Mcdonald's and the Rise of a Children's Consumer Culture, 1955-1985
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Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 1994 Small Fry, Big Spender: McDonald's and the Rise of a Children's Consumer Culture, 1955-1985 Kathleen D. Toerpe Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Toerpe, Kathleen D., "Small Fry, Big Spender: McDonald's and the Rise of a Children's Consumer Culture, 1955-1985" (1994). Dissertations. 3457. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/3457 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 1994 Kathleen D. Toerpe LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO SMALL FRY, BIG SPENDER: MCDONALD'S AND THE RISE OF A CHILDREN'S CONSUMER CULTURE, 1955-1985 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY KATHLEEN D. TOERPE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS MAY, 1994 Copyright by Kathleen D. Toerpe, 1994 All rights reserved ) ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank McDonald's Corporation for permitting me research access to their archives, to an extent wider than originally anticipated. Particularly, I thank McDonald's Archivist, Helen Farrell, not only for sorting through the material with me, but also for her candid insight in discussing McDonald's past. My Director, Lew Erenberg, and my Committee members, Susan Hirsch and Pat Mooney-Melvin, have helped to shape the project from its inception and, throughout, have challenged me to hone my interpretation of McDonald's role in American culture. This is, perhaps, not the work they each would have written, but the final product owes much to their expertise and insight. Most of all, my thanks goes to my husband, Tom. He has been my technical advisor on the inner workings of corporate marketing and finance, and the inner workings of our computer. He rescued me from our children when I needed to work, translated financial statements, clipped articles, typed graphs, edited chapters, spent many late nights talking about McDonald's, and cheerfully endured leftovers or Big Macs for supper. It is to Tom that I dedicate this dissertation. iii God may or may not be dead, but Ronald McDonald surely is immortal. There will be burgers forever! Jon Carroll Ronald Revisited: The World of Ronald McDonald < TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iii LIST OF TABLES v Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. MCDONALD'S: AN AMERICAN PHENOMENON 16 3. THE CONVENIENCE FOOD INDUSTRY AND CHILD CONSUMERISM BEFORE MCDONALD'S ... 58 4. "WHEN YOU'RE GREEN, YOU'RE GROWING": THE FIFTIES AND SIXTIES . 84 5. GIVING SOMETHING BACK 124 6. "MEET RONALD MCDONALD" . 158 7. "PRESS ON": THE SEVENTIES AND EIGHTIES 187 8. ADVERTISING BLITZ 216 (9. "MCKIDS" 248 APPENDIX 267 BIBLIOGRAPHY 271 VITA 295 iv LIST OF TABLES Figure Page 1. Number of McDonald's Units, 1954-1985 .. 46 2. McDonald's Systemwide Sales, 1954-1985 47 3. "Fun" in Children's Print Ads, 1948-1974 68 4. 1991 Spending, Children Aged 4-12 .... 265 v CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION His appearance on a Saturday afternoon drew 5,000 excitable visitors in a mere two hours. The audience was fidgety and noisy. The manager called them a mob. It took six police to keep the crowd under control. Teenagers at a rock concert? No, merely a visit by Ronald McDonald to one of the more than 11,000 restaurants operated or franchised out by the McDonald's Corporation. 1 Since 1948, when brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald unveiled their fast- food prototype in San Bernardino, California, McDonald's has been selling Americans on the cleanliness of its kitchens, the speed and efficiency of its service, and the wholesomeness of its image. 2 America's children heard none of these entreaties. A likable, carrot-haired clown invited them to visit "his house" and have fun. That they heard, and they came by the millions. Even McDonald's was surprised at Ronald's popularity. 111 McDonald's Newsletter" (May 1967), McDonald's Corporation Archives, Elk Grove Village, Illinois. This specific visit occurred on April 28, 1967, in Wilmington, Delaware. 2 In referring to the marketing, financial, or operational functions of the corporation as a whole, the third person singular 11 it 11 is used. The third person plural, "they, them, their," is used in cases where the reference is to individual units or licensees, rather than to the overall corporation. 