INTRODUCTION

In this fast moving world, with all the urbanization process that happen, food
consumption trend among people around the world and especially people in
Malaysia also start to show different pattern due to changing of trend from the
previous year . We can see nowadays people tend to eat outside meals
compare to the traditional way of cooking by their own, this was proven by a
research that been conducted, the result had showed a rapid increase of people
eating outside from time to time.

There are many factors that influence this rapid increase of why people prefer
eating outside meals. Among the factors are convenience, as people can save
time from preparing food, clean all the utensils and less energy need. Besides,
there are also due to more food choices, result by the rapid growth of food
service industry. There are a lot types of food eating place, either food stalls,
restaurant, food court or fast food.

Above of all the selection of food eating place in this case study, we are going
to discuss more on fast food and go specified with Mc Donald’s. McDonald’s
is one of the established fast food in Malaysia, for years they have gained the
customer’s trust and become among the preferable fast food here. Thus, we
are going to look further on how Mc Donald’s manage and maintain their sales
even been surround by a competitive environment from other competitors
such as KFC, Marrybrown and another fast-food restaurant in Malaysia.

In addition, this case study will bring us to look deeper on how Mc Donald’s
survive in this current pandemic situation, as people become more aware on
the outside meals and getting back to traditional way, which is self-cook meal.
We will look on how they come out with new strategies of marketing to cater
this current situation and how they ensure there are still making profit and can
run their business as before the Covid-19.

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 STRENGTH

The strength of McDonald’s is ‘Revenue Growth’. It is because when the

McDonald’s open back since the pandemic Covid-19 was happened, they are
use strategies of 3 ‘Ds’. There are drive-thru, delivery and also digital. Customer
todays more prefer to go driving-through McDonald’s to get their food with
quickly without have to be at there for a long time and just line up in their
vehicle. As we know, McDonald’s was run their delivery in 24 hours. It also
was given a chance to adult for those are searching job in delivering food since
many of them lost job because of pandemic Covid-19. For the digital, customer
can do the order from the handphone. This way can create a social distancing
because food delivery will send and standing in 1 meter from their customer. It
can maintain the sales of McDonald’s. This strategic was keeping the growth of
revenue in their business.

Next, the strength of McDonald’s is ‘Known Brand’. After McDonald’s was

affected by pandemic Covid-19, there have open back with use a slogan of
“Welcome Back”. McDonald’s also do a campaign. They do a campaign by
spread it through television, social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram
and also on radio. It is because McDonald’s is a brand that already known by
the customers and this marketing will get back their attraction to order and buy
food from McDonald’s during movement control order. Known brand was
given a big influence on the customers because the customer will buy and repeat
the same brand of food their known before. It is because they already know
about the taste of food at McDonald’s will give a satisfaction for them.

Last but not least, the strength of McDonald’s is ‘Loyalty’. McDonald’s

have set a price of product by do the promotion since pandemic Covid-19. The
promotion is the one way to get a response from customer in achieve a high
number of people spend the money to buy food from McDonald’s. The
promotion such as free delivery and also surprise gift. This promotion also can
make a return of customer to buy again and again. For sure, the customer will
wait for another promotion of McDonald’s that can be announced later.
Customer also were like to get a chance in buy any product in a promotion

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because the price will be less than before. The promotion of product by
McDonald’s as indirectly build a loyalty from the customer for a long time.

OPPORTUNITY

McDonald have their opportunity to emphasize the emerging chance of

growth. But during the pandemic, McDonald try to improve their opportunity
to make sure their company stable in future. It will enable the organisation to
enhance its economic efficiency, leadership structure, and strategic growth and
other aspects. At present, McDonald's Malaysia is expanding at an annual pace
of about 15 to 20 restaurants. McDonald's expects a positive growth trajectory
to continue in years to come, with good business and marketing strategies.
McDonald's wants to expand this opportunity to every Malaysian person
interested in being a franchisee, running a fast service restaurant with the world's
most recognisable brand, and being part of an established success story.

