Mcdonald's Marketing Quotes

The husband and wife who open another delicatessen store or another Mexican restaurant in the American suburb surely take a risk. But are they entrepreneurs? All they do is what has been done many times before. They gamble on the increasing popularity of eating out in their area, but create neither a new satisfaction nor new consumer demand. Seen under this perspective they are surely not entrepreneurs even though theirs is a new venture. McDonald’s, however, was entrepreneurship. It did not invent anything, to be sure. Its final product was what any decent American restaurant had produced years ago. But by applying management concepts and management techniques (asking, What is “value” to the customer?), standardizing the “product,” designing process and tools, and by basing training on the analysis of the work to be done and then setting the standards it required, McDonald’s both drastically upgraded the yield from resources, and created a new market and a new customer. This is entrepreneurship.

Treat every connection, communication and collaboration as part of a continuous relationship.

The usefulness of the market, its effectiveness as a tool, cuts both ways. The real power of the American consumer has not yet been unleashed. The heads of Burger King, KFC, and McDonald’s should feel daunted; they’re outnumbered. There are three of them and almost three hundred million of you.

Fast Food Rule. Wanna know what the summer's blockbuster is going to be? See who McDonald's does the marketing tie-in with. Wanna know what blockbuster will do disappointing business? See who Burger King ties in with.

War thoughts again. I think back to the business cards from that health shop earlier on. I think about miniature wars that individuals fight all the time. They fight against cellulite, or negative emotions, or addictions, or stress. I think about how we can now hire all different sorts of mercenaries to help us fight against ourselves…Therapists, manicurists, hairdressers, personal trainers, life coaches. But what’s it all for? What do all these little wars achieve? Although it is a part of my life too, and I want to be thin and pretty and not laughed at in the street and not so stressed and mad that I start screaming on the tube, it suddenly seems a little bit ridiculous. All the time we do these things we are trying to enlist ourselves into a bigger war. We are trying to join up, constantly, with the enemy. - Hitler tried to impose his shiny, blonde, neat, sparkling world on us all and we resisted. So how is it that when McDonald’s and Disney and The Gap and L’Oreal and all the others try to do the same thing we all just say, ‘OK’? Hitler needed marketing, that’s all. His propaganda was, of course, brilliant for its time, everyone knows that. What a great idea, to make people feel that they belong to something, that their identity makes them special. If Hilter had bee able to enlist a twenty-first-century marketing department, would he have been able to sell Nazism to everyone? Why not? You can just see a beautiful, thin woman with her long blonde hair moving softly in the breezes, and the tagline ‘Because I’m worth it’.

I do rather like birds,’ Abdullah Unul says. ‘They’re busy, active little things. They make do. Have you ever thought, if Istanbul were to have an official bird, what would it be? I bet you’d think stork straight away. Maybe a sparrow. Me, the official bird of Istanbul would have to be the seagull. What do you see dancing around the Ramazan lights, what’ s following the ships up and down the Bosphorus, what’s facing into the wind on the rocks down by the water side. The common or garden gull, that’s what. For all those reasons, the seagull for me is Istanbul, but mostly because it practises kleptoparasitism. You may not have heard of that. I’ll explain. It’s a behaviour when one animal takes prey from another that has the job of catching or killing it. In seagulls it’s letting some other bird do all the hard work of catching the fish or a bit of bread and then taking it off them as they’re about to eat it. It’s the reason they’re the success they are. So, I’ll have that Koran. Both parts. To be honest, I’d prefer cash, but I imagine there’s a market for that gadgetry you have out there in Fenerbahçe.

