(RepublicanJournal.org) – McDonald’s has one of the catchiest slogans in the fast-food industry. Customers and staff have been saying “I’m Lovin’ It” for more than 20 years, since it was first introduced in 2003. Sadly, the man behind the phrase has passed away.
On June 24, Larry Light, an executive for the fast-food chain, died in Boca Raton, Florida. According to The New York Times, his daughter, Laura Light, confirmed his death and said it was due to a combination of aspiration pneumonia and Parkinson’s disease. He was 83.
Born in 1941 to a homemaker and a builder/confectionary manufacturer, Marvin Lawrence Light originally went to school for psychology, but found himself hired by an advertising agency and would spend the rest of his life in marketing. He was a pioneer in the way that he used market research to propel campaigns, drawing on user data to identify problems and how companies could resolve them.
Light is largely credited with turning McDonald’s around. At the time he was hired in 2002, the company’s profits and stock prices were down, and it lacked severely in the advertising department. Light, who had decades of experience in branding, joined the company as its global chief marketing officer and immediately got to work pinpointing the company’s issues.
In 2020, he acknowledged that the fast-food chain “had been managed as a mass-market, mass-media, mass-message brand,” something he said was a “mass mistake.” To get to work re-branding the company, he invited 14 advertising agencies to compete for the next opportunity to create a global campaign.
The winner of the contest was Heye & Partner, a German agency. From there, the company hired stars Justin Timberlake and Tony Hawk to draw in customers, especially younger generations. It was a gamble, had it not worked it would’ve seen Light out of a job — but it paid off. It boosted the company’s visibility and the phrase with the five-note jingle is still widely used today.
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