McNaming

Building a brand is big business, and in this business there are few brands stronger than McDonald’s. In fact, since 2001 McDonald’s has been consistently ranked as one of the top 10 world-wide brands by BusinessWeek. The only food-like company to beat them is the undisputed king of brands, Coca-Cola.

McDonald's so ingrained in our culture that the brand and its products have grown beyond mere food. From product placements in The Fifth Element and The Sims to their own Douglas Copland coined term (McJob), the McDonald’s brand has reached a level of almost unreal ubiquity. Even The Economist chose the Big Mac as its reference point for cost of living between different countries.

Say what you will about the nutritional value or taste of their food, from a branding perspective, this is a company that is doing something right.

So why can’t they name their breakfast menu correctly?

Everyone knows that the flagship, the crown jewel, the piece de resistance of the McDonald’s breakfast menu is the Egg McMuffin. Wendy’s may have a lock on the square burger, but McDonad’s owns the squat cylindrical egg. When it came time to merge the magnum opus of breakfast sandwiches with the relative also ran Sausage McMuffin, this titan of branding had two choices for name:

- Egg McMuffin with Sausage
- Sausage McMuffin with Egg

Any first year MBA could get this right, but for some strange reason McDonald's dropped the ball, scraped it up, and served it to customers.

Comments

[John Stafford]

So which one did they pick? ;-)