This is always always always what she wished a bazaar to be. Demre, proudly claiming to be the birthplace of Santa Claus, was direly lacking in workshops of wonder. Small corner stores, an understocked chain supermarket on the permanent edge of bankruptcy and a huge cash and carry that serviced the farms and the hotels squeezed between the plastic sky and the shingle shore. Russians flew there by the charter load to sun themselves and get wrecked on drink. Drip irrigation equipment and imported vodka, a typical Demre combination. But Istanbul; Istanbul was the magic. Away from home, free from the humid claustrophobia of the greenhouses, hectare after hectare after hectare; a speck of dust in the biggest city in Europe, anonymous yet freed by that anonymity to be foolish, to be frivolous and fabulous, to live fantasies. The Grand Bazaar! This was a name of wonder. This was hectare upon hectare of Cathay silk and Tashkent carpets, bolts of damask and muslin, brass and silver and gold and rare spices that would send the air heady. It was merchants and traders and caravan masters; the cornucopia where the Silk Road finally set down its cargoes. The Grand Bazaar of Istanbul was shit and sharks. Overpriced stuff for tourists, shoddy and glittery. Buy buy buy. The Egyptian Market was no different. In that season she went to every old bazaar in Sultanahmet and Beyoğlu. The magic wasn’t there.

Oh, America the Beautiful, where are our standards? How did Europeans, ancestral cultures to most of us, whose average crowded country would fit inside one of our national parks, somehow hoard the market share of Beautiful? They’ll run over a McDonald’s with a bulldozer because it threatens the way of life of their fine cheeses. They have international trade hissy fits when we try to slip modified genes into their bread. They get their favorite ham from Parma, Italy, along with a favorite cheese, knowing these foods are linked in an ancient connection the farmers have crafted between the milk and the hogs. Oh. We were thinking Parmesan meant, not “coming from Parma,” but “coming from a green shaker can.” Did they kick us out for bad taste? No, it was mostly for vagrancy, poverty, or being too religious. We came here for the freedom to make a Leaves of Grass kind of culture and hear America singing to a good beat, pierce our navels as needed, and eat whatever we want without some drudge scolding: “You don’t know where that’s been!” And boy howdy, we do not.” (p.4)

For years many in the oil-rich states argued that their enormous wealth would bring modernizations. They pointed to the impressive appetites of Saudis and Kuwaitis for things Western, from McDonald's hamburgers to Rolex watches to Cadillac limousines. but importing Western good is easy; importing the inner stuffing of modern society - a free market, political parties, accountability, the rule of law - is difficult and even dangerous for the ruling elites

What have they fixed?” asked former McKinsey consultant Michael Lanning. “What have they changed? Did they take any voice in the way banking has evolved in the past thirty years? They did study after study at GM, and that place needed the most radical kind of change you can imagine. The place was dead, and it was just going to take a long time for the body to die unless they changed how they operated. McKinsey was in there with huge teams, charging huge fees, for several decades. And look where GM came out.”13 In the end, all the GM work did was provide a revenue stream to enrich a group of McKinsey partners, especially those working with the automaker. The last time McKinsey was influential at Apple Computer was when John Sculley was there, and that’s because he’d had a brand-marketing heritage from Pepsi. And Sculley was a disaster. Did McKinsey do anything to help the great companies of today become what they are? Amazon, Microsoft, Google? In short, no.

When I was terminated in 1992, I had no money, no savings, and no idea what I wanted to do for a living. But I had studied too many people who went from poverty to millionaire and billionaire, including Oprah, Sylvester Stallone, JC Penney, Colonel (Harland) Sanders, Henry Ford, and Ray Kroc, the man who transformed McDonald’s into an international household word. Now that I had an exciting goal to become a marketing consultant for people, I knew that my success depended less on what resources I had than how resourceful I could be.

Around this time, McDonald’s had conceived of a new product, the Chicken McNugget, but they were reluctant to bring it to market because of their concern that chicken prices might rise and squeeze their profit margins. Chicken producers like Lane wouldn’t agree to sell to them at a fixed price because they were worried that their costs would go up and they would be squeezed. As I thought about the problem, it occurred to me that in economic terms a chicken can be seen as a simple machine consisting of a chick plus its feed. The most volatile cost that the chicken producer needed to worry about was feed prices. I showed Lane how to use a mix of corn and soymeal futures to lock in costs so they could quote a fixed price to McDonald’s. Having greatly reduced its price risk, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.

