McDonald's VS Italian pizza: an ethical issue

Happy Meal VS pizza: the new McDonald's spot challenges the traditional Italian pizza, with a subtle, insidious message: that McDonald's Happy Meal suits children's needs better than pizza.

As you can see in the spot, an Italian family is sitting in a pizzeria - of course, the place is presented as gloomy and unpleasant; the waiter arrives and asks the kid which kind of pizza he prefers. Determined, he replies: "Happy Meal!" and the spot closes with these words: "Your son has no doubts, Happy Meal", while the family eats happily in a full-of-light McDonald's shop. 
Then, the voice adds: "Always at 4€", leveraging its low price to attract also parents, and not just children. Pizza margherita's price, in fact, is often higher, especially in big cities.

This spot could be the perfect example of unethical food marketing to children, in which an unhealthy diet is presented as the best option for kids. 
Marketers' are really clever: also the appearence of the pizzeria is not casually chosen; they present a dingy, old place, not really attractive to kids. On the contrary, McDonald's shop looks bright and kids-friendly.  
McDonald's may object that Happy Meal has many possible combinations and not all of them are unhealthy. The choices are:

• One main dish, chosen among hamburger, McToast and McNuggets
• A side dish, chosen among French fries and carrots
• A soft drink (Coca Cola, Coca Cola Zero, Fanta, Sprite, Peach tea or Lemon tea, still or fizzy water, biological peach juice)
• A dessert (Parmesan cheese, biological yogurt or fruit)

Each combination has a very different calorie count: from 254 kcal (if I choose McNuggets, carrots, water and fruit) to 733 kcal (McToast, fried potatoes, a fizzy drink and Parmesan). But let's face the reality: which kid goes to McDonald's to eat carrots and biological peach juice? 
A pizza margherita grants a calorie count of 800 kcal ca., but its ingredients are far healthier than the "junky" version of the Happy Meal: it is composed of 70% of carbohidrates, 20% of proteins, 10% of fatty acids, vitamins A and C, iron and calcium. Moreover, kids usually do not eat the entire pizza, often they just eat half of it: so, the calorie intake is 400 kcal.
It is definitely healthier than a Happy Meal composed by a McToast, French fries, Coke and Parmesan cheese, so it may be considered as an act of a marketing irresponsibility to create a TV advertisement aimed at children encouraging them to choose Happy Meal instead of pizza. Let's keep in mind that McDonald's food has been proved unhealthy by many documentaries, like the famous Super Size Me, in which the independent filmmaker Mogan Spurlock - from February 2nd to March 1st, 2003 - only ate at McDonald's and brushed against death.

Pizza margherita is candidate to become UNESCO world heritage and a spot which questions its healthy nature is an outrage to this traditional Italian dish. 

Neapolitan people, particularly touched by McDonald's misleading commercial, reacted with this parodic video:

In this ironical video, they offer a Happy Meal to a child, who reacts asking "Daddy, what do I do with this sleaze? I want pizza!". Then the voice says: "Your son has no doubts: pizza a portafoglio. 1, 1.5€ maximum".

Some people may say that eating pizza every day is not good for children's health, too. I totally agree, but if I had to choose between offering pizza or a junky Happy Meal to a kid, as the child in the spot, I would have no doubts.


Carlotta Neuenschwander

Family communication and children's consumption behaviour

Good afternoon everybody,

today we are going to focus on family’s role in protecting children from marketing dedicated to them, or better, in educating them to a responsible consumption attitude.

I have found an interesting paper by Gregory M. Rose, David Boush and Aviv Shoham, “Family communication and children’s purchasing influence: a cross-national examination” (2002), in which the authors study the importance of family’s communication process in shaping children’s purchasing power. 

Marketing is always ready to attract and persuade kids: it appears on TV, magazines and it pervades the Web. Even if we fight for making marketing ethical and responsible towards children, it will be impossible, even excessive to prevent firms from targeting them. It is family’s responsibility, too, to instruct children to react in a rational way to marketing messages.

Parents have to make their kids aware of the money’s worth, of product prices and of puffery; they have to learn how to recognize a misleading message and understand that not always a product described as the best and as the one that you definitely have to buy is something that you really need. 

Marketing to children may be unethical, but if parents pamper their kids too much, buying them anything they want, they will facilitate irresponsible marketers’ work.

