Love on a Bun: How McDonald's Won the Burger Wars.

This article examines the television commercials broadcast of McDonald's Corp. in the 1980s to show how they connected to the cultural construct family. Specifically, it demonstrates how familial images were employed as a means of persuasion that ultimately portrayed McDonald's as a potential source of love and human happiness, as a place for being a family. What is suggested in the success of McDonald's advertising efforts is that the U.S. family recognizes the various human groups depicted in the commercials as reflections of itself. That is to say not only the most fundamental cultural institution, the family, is much changed but that McDonald's public messages have helped make its variations acceptable and legitimate, thus playing an influential role in its reconstitution. Moreover, the analysis suggests that familial images, when they are adapted to contemporary meanings, continue to carry considerable persuasive force in modern society. McDonald's approach is nothing less than a strategy of control that works in insidious ways, as through the whines of a child who persuades its parent to stop at McDonald's when other restaurants are closer or offer tastier and more healthful fare.