If all you care about is helping families of sick children, could you drop the branding for a fast food chain?

GIVEN everything we’ve heard over recent weeks, the last thing any of us wants is to see yet more cost added to the National Children’s Hospital. So naturally there will be those who were upset to read this week that the fast food giant McDonald’s had apparently been refused naming rights for the facility – a decision which could add another €10million to the project’s overall bill.

Yesterday, however, a statement issued by Ronald McDonald House Charities (RMHC) said that the running costs of on-campus accommodation for families would be financed by them – and that the facility would still be called Ronald McDonald House.

Essential

Now there is absolutely no question that these accommodation blocks are a vital service.

Across the world you will find thousands upon thousands of testimonials from families for whom this accommodation was a godsend at the most traumatic time of their lives. Thanks to RMHC they were able to stay close to their sick child without having to worry about the costs or hassle of accommodation. As a parent, I know it would be impossible to put a price on the peace of mind that brings during such a period.

So let me be very clear: I am thrilled that families in need are being helped in this way. My only question is this: why does it have to be done in a way that makes it look to some like a method of advertising McDonald’s hamburgers to children?

RMHC, of course, would be the first to point out that it is not the same as McDonald’s. One is a charity; the other the world’s biggest purveyor of hamburgers and fries. The two are separate organisations with distinct aims. And yet there is, by any stretch of the imagination, a great deal of apparent overlap.

For example: McDonald’s is RMHC’s biggest corporate partner. Ronald McDonald himself carries the name of the McDonald’s business (he could have just been called Ronald the Clown and served the same charitable function). He is dressed in the colours of the McDonald’s business; he carries images of the McDonald’s golden arches on his clothing. He is a walking billboard for McDonald’s, the hamburger business.

Moreover, Ronald McDonald himself appears both at the Ronald McDonald House Charity and at many McDonald’s outlets, reinforcing the connection between the charity which houses the parents of very sick children and the chain of hamburger restaurants.

Of course RMHC take a dim view of the notion that a Ronald McDonald House could be seen as some kind of corporate sponsorship marketing ploy by McDonald’s.

But if the purpose of this charity is indeed pure altruism, and there is genuinely no attempt to use it to market McDonald’s, why does it carry the McDonald name and McDonald’s branding? Why is it not named after Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s (or a member of his family)? Why doesn’t it use neutral colours?

That way there could be no suggestion that this is an attempt to promote McDonald’s restaurants to parents caring for sick children when they are perhaps going through the most appalling, difficult and vulnerable period of their lives.

After all, Ronald McDonald is not a creation devised for charity, like the BBC’s Pudsey Bear. Indeed, Ronald McDonald is an advertising vehicle, created exclusively for the purpose of selling fast food to children. According to US art historian Elyse Luray: ‘Ronald McDonald is one of the two most successful advertising icons of all time.’

It all began in the early 1960s when a McDonald’s in Washington DC decided to boost business by sponsoring a children’s TV show called Bozo’s Circus and featuring Willard Scott as Bozo the Clown. The sponsorship was a roaring success: sales increased by 30%. A few years later, however, Bozo went off air. So McDonald’s decided to create their own clown to appeal directly to children.

As Scott himself later explained: ‘There was something about the combination of hamburgers and Bozo that was irresistible to kids. That’s why when Bozo went off the air a few years later, the local McDonald’s people asked me to come up with a new character to take Bozo’s place. So, I sat down and created Ronald McDonald.’

In case anyone was left in any doubt as to what Ronald was about, he wore a paper cup on his nose and a cardboard carry-out tray on his head bearing a milkshake, hamburger and fries.

Senior management at McDonald’s soon came to realise the marketing potential of Ronald McDonald, and elevated him to a national campaign. Specifically, according to renowned US food historian Andrew F. Smith, Ray Kroc himself had long recognized the marketing impact of ‘pester power’: therefore he very deliberately chose to promote McDonald’s to children.

Target

‘The initial target were families in the suburbs,’ Mr Smith has written. ‘Ray Kroc would fly over a community, look where the schools were, look where the new churches were being built – and that’s where he wanted McDonald’s franchises. Ray Kroc thought, “If I get all those children in here, they’ll eat a lot of hamburgers”... and indeed they did.’

The character of Ronald McDonald was the foundation-stone of that policy of targeting children through advertising. And it was only 20 years after Ronald McDonald was created to sell junk food to children that he was also chosen to be the figurehead for charitable efforts to provide accommodation for families of sick children.

Even then, the new centre could have been named after Kim Hill, the Philadelphia three-year-old whose leukaemia sparked the first fundraising drive to build hospital accommodation for parents. But when Kim’s family asked for sponsorship from the local McDonald’s, area manager Ed Rensi had a stipulation: if McDonald’s was going to give money to the project, the accommodation had to be named ‘the Ronald McDonald House’.

Obesity

In fairness, back then most people had little notion of the damage that obesity would do to a nation’s health: using this opportunity to sell hamburgers and fries to children was just business. Now, though, we know different. My children love McDonald’s, and like many people we do bring them there as an occasional treat: but obesity caused by poor diet is killing us – and our young people.

And it’s not just me that has concerns. To date, more than 3,000 doctors have signed an open letter to McDonalds asking them to stop marketing junk food to children – specifically citing Ronald McDonald as a vehicle by which they do so.

That said, I am desperate to ensure that families of sick children are helped in any way possible at the very worst time any parent can endure.

So here’s my suggestion to RMHC: keep doing your amazing work, but change the name of your facility. Paint it in a mix of lovely warm colours; strip out anything that could be seen as branding for McDonald’s; call it the Ray Kroc Memorial House; and if you want to use a clown mascot, use one who isn’t also used for advertising fast food.

Do that, and I’ll personally volunteer to spend the next year raising money for it in any way I can. And, what’s more, you’ll prove beyond any doubt that you care more about helping families in need than you do about selling hamburgers to children.