Firstly, value meals that launch by McDonald. A value meal is a

collection of menu items served together at a cheaper price at a restaurant than
they would cost individually. Value meals to promote bundling, up-selling, and
price discrimination are a popular merchandising strategy. During the
pandemic, McDonald provide the valuable of meals such as Crispy Fish
Foldover, Grill Chicken Foldover, Chocolate Banana Pie and Chocolate Banana
McFlurry. Then, the price that provide by McDonald for the limited meals in
cheaper that another menu. Its because, McDonald try to attract the people to
come during the pandemic. Its is the way that McDonald use to make their
opportunity more effective. Next, other opportunity that do by the McDonald
during pandemic is innovative products. During the pandemic, McDonald try to
introduce or innovate their menu to make the menu more attractive. Depending
on the geographical conditions and community, introducing more products like
this will help McDonald's retain their charm for a longer period of time. For
example, the new menu that add by McDonald during pandemic is Chocolate
Banana McFlurry and the innovate menu is Ayam Goreng McD version sweet
and spicy.

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 Then, global expansion. McDonald's Corporation began to spread
domestically across the United States from the start of the company in 1973,
thus establishing its brand recognition. As can be seen in nations such as India
and China, its initial strategy started by advertising directly to middle and upper-
class citizens. However, McDonald's started to appeal to many individuals
belonging to the lower class with its several discount prices on many of its food
products. Before opening restaurants, China was McDonald's first global nation
in which it studied extensively. In reality, McDonalds was able to establish
marketing strategies through globalisation and internationalisation, while at the
same time customising them according to cultural and national differences for
different regions to suit particular target markets. Based on a few elements,
including social cultural, technological, political and economic situations, the
company conducts heavy research in regions where it wants to open locations.
The key to McDonald's success is its "think global, act local" business mantra
(Vignali, 2001). In any area in which it opens its fast food restaurants, this has
helped the company to achieve financial success.

Lastly, is McDonald try to rebuilding brand image. Although fast-food

restaurants are struggling to combat the reputation of 'junk manufacturing
centres', McDonald's will play it smartly by continuing its aggressive, safe and
personalised offering initiatives. Such advances have started to show results,
with strong comparable sales contributing to earnings growth. The re-
franchising mission has definitely driven sales down, but McDonald's healthier
image will continue to make bigger differences in the long run. Over the past
few years the company, which has delivered mediocre results to investors and
has been increasingly subjected to negative press around its menu selection and
employee relations, announced that it would undergo a major rebranding
campaign to restore its reputation. The strategy of the company is to transform
into a more trustworthy and valued brand" and to build an overall restaurant
experience that "customers will feel good about What that means is precisely to
be decided, but the rebranding strategy would definitely not be the usual shift
in logo and design.

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 WEAKNESS AND THREAT

McDonald’s stated that one of their weakness is raises the prices. Mostly
people are trying to spend less especially during the lockdown. The reason for
the increase in the price of the McDonald’s called the “quality of raw materials,
availability, required quantities and other expenses linked to the appropriate
product as they want to offer their products with consistently high quality.

McDonald’s stated that one of their weakness and threat is the customers
also have changed their behaviour and purchasing during the pandemic. The
significantly changed behaviour are because of they have remained cautious of
stepping out to avoid risk of exposure of the pandemic. They said that its
average order was large, but for overall the customer counts are felling during
the quarter. This is because during the pandemic, the customers are looking for
new experience which more to a contactless and digital type of experience.
Therefore, McDonald’s company need to improve their service of mob ile
usage, delivery service, drive-thru service to be more convenient to the
customers.

Further than that, the new trends toward healthy and wellness also
impact customer behaviour demand for fast food. Each McDonalds dishes
provides large number of calories but not too much nutrition because the use
trans-fat and beef oil in their food. Therefore, a number of customers who care
about their health stop eating and ordering at McDonalds restaurants and the
causes makes revenue of company decrease. During the pandemic lockdown,
mostly consumer especially family are more preferring to prepare healthy
home-cooked meals and baking at home. That is the one of the reasons why
decrease demand of fast-food during pandemic.

