I’m Lovin' It: Globalization Uncovered Through McDonald’s
Gavin Reddy
03/09/2026
Globalization refers to the process by which ideas, cultures, and people are exchanged between countries. Scholars argue about whether globalization occurs through a standardized, localized, or mixed approach called glocalization. To investigate, McDonald’s is a case study, using food as a comparison tool to explore these theories.
McDonald’s first international location was Japan, despite the stark contrast between American values of indulgence and Japanese values of craftsmanship. The differences between each region set the stage for McDonald’s globalization, intriguing many scholars. Studies explore the philosophical qualities of globalization or the business strategies of McDonald’s but overlook how these changes occur.
This study uses video advertisements with multimodal content analysis to address the current gap. The semiotic elements of advertising display cultural relationships of local-foreign interactions. This paper asks the question, “How does McDonald’s advertising in the United States and Japan reveal the process by which globalization affects culture?”
The identified themes of standardization, hybridity, and quality suggest that McDonald’s glocalization techniques are not a compromise between standardization and localization. Glocalization produces new cultures by unpredictably combining components. Therefore, globalization is found to take select pieces of different scholars’ theories. These findings underscore the value of commercial media and food as primary sources for understanding how globalization constructs cultural meaning.