Business Project

The McDonald’s Corporation bases their organizational structure around various functional areas such as, marketing, human resources, accounting, finance and operations. Each department consists of groups of people who have comparable skills and perform similar tasks. This allows for decisions and projects to be delegated to qualified departments to be accomplished. I will focus on the aforementioned areas of organizational structure and how McDonald’s utilizes these departments. Firstly, I will explore McDonald’s marketing department, whose sole responsibility is to create, communicate, deliver and exchange offerings that have value to customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Considering McDonald’s target market is everyone, their marketing department is active and dynamic in their advertising strategies. McDonald’s spends more money on advertising than any other fast-food restaurant and ranks fourth on the list of overall advertisers in the country. McDonald’s implements extensive advertising campaigns including, but not limited to, radio, television, newspaper, celebrity spokespeople, cross promotions, billboards, and slogans. Particularly, the use of slogans has proved beneficial to sales, considering over twenty different slogans have been used in the U.S. alone. The most influential and recognizable slogan, ‘i’m lovin’ it’, which started in 2003, is still one of the branding campaign used by the McDonald’s Corporation today. Another effective form of advertising carried out by McDonald’s marketing department is the use of celebrity spokespeople, carefully chosen based off current media trends to endorse their product. For example, McDonald’s used LeBron James and Dwight Howard in a celebrity driven marketing campaign during the 2010 Super Bowl, where they competed in a slam dunk contest; the winners prize being McDonald’s signature product, the Big Mac. These are just two of the many notable celebrities McDonald's has enlisted over the years. Other celebrities such as, Michael Jordan, Justin Timberlake and Venus William have also been endorsed by McDonald’s to support various campaigns. While all these forms of marketing are proven to be effective, televisions ads remain McDonald’s primary form of advertisement. The next functional area is human resources, which is responsible for all actions McDonald’s takes to attract, develop, and retain quality employees. Rich Floersch, McDonald’s Executive Vice President and Chief Human Resources Officer, is responsible for overseeing McDonald’s human resources function for its 400,000 company employees in more than 100 countries. ("Richard Floersch :: AboutMcDonalds.com," 2010) Even though Floersch is responsible for McDonald’s human resource department as a whole, the corporation operates on a divisional structure where each division is separated geographically, allowing department heads in each region to support the company’s strategic objectives. McDonald’s uses chain-of-command structure to grant authority to members of the human resource departments in each location. For example, the two sides of Mcdonald’s human resource organizational structure consist of senior management, like Floersch, and the restaurant side, which includes general managers, assistant managers and team leaders. At the restaurant level, managers are expected to recruit, train and promote qualified employees along with providing a safe, healthy working environment. In addition to eliminating any chance of unlawful discrimination or harassment. These standards of conduct for McDonald’s are set by senior management, but implemented by independent locations through various types of management positions. The organizational structure of the McDonald’s Corporation relies heavily on its accounting department. This department is responsible for measuring, summarizing, and communicating financial and managerial information. Through