[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated. Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired. Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one. These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed. Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society. In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional. Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.

Hello? Hello? Pantycar Twenty-seven? Report from Data Retrieval: a disturbance in Simbimatu Covered Market: Privacy infringement. PainCrime probability currently sixteen percent

One day I found myself at a local flea market, talking to a guy who was selling refurbished printers for $50. I had seen identical printers on eBay for $300, so I bought his entire inventory, put them on eBay for an unbeatable $200, and made $150 on each one. Every week I would go back to the flea market and take the printers off the guy’s hands, and every week I was making money. Not much, mind you, but more than I would have been making at McDonald’s. Still,

If you are looking for a good long-term investment, buy a company that has the highest sales in its industry. So for home improvement, you want to own Home Depot; for fast food, McDonald's; for toothpaste, Colgate Palmolive; for payments, Visa; for smart phones, Apple; and for social media, Facebook.

In December 1972, Polaroid was selling for 96 times its 1972 earnings, McDonald’s was selling for 80 times, and IFF was selling for 73 times; the Standard & Poor’s Index of 500 stocks was selling at an average of 19 times. The dividend yields on the Nifty-Fifty averaged less than half the average yield on the 500 stocks in the S&P Index. The proof of this particular pudding was surely in the eating, and a bitter mouthful it was. The dazzling prospect of earnings rising up to the sky turned out to be worth a lot less than an infinite amount. By 1976, the price of IFF had fallen 40% but the price of U.S. Steel had more than doubled. Figuring dividends plus price change, the S&P 500 had surpassed its previous peak by the end of 1976, but the Nifty-Fifty did not surpass their 1972 bull-market peak until July 1980. Even worse, an equally weighted portfolio of the Nifty-Fifty lagged the performance of the S&P 500 from 1976 to 1990.

commercial paper is short-term money, loaned out for thirty to forty days or less. This market is used by the biggest and best blue-chip companies. Commercial paper is the quickest, cheapest, and easiest way for them to raise a fast loan that is not regulated by the SEC. As

Cameco

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value at risk, a technique used to estimate the probability of portfolio losses based on the statistical analysis of historical price trends and volatilities. It measures the worst expected loss under normal market conditions over a specific time interval at a given confidence level. Which means it measures both fear and optimism.

Never blow your powder too early,” he said. “Start nice and slow, nice and low. Get the feel of the market, get centered, make sure you got a ton of ammunition, and don’t quit too early. Never do that. When they’re running against you, keep going, because they’re gonna turn. And the split second they make that turn, hit it, buddy, hit it real hard. Because that’s when you’re gonna fucking win.

He fielded all questions that students put to him, exhibiting in his lectures and discussions the qualities which have made him a present-day commercial legend: his tough-minded business philosophy; his virtually compulsive adherence to the fundamental operating strategies designed to attract the family market; his emphasis on such basic qualities as courtesy, cleanliness, and service; and his abiding loyalty to his associates, particularly to those who have served McDonald’s since its fledgling years.

One day I said, “Mac, the only way in this world that you can increase your soda fountain volume is to sell to people who don’t take up a stool. Look, I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I will give you 200 or 300 containers with covers, however many you need to try this for a month in your store down the street. Now most of your takeout customers will be Walgreen employees from headquarters here, and you can conduct your own marketing survey on them and see how they like it. You get the cups free, so it’s not going to cost you anything to try it.” Finally he agreed. I brought him the cups, and we set the thing up at one end of the soda fountain. It was a big success from the first day. It wasn’t long before McNamarra was more excited about the idea of takeouts than I was.