2 originally created in 1963 as a regional, short-term advertising gimmick, the literally colorful clown has even overshadowed the equally colorful character of Ray Kroc. Kroc became the guiding hand of McDonald's after he signed on as the McDonald brothers' exclusive licensing agent in 1954. That Ronald is so popular, however, is strong testimony to a dramatic shift in child consumption patterns in the years following World War II. Children as young as three and four, mere preschoolers, began to participate in everyday purchasing decisions for the family. They whined-- or begged, bargained, or cajoled--to go to McDonald's and their parents, overworked and attracted by the new convenience and ease of eating out, acquiesced. Children constituted a significant consumer niche in three ways. First, they directly purchased items themselves; a function that increased as the children matured. Second, they influenced parental purchases, either through active requests or by their natural liking or disliking of certain products. Most importantly, however, children eventually matured into full-fledged consumers whose brand loyalties, advertisers hoped, continued into adulthood. 3 McDonald's marketing message reached children at all three levels. The message took such root that parents drove 3 charles Hull Wolfe, Modern Radio Advertising (New York: Funk & Wagnalls and Printers' Ink, 1949), 175. 3 out of their way to avoid passing the local McDonald's. 4 By the late 1960s, children became McDonald's prime marketing target as the corporation battled against competitors Burger King, Burger Chef, and newcomer Wendy's. To insure its success, McDonald's developed a three- fold marketing program based on an image of McDonald's as fun, an image of Ronald as friend, and an image of the corporation as wholesome and benevolent. While Ronald attracted the children, the perception of McDonald's as wholesome reassured parents. In an era characterized by fears of teenage crime, communists, and the atom bomb, drive-in restaurants bore the stigma of delinquency. In contrast, McDonald's prohibited teenage rowdiness and aggressively positioned itself as a safe and sanctioned outlet for young children. Like Walt Disney, whose animated fairy tales sanitized film consumption for youngsters (nickelodeons were notoriously uneven in their appropriateness for young audiences), Ray Kroc made McDonald's culturally ''safe" for children. Most importantly, McDonald's actively and consciously pushed down the age at which children assumed a significant consumer function. Before Ronald McDonald, a three-year-old was simply not considered a consumer. Children that young, 4Dictaphone memo from Dick McDonald to Ray Kroc (October 1957), reprinted in The Legacy Series, dictaphone tape transcript (Oak Brook, IL: McDonald's Corporation, 1988), 16- 17. 4 little more than babies, were thought incapable of the discrimination necessary to developing brand loyalty, a pre requisite to the consumer socialization process. 5 Food products, especially cereals and candies, and toy gadgets sold via radio and comic book advertising, targeted youngsters aged seven and older. Comic books, by definition, required a literate audience. And children's radio serials extended beyond the attention span of restless and visually-oriented toddlers and preschoolers. But McDonald's succeeded in encouraging a friendship between Ronald McDonald and youngsters using the medium most suited for very young children, television. Television perfectly met McDonald's marketing needs. As analyzed by Vance Packard, television became the most modern medium for the creation and fulfillment of the desire 5Exactly how children develop consumerization skills is still debated. The most convincing theory posits that a child's processing of consumer information is dependent upon his/her cognitive level, with a child reaching substantive consumer awareness skills by ages eight or nine. Scott Ward, Daniel B. Wackman, and Ellen Wartella, How Children Learn to Buy: The Development of Consumer Information-Processing Skills (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1977), 23, 178. Texas A & M marketing professor James McNeal, however, suggests that parents' modelling of their own purchasing habits, rather than the child's cognitive level per se, enables a child to evaluate and differentiate between products. Still, McNeal's thesis tacitly parallels Ward, et al.'s findings in concluding that a child does not possess legitimate independent purchasing power until age seven with the acquisition of more mature discrimination skills. James Utah McNeal, "The Development of Consumer Behavior Patterns in Childhood" (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas-Austin, 1964), 8, 61, 86. 5 for consumer goods. 6 Children were especially vulnerable to the carefree images of what was thought to constitute the "good life" for the post-World War II family. In 1969, for example, Ronald McDonald reached nearly 5.5 million children aged two through eleven through the family television set, via network advertising on Saturday mornings. 7 McDonald's not only saturated children's television air-time with Ronald commercials, but scored points with parents by sponsoring educational and family prime-time programming. To the chagrin of its competitors, McDonald's, through television, parlayed children's personal love and friendship for a fantasy character into a psychologically abstract, yet unshakable loyalty toward a corporation. Television alone, however, does not explain the phenomenal success of McDonald's.