what should the criteria be?