It started so well. Last month, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski posted a video of his first chance to try the company’s new flagship burger, the Big Arch, which debuts across the U.S. on March 3.
It lined up as the perfect marketing moment. The boss, front and center, celebrating his new creation. And he was effusive as he opened the box. It was “so good.” It was “unique.” “So much going on”.
Kempczinski is a P&G grad. This was the textbook windup from the Big Boss.
Then he took the bite.
The bite itself—like a man defusing something—was not a bite at all. It was a clip of the outer edge, while he disconcertingly talked about it as the “product.” Then “this thing.”
What happened next, or rather what didn’t, sealed the video’s fate. It ends with 2.3% of the burger consumed and Kempczinski wafting the rest of his Big Arch around like a flag of surrender. He promises to enjoy it off-camera.
The video has been picked apart across social, and musician Garron Noone delivered the line that will follow Kempczinski to his grave: “This man does not eat McDonald’s.”
Kempczinski is, by all accounts, an excellent CEO.
Harvard MBA, Duke undergrad, 25 years in blue-chip consumer companies. He claims to eat at McDonald’s several times a week.
McDonald’s has performed strongly on his watch. He knows the P&L, the franchisee economics, the supply chain, the digital strategy.
What he also knows, and what the video made obvious to several million people simultaneously, is that the Big Arch contains enough calories to power a small Zamboni.
This is the central tension of the modern CEO. The higher you rise, the further you get from the thing you sell. You earn $20 million a year, for selling a combo meal that costs nine bucks.
The contradiction is as gigantic as it is intractable. You become a manager of managers, a master of the universe, a special visitor to conquered foreign lands. You know your product intimately as a concept—its market share, brand equity, net promoter score—but you stop knowing it as a thing you shove in your mouth on Tuesday when you’re shitfaced.
