emergencemarketing.com

Apparently McDonald’s is giving away toy miniature Hummer cars with their happy meals, irking environmentalists and causing the Environmental Working Group and HybridCars.com to create the Ronald McHummer Sign-o-matic site (used to create the image in this post).

Responding to the widespread negative feedback to the co-promotion between McDonald’s and Hummer, Bob Langert, the VP of Marketing at McDonald’s wrote on the company blog – which is ironically named “open for discussion” – “the miniature Hummers are just toys, not vehicle recommendations or a source of consumer messages about natural resource conservation, greenhouse gas emissions, etc.”

Talk about the misuse of a corporate blog as a communications vehicle or a marketing tool.

First off, do you think that McDonald’s VP of Marketing seriously believes that Hummer is in the business of making kids happy? And do you think that he is expecting people who read his blog to believe that? A cross-promotional deal with Hummer is obviously meant to promote the car to young people. Other car manufacturers like Toyota have clearly decided that pitching cars to this age group will be beneficial in the long run. On a good corporate blog one would expect frank and honest talk – not corporate speak like this.

Matthew Fried from Enviroblog obviously thinks that the VP is either naive or disingenuous, and in doing so exposes the second misuse of McDonald’s corporate blog. Apparently he left a comment on the Marketing VP’s post yesterday – which still has to be approved. So much for calling the blog “Open for Discussion!”

[Tags: blogging wom viral marketing consumer+generated+content cgm]

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