In 1988 two consultants, Jim Rosenthal and Juan Ocampo, wrote Securitization of Credit, a road map that helped Citibank and Chase Manhattan survive the South American debt crisis. The book, the first on a subject that soon washed over the financial world like a tsunami, showed the banks, unable to earn their way out of their bad debt situation, that by securitizing the loans on their books—packaging them up and selling them into the secondary debt markets—they could effectively walk away from the loans, albeit while still taking a hit to their balance sheets.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1971, Howard Schultz, the owner of a local coffee roasting and distribution company, noted the increasing affluence of the American public and their desire to receive gracious treatment in their daily activities. Schultz recognized that there was a market for small businesses featuring top quality coffee and an opportunity to relax in an attractive environment. To take advantage of these emerging Minitrends, Mr. Schultz initiated the very successful Starbucks chain which offers top quality coffee drinks in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere Starbucks has a long record of appreciating Minitrends, but failed to recognize the trend that more economically-stressed customers were beginning to opt for similar, lower-cost drinks offered by fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s. While still popular, in summer 2008, the Starbucks company announced the termination of 1,000 employees, and in November 2008, the company reported a 98 percent decline in profit for the third quarter of the year. To be more economically competitive, Starbucks has recently introduced a line of instant coffee.

EARNINGS McDonald's Plans Marketing Push as Profit Slides By Julie Jargon | 436 words Associated Press The burger giant has been struggling to maintain relevance among younger consumers and fill orders quickly in kitchens that have grown overwhelmed with menu items. McDonald's Corp. plans a marketing push to emphasize its fresh-cooked breakfasts as it battles growing competition for the morning meal. Competition at breakfast has heated up recently as Yum Brands Inc.'s Taco Bell entered the business with its new Waffle Taco last month and other rivals have added or discounted breakfast items. McDonald's Chief Executive Don Thompson said it hasn't yet noticed an impact from Taco Bell's breakfast debut, but that the overall increased competition "forces us to focus even more on being aggressive in breakfast." Mr. Thompson's comments came after McDonald's on Tuesday reported that its profit for the first three months of 2014 dropped 5.2% from a year earlier, weaker than analysts' expectations. Comparable sales at U.S. restaurants open more than a year declined 1.7% for the quarter and 0.6% for March, the fifth straight month of declines in the company's biggest market. Global same-store sales rose 0.5% for both the quarter and month. Mr. Thompson acknowledged again that the company has lost relevance with some customers and needs to strengthen its menu offerings. He emphasized Tuesday that McDonald's is focused on stabilizing key markets, including the U.S., Germany, Australia and Japan. The CEO said McDonald's has dominated the fast-food breakfast business for 35 years, and "we don't plan on giving that up." The company plans in upcoming ads to inform customers that it cooks its breakfast, unlike some rivals. "We crack fresh eggs, grill sausage and bacon," Mr. Thompson said. "This is not a microwave deal." Beyond breakfast, McDonald's also plans to boost marketing of core menu items such as Big Macs and french fries, since those core products make up 40% of total sales. To serve customers more quickly, the chain is working to optimize staffing, and is adding new prep tables that let workers more efficiently add new toppings when guests want to customize orders. McDonald's also said it aims to sell more company-owned restaurants outside the U.S. to franchisees. Currently, 81% of its restaurants around the world are franchised. Collecting royalties from franchisees provides a stable source of income for a restaurant company and removes the cost of operating them. McDonald's reported a first-quarter profit of $1.2 billion, or $1.21 a share, down from $1.27 billion, or $1.26 a share, a year earlier. The company partly attributed the decline to the effect of income-tax benefits in the prior year. Total revenue for the quarter edged up 1.4% to $6.7 billion, though costs rose faster, at 2.3%. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters forecast earnings of $1.24 a share on revenue of $6.72 billion.

