McDonald's to Customers: Ask Me Anything!

The Internet has reshaped how we do business in amazing ways. It’s provided a pipeline that has made it easier for companies and NGOs to reach out to consumers. It’s bolstered charity efforts by making them more accessible. And it has made it easier for consumers to find and reach all of those services.

But I often think the true value of the Internet is in the education it can share. It makes it easier for us to learn about the companies we’re considering doing business with and the products they offer. It also increases transparency when it comes to the initiatives we’re asked to donate to. In many ways, it’s truly made the world smaller and less complex.

But can a company ever share too much information?

Or put another way: Is there ever a time when a consumer’s question (and the answer) is better left unpublished?

That’s the dilemma that McDonald's seems to be facing these days. In an effort to quash rumors about its food quality, it’s opened the information vault and set up new, regionally specific online portals for the most fantastic questions consumers can think of. And we’re not just talking your blasé “how many calories are in your Big Mac” question. In the U.S., readers can find that at fastfoodnutrition.org.

No, these are questions that go beyond what most people would probably think to ask, like, “Are your hamburgers really made of white meal worms?” or “Why does your food, left out over time, never rot or decompose?” Both questions, while maybe educational for their replies, leave the fast-food consumer gasping for air.

What is interesting is that each of McDonald's regional websites (U.S. versus Canadian or Australian, for example) approaches this process differently, but they all, to some degree embrace the ethic that publishing the customers’ questions, no matter how stomach-turning, helps prove the company’s transparency. The Canadian site takes the no-holds-bar approach and publishes the questions in post-note form, spelling errors and all. Those who weren’t turned off by the meal worms and decomposition questions probably won’t be undone by the following veracity challenge: "What kind of subituts do u place in yur BEEF BURGER – BE HONEST!"

The U.S. site has cleaned up the spelling and the amazing number of redundant questions, while the Australian team seems to have tumbled to the fact that not all customer ponderings need to be aired on an international website.

And that’s a pretty good takeaway. Those of us who would never think of asking a company we have willingly patronized whether it uses inedible critters in its food are left to wonder not whether it’s bunk, but why the question keeps getting asked.

As Chris Morran, senior editor for the Consumerist put it, “If people are asking what’s in your burger, you’ve already lost.

“[What McDonald’s] completely overlooks is that the real problem is the fact that people are asking these questions to begin with,” says Morran.

Ditto. But I would go a step further and say that the issue is really a matter of the vision McDonald’s has of its corporate future.

When the golden arches first went up, the company’s concept took the world by storm. It was a new, it was fresh and its true appeal was that it super-charged our imagination. That’s the selling point of mega-sellers. Their brands offer a change.

And that change doesn’t have to be taste (although I would think it would help for a hamburger chain). It simply needs to prove it’s bold.

That’s what I think McDonald’s is trying to do. But in challenging customers to put up the weirdest, most unthinkable questions, it’s undermining that spark it has traded on for so many years: the sense of enthrall in trying something new, that doesn’t come with a whole lot of uncomfortable questions that shouldn’t have to be asked in the first place.

Maybe the message McDonald's needs to be sending out is not a line-by-line correction of its public image, but a highlight of how it’s going to use its considerable experience to remake the food industry for the 21st century. That was its selling point in the mid-20th century, and it worked.

Image credit: Pointnshoot