A lack of family communication often generates spoiled children

A good communication between parents and children is crucial and it usually has two main dimensions – as the authors state: one mainly socially-oriented, related to human interrelationships (based on some dictates, like avoid conflicts, respect the elders and so on), the other one conceptually-oriented, focused on teaching children to think independently and to evaluate all sides of an argument during the communication process. 

Starting from these two dimensions, four communicative patterns have been elaborated:

• laissez-faire: typical of families with a low-quality communication, lacking both of social and conceptual orientation;
• protective: it describes families in which socially-oriented dimension is strong, but the conceptual one is insufficient;
• pluralistic: more focused on the conceptual dimension, less on the social one;
• consensual: both the dimensions are important.

Family communication and a responsible consumption behaviour are often connected

If we consider these dimensions on a scale where the lowest level is laissez-faire and the highest the consensual one, the more we move towards the consensual level, the more our children are conscious about the use of their income.

Usually, children raised in pluralistic and consensual families have more income at their disposal and they are more responsible about their purchasing power, while children in protective and permissive families tend to be more dependent to their parents’ income. 

Which kind of communication do you adopt in your family? Be careful: if you recognize that your communicative pattern is low-quality, remember that it is important to raise independent and aware children, in order not to make them easy targets for irresponsible marketers. 

Carlotta Neuenschwander

You can't leave your black hat on

Good morning everybody

Today’s topic will be a little bit different from the usual ones, but still related to marketing ethics.

The title of the post may seem you strange, despite the fact that it echoes the famous Joe Cocker’s song: the subject I am going to deal with is black hat SEO.

First of all, what is SEO? As a marketer, it is impossible not to know it, since it is a really hot topic nowadays. SEO is the acronym for Search Engine Optimization: Wikipedia defines it as «the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's unpaid results».

SEO

More easily, we make use of some search engines everyday: the most famous one is Google, but there are others, like Bing and Yahoo. 

As a company – but even as a single individual, if we want to promote ourselves – it is crucial to appear among the first results in order to get more visitors: the goal of web marketers adopting SEO techniques is to get a higher rank in the search results page and to appear more frequently in the search results list. 

“The best place to hide a dead body is page two of Google”, they say: we can easily understand that being on the first page is very important for companies. 

Improving your ranking through SEO techniques

To have a quick and nice explanation, you can watch What Is SEO.

There are various licit SEO techniques: choosing the best keywords – with the aid of tools such as Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool, having web analytics in place, creating high-quality contents, using relevant titles and meta-descriptions and so on. 

On the other hand, there are also web marketers who use aggressive SEO strategies, not aimed at attracting the audience, but just search engines, and in a deceptive way. These methods are called black hat from western movies: indeed, bad characters usually wear black hats, while good guys carry white ones.  

Black hat as a symbol of evilness

Black hat SEO techniques exploit the logic of the algorithms upon which search engines are based, trying to cheat them. Common methods are:

• Keyword stuffing, the strategic use of a certain keyword to make the webpage appear pertinent to the content users are searching for (even if probably it is not so).
• Doorway pages, pages without contents, but created to redirect users to other pages.
• Cloaking, the creation of two different web pages, one for the users and one for search engines’ spiders. That is done because the content of the “real” page, the one created for users, is substantially different – sometimes pornographic.
• Link spam, the use of link farms – groups of web sites that all hyperlink to the other members’ website – to gain visibility.
• Hidden text, the creation of invisible contents – in the same colour of the page background, for instance. 

Black hat SEO techniques

We are talking about these techniques because they are an example of unethical web marketing: these people cheat search engines and users at the same time, they are unethical under a stakeholder-oriented approach. 

If I am searching for something on Google, for instance, I am expecting that the first results are the web sites providing the best contents about that topic. With black hat SEO techniques, I can be deceived, since the web sites that make use of them appear among the first results, but they are not qualitative at all. 

Usually, who uses these techniques is someone who aims at a quick financial return through its website, and it is not concerned with a long term perspective; that is why usually Google rates better pages that have been existing for more than one year.

Luckily, search engines usually ban these people, but, before, they have to recognize them as spammers: it may take time, usually sufficient for them to achieve their goals. 

However, these behaviours are not rewarded: it is far better to obtain a long-term competitive advantage through high quality contents, than cheating search engines with deceptive SEO practices. 

That is why, in order to be successful and ethical at the same time, you can't leave your black hat on.

Carlotta Neuenschwander