Economic data will be the biggest driver of market moves over the next month, and the key one is the jobs report," said Jim McDonald,

Despite the challenges, Coca-Cola succeeded in the end. China has become Coca-Cola's third largest market in the world, after the United States and Mexico. It has invested over $5 billion in China. More important, Coca-Cola has blazed a trail for other foreign companies—Pepsi, KFC, McDonald's, Coors, Budweiser, IBM, Apple, Dell, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, Sheraton,

As Tyson went on its buying spree, the company shaped the modern chicken industry into what it is today: a highly concentrated business controlled by four companies. By the mid-1990s, Tyson controlled about 25 percent of the U.S. chicken market and competed against just a handful of giant companies that controlled the rest. The top four chicken producers controlled over half the U.S. poultry business, supplying massive volumes of meat to the biggest national grocery chains and restaurants, like Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The remainder of the market was controlled by smaller versions of Tyson, vertically integrated companies that were still enormous by historical standards. By 1992, 88 percent of all chicken in the United States was produced in the kind of large, heavily mechanized slaughterhouse that Don Tyson built in Springdale. In 1967, by contrast, just 29 percent of chickens came from big processing plants.

Over the last ten years, more than a billion iPhones have been made in Chinese manufacturing plants powered by coal. Exporting our green guilt to China while simultaneously harming job prospects in the Rust Belt, creating an uneven playing field for American companies, makes little sense. It’s an unsustainable path with significant political ramifications. Although carbon reduction goals are commendable, meeting them will be impossible without China playing a more active and constructive role.

Coke is a special kind of dividend stock. It is a Dividend Aristocrat, one of an elite group of companies that have raised their dividends every year for the past 25 years. Other Dividend Aristocrats include the Colgate-Palmolive Company, Johnson & Johnson, and McDonald's. There's an easy way to own a piece of every Dividend Aristocrat: just buy some shares of NOBL. It is the ProShares S&P 500 Dividend Aristocrats ETF. It trades just like a stock, and you can purchase it using any brokerage account.

NXE

What to do next What do you do when you’ve found a baby business you think may be a star? ★ Talk to them. Find a reason to talk to everyone in and around the company, to express your interest and learn more. ★ Do them a favour. If you can, buy something from them. Point them towards other customers. Advise them on how to expand. ★ Discreetly verify that it is a star. Ask questions suggested in the section above, ‘What are you looking for?’ ★ Work out a job you could do for them. Don’t wait for them to post a vacancy. Tell them what you can do, why they should hire you. Stress the benefits you bring. ★ Make your mark. When you join the firm, work out one thing you can do within your first month that will visibly benefit your colleagues and the venture. ★ Check again from the inside that it really is a star. If the business isn’t really growing very fast, or doesn’t fit the bill in any other way, don’t hang around. If it really is a star, work out how far the star could rise. ★ Raise ambition within the firm. Sometimes the founders of a star don’t see its potential. Open their eyes.Tell them how valuable the firm could become, if expanded to its maximum potential. Consider whether the idea can be exported to other countries, and/or franchised. Would other channels of distribution (such as the phone with Betfair) enlarge the market? ★ Consider making an offer for the firm. If the founders really don’t ‘get it’, put together a group to buy the firm. Remember the astronomical return Ray Kroc achieved from buying McDonald’s from the founders, when it was already highly successful.

The color red is known to have expansive energy. Consider the famous Target logo with its red target symbol, as well as McDonald’s for its widespread usage of red in its signage, restaurants, packaging, and clownish icon. In fact, many top brands globally use only the color red in its name and logo, including Coca-Cola, Oracle, Honda, H&M, and Budweiser.

For Microsoft’s productivity applications, the break came when the world transitioned from text-based DOS applications to graphical user interfaces, in the mid-1980s. But as the industry shifted from text to graphical interfaces, it created an opening, as every application needed to be rewritten to support the new paradigm of dropdown menus, icons, toolbars, and the mouse. While Microsoft redesigned and rethought their applications, their competitors were too stuck in the old world, and so Word and Excel leapfrogged their competitors. Then in an ensuing stroke of product marketing genius, it was combined into the Microsoft Office suite, which promptly became a colossus. Much effort was put toward making each application within the suite work with each other. For example, an Excel chart would be embedded within a Microsoft Word document—this was called Object Linking and Embedding (OLE)—which made the combination of the products more powerful. In other words, the product really matters, and bundling can provide a huge distribution advantage, but it can only go so far. It’s an echo of what we now see in the internet age, where Twitter might drive users to its now-defunct livestreaming platform Periscope, or Google might push everyone to use Google Meet. It can work, but only when the product is great. This is part of why the concept of bundling as been around forever—the McDonald’s Happy Meal was launched in the 1970s, and cable companies have been bundling TV channels since their start. But at the heart of these bundling stories are important, iconic products that reinvent the market.

