The McNibble was not a PR problem

In February 2026, McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczinski posted an eighty-second Instagram video. He was launching a new burger. He called it a "product." He took a small, hesitant bite. The setting was a sterile office with beige walls and fluorescent lights. The internet turned the clip into a meme within hours. Burger King's president responded with a messy, enthusiastic bite of a Whopper. Wendy's launched a mock "Chief Tasting Officer" recruitment campaign. The whole thing became what PR circles are now calling the McNibble.

The discourse since has been almost entirely about communications training. Better media coaching. Better settings. Better body language. A rule that CEOs should not film themselves eating unless they can do it convincingly. A new industry cottage industry of "authenticity audits." Every piece of advice is oriented around the same premise, which is that the McNibble was a performance problem that can be solved by performing better next time.

It was not a performance problem.

It was a meaning problem. And every piece of advice to fix the performance is making the underlying problem worse.

What the audience caught in those eighty seconds was not bad acting. It was accurate reading. The word "product" is actually how that leadership thinks about the food. The hesitant bite is actually what his body did when asked to eat it. The beige office is actually where that conversation takes place. None of these were slips or mistakes. They were the honest semiotic expression of the thing underneath. The problem was not that the video was inauthentic. The problem was that it was, briefly and accidentally, exactly authentic to what the company actually is.

The industry response is to coach the next video to be less authentic in that specific way. Teach the CEO to say "burger" instead of "product." Film in a kitchen. Practice the bite. Recover the illusion. And most people watching will understand, at some level below words, that the recovered performance is exactly that. A recovery. A performance.

There is a concept in semiotics called the floating signifier. A sign that circulates without a stable meaning to anchor it. It looks like communication. It functions like noise. And audiences feel the instability of it even when they cannot name what they are feeling.

Most struggling brands are floating signifiers. The visual identity is considered. The messaging is workshopped. But underneath it, the meaning is unresolved, and everyone can sense it. McNibble is what happens when the floating signifier finally does something in the world. The circulation stops. The meaning is exposed as absent. The audience gets a glimpse of the gap between the sign and the thing, and the gap turns out to be the entire story.

This is the part the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer is pointing at and the PR industry is refusing to see. The report describes "pervasive insularity," consumers retreating into smaller circles, eighty one percent of people requiring trust before even considering a purchase. The framing is that trust has become scarce. The framing is wrong. Trust has not become scarce. Performance has become cheap, and the cheapness of performance is what has made audiences finally tune to the signal underneath it.

The Burger King response was not a better performance. It was a brand whose sign and referent happen to be aligned. Aggressive, messy, unpretentious eating is actually what Burger King means. When the president filmed himself doing it, the audience received a coherent signal and relaxed. This is not because he is a better actor. It is because there was nothing to act. The meaning and the expression were the same thing.

At Sundays, we call the layer underneath the surface the experience architecture. It is the full system of what a brand actually is before any visual or verbal choice gets made on top of it. When that system is coherent, everything downstream feels right even when it is imperfect. When that system is incoherent, no amount of downstream polish can fix it. The audience does not need to know the theory to feel the difference. They feel it instantly.

The practical problem this creates is uncomfortable. Most organisations, when they run into trouble, go looking for a rebrand. Better logo. Sharper messaging. Fresher campaigns. None of this is wrong. It is just oriented at the wrong layer. A rebrand cannot resolve a meaning problem any more than a louder megaphone can correct what is being said. You cannot make a floating signifier stop floating by painting it a different colour.

What actually works, in the cases where it works, is the unfashionable version. Stop before the visual work begins. Find out what the thing actually is. Decide what it stands for when no one is performing. Align the internal systems, the language, the leadership behaviour, the product experience, until the sign on the outside is the honest surface of something coherent underneath. Then let the visual expression be a consequence of that coherence rather than a substitute for it.

The McDonald's moment is not really about McDonald's. McDonald's will survive. They have the scale to absorb a meme. The moment is diagnostic. It shows, with unusual clarity, what every founder and operator is now navigating. The audience has tuned to the signal. They can tell the difference between a surface and a thing, and the cost of getting caught with only a surface is going up. Every week.

The authenticity crisis is not a crisis of authenticity. It is a crisis of meaning being diagnosed as a crisis of performance, which is why none of the proposed cures are working. The cure for a meaning problem is meaning. It has to be sourced, not produced.

And that has never been a communications job. That has always been a decision about what the thing actually is.

Sundays is a strategic brand advisory practice working at the layer underneath the surface. sundays.design