Branding Disasters: McDonald's McPizza and Arch Deluxe

Brands need to change to reflect their current markets but sometimes customers prefer the devil they know - as McDonald's found out to its detriment with the launch of the deluxe range.

It’s always good to try something new and any organisation worth its salt will experiment with new products from time to time, either to reflect seasonal changes and market changes, to try out new specials, or simply to cater to customer requests. But when you’re a massive corporate chain, you’d better make sure you’ve done your research before messing with the formula.

Take restaurant Little Chef, for example. There was a time when it was a treat to ditch the soggy sandwiches and stop at the roadside to be served fast food by a waitress in one of the many Little Chef restaurants that littered the A roads. Unfortunately, it remained in a time warp and was faced with administration. RCapital stepped into the breach and reinstated the previous CEO, Ian Pegler. Within nine months Pegler had launched a brand new menu, including four sell-out dishes, and by the third quarter the company began to turn a profit.

But it didn’t stop there. The brand also became famous for trying to inject some new life into the microwave-friendly menu. Nothing wrong with that, you might say. But Pegler opted for the unusual choice of bringing in Heston Blumenthal as a consultant - a chef notorious for preferring to put bacon and eggs and tea in his ice cream and having snails with his porridge than opting for the Little Chef fry-fest flagship Olympic Breakfast.

Click here for a snippet of just how the customers expecting something ‘dinged’ to precarious perfection reacted to such dishes as ox cheeks.

Pegler himself was less than impressed with some of the choices but learnt an important lesson. “The little Chef has had seven owners since I left in 1994 but the basic proposition never changed: The brand exists for people to eat food they like, at the roadside, in warm comfortable surroundings,” he told MyCustomer.com earlier this year. “We’re famous for our breakfast, which appeals to our core customers. You then have to build on the other parts.” He added: “We understand our market now.”

Something which might not have been said about fast food behemoth McDonald’s in the 1990s. Everybody pretty much knows what to expect underneath the golden arches - be it food or service - no matter where you are in the world. But that didn’t stop McDonald’s trying to outdo firms such as Dominos and Pizza Hut by offering the McPizza, which was even served to the table.

However, despite the cheesy ads promoting its quick yet romantic appeal, customers were clearly not lovin’ it. After all, if you want to get the experience of having a pizza served to you in a restaurant, surely better to go to a more intimate pizzeria? And the less said about the grotesque-looking Pizza McPuff (imagine fashioning a pizza to resemble their famous apple pie) the better!

Other classic failures included onion nuggets, an attempt to branch out into more exotic seafood – McMussels with cheese anyone? - and the most expensive of all: the Arch Deluxe. Instead of appealing to kids, this was marketed as ‘the burger with the grown up taste’. But the calorific  content and high prices weren’t as palatable to consumers.The deluxe line had a promising start. Just as Little Chef caught on to the kudos of attaching a food celebrity to a brand, executive chef Andrew Selvaggio came up with the concept. First out of the kitchen was the McLean Deluxe in 1991, which aimed to appeal to the more health-conscious by offering a classic looking burger reduced in fat.

Ironically, today people are bombarded with messages warning against obesity and promoting more healthy eating but it was ahead of its time. Consumers didn’t seem to be bothered about what was in their burger and sales were poor. The McLean was even being dropped from menus before it was officially given the boot in 1994.

The Arch Deluxe, however, was a direct competitor to the Burger King Whopper and included bacon, cheese and a secret sauce. The idea was that adults would be drawn to its superior taste. What the McDonald’s execs didn’t bargain for was that consumers decided that if they were going to forget about the fat and go for a ‘naughty’ burger, they’d rather save a few cents and go for the cheaper option. It was an expensive lesson for McDonald’s, though, having spent an estimated $300 million on the Arch Deluxe campaign before it was sent to the McScrapheap.

So, it just goes to show that sometimes while it’s nice to try something new, consumers don’t always want to stray too far from what they already know. They can go elsewhere for that.

Other articles in the Branding Disasters series.