The type of person who frequents McDonald’s and the type who shops at the farmers’ market exhibit different eating behaviors across the board.

When a product debuts, it can face opposition and may require significant promotion and explanation. Heinz EZ Squirt ketchup, Crystal Pepsi, and McDonalds’ Arch Deluxe were expected to shake up their categories. The products had huge budgets to introduce and explain different colored ketchups, clear and caffeine free cola, and a gastronomic hamburger for adults. All failed. The Arch Deluxe was a quarter pound of beef on a split-top potato flour sesame seed bun, topped with a circular piece of peppered bacon, leaf lettuce, tomato, American cheese, onions, ketchup, and Dijonnaise. In 1996, McDonald's spent over US$300 million on research, production, and marketing. Despite having the largest promotional budget to that point in fast food history, the “burger with the grownup taste”, neither compelled nor impressed.

The market-savvy McDonald’s Corporation, capitalizing on the popularity of the movie Fatal Attraction, introduces a new menu item, Boiled McRabbits.

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist — McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15.

No Haters” was a breakthrough for the BuzzFeed brand, but it was no nobler a posture than McDonald’s marketers naming the Happy Meal.

Elizabeth Green’s New York Times article “Why Do Americans Stink at Math?” is funny and not so funny. In it, she recounts how, in the 1980s, A. Alfred Taubman, owner of the A&W chain, attempted to win over customers from McDonald’s. To lure customers from McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger, he advertised the A&W better-tasting burger that was, in contrast to the McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, a full one-third pounder. One-third of a pound versus one-quarter of a pound and at the same price! Great idea, right? Well, not if you don’t know one-third is more than one-fourth! Taubman called in his cutting-edge marketing firm, Yankelovich, Skelly & White, to find out why the A&W campaign was failing. A study had shown that, without question, respondents preferred the taste of A&W’s burger over McDonald’s. Except for one small glitch. “Why,” respondents asked, “should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat at A&W as we do for a fourth of a pound at McDonald’s?” Since three is less than four, reasoned more than half of those questioned, A&W was really ripping them off! And the problem is not confined to hamburger connoisseurs. Medical professionals, it turns out, aren’t immune to fallacious math either. Doctors and nurses have also been known to err when calculating dosages for medications. The problem is prevalent enough, in fact, to support services that help simplify math for doctors and nurses, including Broselow.com, whose tagline is “Taking the math out of medicine.

you are looking for a good long-term investment, buy a company that has the highest sales in its industry. So for home improvement, you want to own Home Depot; for fast food, McDonald's; for toothpaste, Colgate Palmolive; for payments, Visa; for smart phones, Apple; and for social media, Facebook. Once a business sells more than any other company in its industry, it becomes

The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist -- McDonald's cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the builder of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley's technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.

YouGov BrandIndex reveals an interesting fact. McDonald's, for example, has 33 percent lovers and 29 percent haters, a near balanced polarization. Starbucks has a similar

small cap" and "big cap" are relative terms. The market today is much larger and is dominated by a list of big players that dwarf smaller companies in their sheer size and share of available investment capital. The fact that these giants are so large does not necessarily mean that small-cap companies are undercapitalized. Many of these companies have no desire to compete with the likes of Wal-Mart and McDonalds, preferring to excel in a niche market that's too small for the big players to bother with.