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The damage to the company’s reputation was even more important, although more difficult to quantify. However, Exxon fell from being the largest oil company in the world to the third largest. The Exxon Valdez became synonymous with corporate arrogance, and the story remained prominent in the media for over a year. According to a 1990 US news poll, 65 per cent of respondents said that ‘the Valdez oil spill was the key element in raising public consciousness about environmental issues.’

Lessons from Exxon

Live up to your promises. The company failed to show that it had effective systems in place to deal with the crisis – and in particular its stated ability to move quickly once the problem had occurred was not in evidence.

Act like a good corporate citizen. Exxon acted indifferently to the environmental destruction, and therefore did little to help the company’s case.

39 McDonald’s – the McLibel trial

As brands go, McDonald’s is a biggie. Along with Coca-Cola and Marlboro, it is one of the few brands which is recognized in almost every country. As McDonald’s itself proclaims, its chain of fast-food restaurants represents the ‘most successful food service organization in the world.’ There are now over 25,000 McDonald’s restaurants across the globe, catering for around 40 million people every single day. Even during the worst economic climate since 1929, McDonald’s reported global sales in July 2010 were up 5 per cent and operating profit was up 10 per cent. At that time McDonald’s was the sixth most valuable brand in the world, worth in excess of $66 billion and sandwiched in the rankings between Coca-Cola and Marlboro.

The brand reached this position of dominance by arriving at a simple formula, and pushing it hard. As Des Dearlove and Stuart Crainer explain in The Ultimate Book of Business Brands, simplicity is the secret behind the brand’s success:

Henry Ford mastered mass product production; McDonald’s has mastered mass service production. It has done so through strict adherence to simple beliefs. Quality, cleanliness and uniformity are the basis of the McDonald’s brand. [...] A McDonald’s restaurant in Nairobi, Kenya looks much the same as one in Warsaw, Poland or Battle Creek, Michigan. [...] In effect, the very uniformity of the brand is the crucial differentiating factor.

However, by the 1990s McDonald’s smooth ride became rather more turbulent. Although it still held onto the crown as king of fast food, the company experienced a number of setbacks. There were new product failures, such as the Arch Deluxe (discussed in Chapter 2), and various run-ins with environmentalists, anti-capitalists and other activists. One of the most notorious, and certainly one of the most protracted of these confrontations was the libel case involving Helen Steel and Dave Morris.

Although the trial didn’t reach court until 1994, the case revolved around a pamphlet first published in 1986 by London Greenpeace, a splinter group of Greenpeace International. The pamphlet focused on a variety of social and environmental issues such as animal cruelty, exploitative marketing (in McDonald’s advertising campaigns aimed at children), rain forest depletion and the perceived negative health value of McDonald’s products.

However, very few people would now know about the contents of that pamphlet if McDonald’s hadn’t taken the matter to court. Even Naomi Klein, the anti-branding commentator and author of No Logo, claims that the pamphlet distributed by Helen Steel and Dave Morris lacked ‘hard evidence’ and was ‘dated’ in its concerns:

London Greenpeace’s campaign against the company clearly came from the standpoint of meat-is-murder vegetarianism: a valid perspective, but one for which there is a limited political constituency. What made McLibel take off as a campaign on a par with the ones targeting Nike and Shell was not what the fast-food chain did to cows, forests or even its own workers. The McLibel movement