How many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand? A trick question you say…

McDonald’s has built one of the world’s most durable brands around efficient, consistent and low-cost food. People save time and money going to McDonald’s - and they know what to expect from the experience. Of course, four men robbed a McDonald’s in Lauderdale Lakes, Florida, last Saturday by gunpoint providing an experience far beyond expectations. At other locations, you might have a McDrug Deal, get carjacked in the parking lot and or shot on your way home. The security at a high school in Philadelphia can monitor the McDonald’s across the street. Why? Because you might be shot at McDonald’s for showing disrespect (this one happened in London, so it’s not just us, but it may be Western culture’s own brand of extremism).

It’s not just in the news. Bloggers are talking about these things. So much, in fact, that blog posts on crime at McDonald’s outweighs conversations about its breakfast menu (there is some overlap though, like this blog post talking about someone who was run down in a McDonald’s parking lot after eating breakfast there).

Share of Key Issues and Messages for McDonald’s
3 Months of Blog Postings

And while analyzing the Blogosphere is a great way to get a sense of public discourse, there’s nothing better than good old-fashioned news media to pinpoint where the problem areas are (this may change soon, if geotagging takes off).

Top Publications Covering McDonald’s and Crime
3 Months of Media Coverage

But don’t expect local issues like crime to stay local. A local news attack at a Grand Prairie, Texas, McDonald’s was posted to You Tube where it was viewed 3,685 times in the four months between when it was posted (8/2/06) and when I checked it today. And it doesn’t stop there. Bloggers, like Dread Egos, post the You Tube video to their blog. A Google search for “McDonald’s” and “sucker punch” turns up 32,600 results. That’s not many compared to the 16,900,00 results that come up for McDonald’s, but “McDonald’s” and “crime” turns up 1,750,000 results (NOTE: the actual search results for McDonald’s, the company, would be less than a pure “McDonald’s” search and the content having to do with crime would be greater than the results from a simple “crime” keyword search).

Since McDonald’s is everywhere and crime is everywhere, you have to expect this is going to happen from time to time. But, is there any brand impact? And what could McDonald’s do about it? Knowing that it’s a topic of discussion greater than many of the products and messages being promoted is a big red flag that you might need to take action. Using local PR strategies to balance out negative perception is a good start, but in world connected by social media, that’s not enough. In the absence of a full-fledged corporate strategy to minimize crime at the stores, going beyond messaging to show some level of action is always ideal (in-store metal detector perhaps, remove shoes, toss liquids…).

I looked for some research on this topic and found a great article on the impact of corporate crimes, but not on the occurance of crimes during the brand experience. I’d like to conduct a study to find out what percentage of people who have experienced a crime at McDonald’s first hand will no longer eat there. Then ask the same question to people who heard about a crime from someone else? What’s the fall-off rate as you add more degrees of separation. You would have to take into account the number of times someone has heard about a crime, over what period of time and whether the negative impact was per location or at the brand level.

Ultimately, you could figure out the ripple effect of each crime and how many it would take to significantly impact McDonald’s brand. Then you could answer the question - how many criminals does it take to steal McDonald’s brand?

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.

On August 15, 2006, a media flurry began when Dell announced it was recalling 4.1 million laptop batteries manufactured by Sony, the largest safety recall in the history of the consumer electronics industry. Overheating batteries have been causing laptops to catch fire or explode. The following week Apple recalled 1.8 million laptop batteries, also made by Sony.

Seeing two of the industry’s most polar-opposite brands pulled into the same debacle made us wonder how the media treatment would play out. We looked at the tone and visibility of Dell and Apple’s battery woe media coverage and noticed Dell had far more visibility and negative tone than Apple.

Media Coverage by Tone
Dell and Apple Battery Problems, August 2006

MediaSignal^TM is calculated by adjusting the reach number for each article based on how prominently the subject (Dell/Apple) is mentioned and then adding together the adjusted reach numbers for each company’s total base of news articles. This chart is based on 6,986 online, print and broadcast news articles for Dell and 5,270 for Apple. Green corresponds to positive MediaSignal, blue/gray to neutral and red to negative.

One reason for this discrepancy in tone is that Dell was first to recall the Sony batteries and in that initial burst of coverage, Apple came forward to say that it was looking into the matter and examining its own Sony laptop batteries. Was it Dell taking a proactive lead on critical safety issues? Engadget and other blogs had been following the saga laptop by laptop, calling it to Dell’s attention. If you take a look at discussion of Dell and battery problems in the Blogosphere, the writing may have been on the wall for awhile.

Newscycle Report
Blog vs. Media Coverage for Dell Battery Problems

The chart shows the media coverage in volume (blue) over time compared to blog posts (gray) over time for discussion of Dell and battery problems.

InfoWorld reported that Dell and Sony knew about the problem as far back as 10 months ago. According to one Slashdot comment, Dell registered www.dellbatteryprogram.com on 11/10/2005, possibly anticipating a recall. One thing is certain though - with upwards of 50 millions blogs containing the personal experiences of millions of people, there’s no need to wait for customers to come to you. Public information on the Internet is often a better source of data for understanding your customer’s experience with your product.