Fast Food on the Frontline

Tony Karon

It takes a brave entrepreneur to run a KFC or McDonald's franchise anywhere from Rabat to Rawalpindi, Sanaa to Sulawesi. While the appetite for their cheap and tasty fare offers an ever-expanding market, the business climate in the Muslim world has a habit of turning nasty for outlets of America's favourite fast-food chains, as a result of unpredictable developments thousands of miles away.

Mobs enraged by a grotesque low-budget Californian video parody of the life of the Prophet Muhammad attacked outlets of those and allied chains in the Lebanese port city of Tripoli; in Yogyakarta, Sulawesi and other Indonesian locales; and in Pakistan's major cities, prompting KFC to temporarily close all of its 60-plus outlets in Pakistan. The decision was hardly surprising; it has become an almost routine ritual for KFC's venerable Colonel Sanders icon to take the lumps intended for Uncle Sam -- and not only in the Muslim world.

In 1999, after the US mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war, hundreds of Chinese protesters descended on KFC outlets and beheaded statues of the Colonel. Countless examples from Italy to Ecuador, Indonesia to Mexico, attest to the role played by McDonald's and KFC as fetish object on which anti-American outrage is vented. US embassies and consulates, after all, are as impregnable as firebases, but globalization has brought the shiny storefront cathedrals of American culinary consumerism on to the streets of every city; most of McDonald's and KFC's revenues now come from abroad.

Thomas Friedman, The New York Times globalization cheerleader, was indulging in wishful thinking when he wrote, in 1999, that: 'No two countries that both had McDonald's had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald's.' That same year, McDonald's in Belgrade was adding Serbian nationalist paraphernalia to its advertising to align itself with a customer base being bombed by the Mickey D's-fed NATO alliance; and India and Pakistan were slugging it out in Kashmir.

Success, in fact, depends on maintaining the appeal of American brands despite geopolitical tensions, which requires making them part of the local cultural fabric, less vulnerable to being portrayed as a representative of a hostile power. 'We don't act local,' Walt Riker, a McDonald's spokesman, explained, 'We are local.'

The American chains try to indigenize themselves by adapting menus and embracing local cultural norms, sometimes with tragicomic effects -- a McDonald's outlet in Karachi recently forbade a Pakistani married couple to sit together lest their proximity offend cultural sensibilities.

The chain serves lamb burgers in India to avoid offending Hindu prohibitions on eating beef, and is currently opening vegetarian outlets near Sikh holy sites. KFC's Chinese customers can order congee or Sichuan spicy tofu rice along with the Colonel's more familiar fried chicken, while in Urumqi, capital of the predominantly Muslim Xinjiang autonomous region, the local KFC offers special deals for families celebrating their sons' ritual circumcision.

Efforts to hedge against market backlash to geopolitical events can produce ironic tensions: McDonald's in Saudi Arabia, at the height of the second Palestinian intifada, sought to circumvent calls for a boycott of American products through a promotion that gave a portion of its takings to the 'al-Quds Intifada Fund' supporting Palestinian hospitals. In Egypt, the McFalafel was promoted with a jingle sung by a local pop star best known for his hit tune I Hate Israel. Needless to say, these were not the sort of marketing efforts encouraged by brand headquarters in the overwhelmingly pro-Israel United States.

The 'exotic' American identity may have once been a selling point for KFC and McDonald's in emerging markets, but that has changed with the global homogenization of urban consumer cultures.

New generations of Asians, Eastern Europeans and Arabs have grown up under the Golden Arches or the Colonel's indulgent smile without ever having set foot in America. A Lahore teenager today might well wonder why people express their anger at a movie made in California by trashing the local restaurant at which he celebrated his fourth birthday.

Curiously enough, only two years after the 1999 'beheadings' of the Colonel, Chinese consumers stayed loyal to KFC and McDonald's amid the outrage caused by the downing of a Chinese warplane by a US surveillance aircraft near Hainan. 'McDonald's means America, but it also means China, too,' one Beijing customer told a Washington Post reporter. 'Of course we are angry at the US, but that doesn't stop my boy liking McDonald's.'

Cultivating that sentiment in the target market may be the holy grail for building brand loyalty across geopolitically troubled boundaries.

Tony Karon is a senior editor at Time magazine.

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