As the restaurants struggled to cope with the consumer behaviours

during the health crisis, forcing McDonalds restaurants to simplify menus and
shifting largely to online and mobile orders for delivery, pickup and drive-thru
as the restaurants have started to reopen to limit seating capacity. The
contactless method and limiting capacity per premise are for the social-
distancing measures to ensure the safety of its employees and customers. Since
the start of Movement Control Order, McDonalds has offered a limited menu in

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order to keep service running and people fed. Before the pandemic crisis, the
larger menu has slowdown the service and ultimately hurting sales. Although
many customers are disappointed with the decision, some of the loyal customers
has proven that they are also advantages of limiting the menu such as the menu
order speed has increasing. This is due to limited menu had ease the operations
and allowing the team to focus and provide blazing fast service.

McDonalds also limiting capacity in dining rooms as a step of confront

the pandemic. For some period of time before, McDonald’s Malaysia has
banned dine-ins in all of its outlets nationwide despite a government
announcement permitting eat-ins at all eateries. The decision was the concern
of the safety of its patrons. After the ban lifted, there are several new Standard
Operation Procedure (SOP) insisted to all employees and customers which each
restaurants owner need to make sure to follow thoroughly the new SOP. They
must make sure there is at least a two-metre distance between tables and one-
metre distance between each people. Each table restricting the number of
customers per table. The new SOP lead to decrease of customer visiting the
restaurants such as friends and families member are not able to enjoy the usual
crowd and gathering time together because of the restriction and limitation
capacity inside the premise and per table. The restaurants also only allowed
customers that are wearing face mask, do temperature check and sanitize their
hand before entering the premise. Some customers may find that the mask usage
are burdensome as they only allows to take down the mask once they seated at
the table to dine.

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 SURVIVAL OF MCDONALD’S IN MALAYSIA DURING CRISIS

a) What are Mc Donald’s strategies to remain their sales during the crisis
of COVID 19?

2020 is a very challenging year for each of us due to Covid 19 outbreak.

This unprecedented situation is changing the world we live in, and we will need
to adapt to a new reality in its aftermath. Most of the companies and businesses
are affected during this pandemic Covid 19 including foodservice organization
and Mc Donald’s is one of them. This global outbreak has significantly
disrupted the Mc Donald’s business. While they are facing this new situation,
they had started their preparation on strengthen their company to position them
for long-term growth. Every company need to make a move to make sure they
can survive during this outbreak. As we can see, there are many businesses that
need to close down because their profit decline and they cannot afford to pay
the salaries and maintenance anymore.

The Mc Donald’s President and Chief Executive Officer, Chris

Kempczinski, had stated that they experienced a significant decline in their sales
since mid-March. The situation remains fluid, and they had come out with a few
strategies to make sure they can survive. First of all, their strategy will focus on
the three ‘Ds’ which are Delivery, Drive-thru and Digital. These three systems
are expected as the biggest opportunities to growth during this pandemic. As
we all know, customers are looking for more contactless experience such as
using digital so they can navigate on their own. We want to minimize the direct
contact between people as suggested by the government. Other than that, it is
easier for the customers who do not want to go out to buy the food. So, they just
need to order using the Mc Donald’s apps and the food will be delivered to their
house. In Malaysia, Mc Donald’s has implemented new campaign which is
‘Contactless McDelivery’ where there will no direct contact between the
customer and the employees during the delivery service. The customers need to
order and pay using the McD system and the employee will deliver the food and
hang it on the customer’s door or gate. The customer will be informed before
the rider arrived.

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 The process of contactless delivery

Other than that, to boost their sales, Mc Donald’s plans to increase their
marketing spend. Marketing spend and value activity are important to attract
more customers and built customer relationship to make sure they will purchase
again. Their aim is to make customers feel safe to consume their food and
beverages because customers are more concern about health during this
pandemic. So, when Mc Donald’s shows how their employees are very concern
about food hygiene such as wearing mask when preparing the food, always
sanitize their hand and so on, it is one of their marketing strategy to get the
customers’ trust.

Mc Donald’s food hygiene alternative

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b) How do they market and pricing their product during Movement
control order?

