Ethical Cultural Analysis

Ethical Cultural Analysis on McDonald’s

The McDonald’s is a multinational company with over 30,000 franchises fast food restaurants in more than 120 countries. The company appeared in the United States after the crisis of 1929, and in the 50s it was taken by millionaire Ray Kroc and began to expand at first nationally, then in the 70s, the brand embarks on global expansion, starting with major cities of the western world. McDonald’s is the best known brand in the world today, it has dethroned Coca-Cola in 1996, according to the Financial Times.

This company is a perfect example of a successful internationalization, and despite some economic crises, it continues to grow exponentially. Indeed, the international nature of McDonald’s is obvious because more than half of its turnover is generated outside its native country and today, it takes one day to open a restaurant in the United States, and four days to open abroad.

McDonald’s has obviously benefited from the globalization of American culture, it is for many the symbol of it. But it is also the logic and specific operations that allowed the company to generate such success.

However, it would be illusory to believe that the McDonald’s model can be fully universal, its development in areas of the world everyday gets more distant from American culture, forcing the company to take into account certain regional differencies.

McDonald’s model is replicable in many cultures. The company managed to overcome cultural barriers in its expansion strategy by adopting a so called “glocal” strategy, as it adopted the slogan “think local, act global”.

Globalization induced economic necessity to target the geographic expansion of a product: a source of economy of scale, increasing costs and amortization of competitive advantages in local markets. But how far to go in globalization? Should we globalize positioning, concepts or products themselves?

In the 80s there was launched the...