Global warming stopped!
Fast-food giant ends spicy international campaign

I know only a few people who never ever go to McDonald’s, and believe me, they are much easier to categorize than those who do. I’d be very surprised to hear that Mickey D’s Marketeers are unaware of their cosmopolitan clientele…

The era of global warming is over, for McDonald’s at least. After a mere six months of trying to raise the heat in their kitchens, they’ve put the Hot ‘n’ Spicy McChicken Sandwich on ice.

The initial speculations about this left me a bit puzzled. Two or three of the food punditocracy opined that Mickey D’s customer base prefers less spicy food. One consultant suggested that Wendy’s and Popeye’s were more likely choices for customers in search of spice. Both of them have been pushing the spice for a while (Wendy’s is even gloating a bit by announcing a new spicier spicy chicken), and the awareness in the customer base is top-of-mind.

I have problems with this for a number of reasons. Let’s start with grammar. How many definite articles do we have in English, for crying out loud? Is it too much to ask of corporatese to say – just once – top-of-THE-mind?

The second is the idea of the tepid preferences of McDonald’s customer base. When I last checked, this group included about 90 percent of the explored universe, and any generalization about them is likely to be both statistically inaccurate and financially dangerous. McDonald’s knows this; they have learned the hard way that you do not serve fries cooked in beef tallow in India, even though they were wildly popular in the U.S. and earned praise from Julia Child. Every market is regional, after all, and every demographic has its own quirks.

I know only a few people who never ever go to McDonald’s, and believe me, they are much easier to categorize than those who do. I’d be very surprised to hear that Mickey D’s Marketeers are unaware of their cosmopolitan clientele; it ain’t like they’re a bunch of dummies. When I go there—as I did today, to see how quickly the guillotine would fall on that sandwich—I see grannies, toddlers, working stiffs and teenagers. You can’t tell me that none of them eat spicy food, so don’t try. My teenagers will pull out two Serrano peppers and give you that grin that says they’re calling your busted flush.

When I did product development for Pillsbury of sainted memory, they had a simple and systematic approach to evaluating their products: They would taste them side-by-side against the competition. This “product cutting” allows the development team to see all the available variations of a particular category at once (shopping for it is a nightmare), so they can compare taste, appearance, packaging, price, line extensions, and so on. It also lets you know where your own product’s weaknesses are: Occasionally one will be forced to conclude that those morons in marketing were given a crappy product to work with, so it wasn’t all their fault. This time.

If you have an item in your restaurant that isn’t doing particularly well, don’t begin by printing coupons or putting it in a shaded box in the center of the menu. The very first thing to do is make sure that it’s worth saving. Buy similar items from other places and do a comparative test. If you did it with our chicken sandwich it would look like this:

Spicy Chicken Sandwiches

Now this was concocted from just two samples, one from each place, and you have to be careful: There are differences in what I got and what, according to the official word on the Websites, I was supposed to get. Most notable was the bun—I was tremendously impressed with the appearance and quality, until I looked it up on the Website and found that they should have made it on the same squishy Kaiser that McD’s uses. A true analysis would get several of each from several stores; I just wanted to show the method.

The point, though: You don’t have to come up with demographic explanations of the failure of the McDonald’s version. It just wasn’t very good.