With the outbreak Covid-19, the government had implemented

movement control order (MCO), which mean all the citizen must to stay at
home, and only allowed to go out to settle their necessary things. At this point,
for sure Mc Donald’s is not in the list of the most necessity things during the
MCO. This led to decline of physical buying at all the Mc Donald’s in
Malaysia, if this situation continued and not carefully handle it will lead to a
high volume of losses.

Thus, this is what we are going to discuss in this case study. We will
look on what incentive come out by Mc Donald’s to turn this unwanted
situation or we can call as tragedy into a golden opportunity to increase their
number of sales.

Start with how they market their product, we can see they invest a lot of
money and effort in conduct a marketing in form of advertising their product
in all the social media platform rapidly than before. They know that people or
their targeted customers are started to use social media more frequent during
the MCO, thus from the advertising they can attract and influence the people
to buy from them. Furthermore, they also provide solution to the people that
cannot go out to buy the food physically at the store, they come out with their
delivery system which known as McDelivery to send the food safely to the
customer.

McDelivery advertising in Twitter

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 Besides, they also have done collaboration with third party delivery
company such as Foodpanda and Grabfood to deliver their food to the
customers. What make things more interesting, if the customer checkout from
the third-party app they can redeem for certain voucher and can receive extra
discount. Furthermore, sometimes they also can get a free
delivery charge, which we think this collaboration is an excellent strategy to
Mc Donald’s survive during this crisis.

Foodpanda vouch Grabfood free delivery

In other hand, they still open their stores for customers to do physically
purchase and take away the order home as the customers are not allowed to
dine in. The customers can choose either drive thru or walk-in, both methods
have been conducted with tight procedure follow the government standard
operational procedure to prevent from any unwanted transmission happen.
For walk- in, customers now can make their order at the machine, they can
select their menus and insert the amount that they need to pay. This is to
ensure less contact, safe and hygiene among the customers and employees, as
Mc Donald’s prioritize the health and safety of both customers and
employees.

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 Advertising in Twitter

While from the point of pricing, Mc Donald’s seem to not have any
drastically change of prices for their overall range of products. But they have
offered many promotion and discount to their selected products. They have
happy hour during selected time, which the prices of the product are lower
compare to normal time. They also come out with combo price, that is more
worth it to be purchase compare to the ala carte set.

Happy hour prices

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c) How the food delivery such as Food Panda, Grab Food, Da Makan and
others food riders helping government of Malaysia during crisis of
COVID 19?

Food delivery services have seen an increase in popularity lately, largely

because of the movement control order (MCO) due to the Covid-19 pandemic
and even continue its demand during CMCO. How these food delivery service
helps government during pandemic? Food delivery riders can be called as one
of the frontliners that work for the society during the outbreak. When the
government announced that our country is having MCO, everyone needs to be
at home. People are working from home, students attend online classes and most
of business outlets need to close down. So, during this period, food delivery
system helps government to make sure everyone can get their favourite food
even by staying at their home. Food delivery service not only can deliver food
from the restaurant, but there are also apps where people can ask for buying
their groceries and so on.

Example of online grocery shopping

Other than that, this food delivery system also helps to rebuild the
economy for the businesses itself and the country. Can we imagined what will
happen if all the business needs to close down and there will be no business
transaction happen? It will be the most critical situation for the business owner
and also our country. By having this food delivery system, at least the
foodservice operation and other stores that offer delivery service can operate
their business in a new norm. It will help the business and company to survived
as usual.

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 CONCLUSION

For the conclusion, Covid-19 was affected to the business of

McDonald’s. All of the organizations from manager until employees must be
cooperate in achieve the goals at the company. They need to ensure that the
business will be continuously and can be run with a many alternative ways.

In this pandemic, they need to think about the safety and healthy. The
important thing is they need to wearing mask during works and wash their hands
always. If can, provided a hand sanitizer to their customer. They also need to
make sure that if the one of the employees infected to the Covid-19, they should
not be there and works.

Lastly, McDonald’s has to make sure they can solve their problem with
kindly in provided services for the customer during this pandemic. It is to make
sure the satisfaction and the quality of service can be maintained. It is also to
make sure the McDonald’s were being the first choice of customers in getting
their meals.

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