McCafe on a bun?

This should sound familiar: Restaurant upstarts take a commodity product you’d find on any menu, raise the quality and price, and cultivate a cult-like following.

After Starbucks did it with coffee, McDonald’s eventually responded with McCafe, a line-up that promises quality beverages at a much lower price. By all accounts, it’s been a smash.

So Big Mac isn’t waiting as long to employ the same defense against upscale burger purveyors like Five Guys, Smashburger and Bobby Flay. The rise of the so-called premium burger segment is providing McDonald’s with the cover to slide higher quality choices into its mix and trump the newcomers on price, COO Don Thompson explained last week.

“Frankly, I think it’s good for us,” he told investors. “It's a benefit because those premium burgers have higher margin and we've got some of those same premium burgers.”

Translation: It’s McCafe on a bun.

Thompson noted that the tack is already working with McD’s Angus one-third-pound burgers. Expect to see more choices in that price and quality strata, he advised during the analysts conference call.

Thompson noted that those new choices could be imported from McDonald’s operations in Europe, including the 1955, a burger the chain is marketing in Germany with a fictional pedigree. Commercials suggest the oversized bacon burger was invented by a housewife in Chicago, whose recipe was just recently discovered by a McDonald’s crewmember in Deutschland.
“Europe has already tested the 1955 very successfully,” Thompson observed.

He also mentioned the Big Tasty, another premium choice that McDonald’s started offering in Europe, with and without bacon, around the start of 2011.

Thompson didn’t mention the Pub Style Burger, a product that drew considerable attention from bloggers after word leaked of its test in the Midwest. But he did note that many of the analysts on the call were aware of some U.S. initiatives featuring premium burgers.

“I'm really looking forward to us having even more premium burgers,” he commented.

Price-wise, the entries will be positioned as a value relative to burgers of comparable quality. Thompson said McDonald’s can afford to undercut the competition because of “our supply chain and the efficacy of it.”

He also noted that the premium play will extend to chicken. Some U.S. markets are already offering premium chicken sandwiches.

Merci! Are they kidding?

The sanctimonious guardians of family values almost lunged out of their jackboots when McDonald’s ran a French commercial suggesting the young male star was more interested in other dudes than he was in girls.

Now the blogosphere is sloshing with indignation because the chain ran the spot only in France. The self-righteous NPR set is blasting the company as a lap dog to the ultra right because it has confirmed publicly that the ad isn’t scheduled for a U.S. airing.

The latest flashpoint was the interview that McDonald’s president Don Thompson gave on Sunday to the chain’s hometown paper, the Chicago Tribune. “You're right, that commercial won't show in the United States,” Thompson blasphemed.

Thompson, the sort of guy you’d love to have at a family barbecue where the big game is on, made that utterance more than a week after the U.S. National Gay & Lesbian Chamber of Commerce alerted McDonald’s that it would have nothing more to do with it. No longer would the burger chain be welcome to sponsor any Chamber functions, or even to be a member. A pro-inclusion group by its very definition was excluding a party from all interactions because of its “blatant geographic pandering.”

McDonald’s just can’t win. It has the McNuggets to run an ad that depicts what’s likely a touchstone experience for millions of gays and lesbians, something 90% of big consumer brands would never dare to try on this planet. The spot wasn’t preachy or showy, an on-air equivalent of professing that some of its best friends are gay. It was just another slice-of-life-type spot—McDonald’s advertising stock in trade—that happened to have a gay protagonist this time around.

Yet the company is blasted for not running the spot in the U.S., a market where ads for erectile dysfunction aids have been attacked for promoting recreational sex.

[Full disclosure: I’m a strong advocate of recreational sex. Especially with a partner.]
Commercials dealing with menstruation have to lapse into safe-speak, like having Mother Nature delivering a “monthly present.”

The damned-if-you-do-or-don’t situation is especially ironic because McDonald’s had the courage several years ago to put an executive on the Chamber’s board. That unambiguous hurrah for inclusion drew considerable heat from Bible thumpers and conspiracy theorists, who accused the chain of pursuing a homosexual agenda.

I remember how one irate group ran a picture of Ronald McDonald interacting with a boy dressed as a pirate and a girl outfitted as a princess. The artwork was clearly intended to suggest that Ronald might’ve considered becoming a priest at some point.

Parties that blast McDonald’s for not being louder in championing inclusion should keep that lapse from reality in mind. Their real opponent isn’t the chain, it’s the extremists who think they can deny the diversity of mankind by assailing any party that so much as suggests there’s no mold for good, right-being folk.

McDonald’s is trying to put some cracks in that thinking. Don’t slam it for foregoing a sledgehammer.