In terms of advertising and promotions Burger king has been using a lot of creativity compared to their competitors in the fast food industry. This included the viral site Subservient Chicken and the creation of the “King” in commericial campaigns and even his own series of successful video games . Going in a different direction the creative minds at Burger King have come up with another interesting idea, a documentary!
Titled the Whopper Virgins a crew of researchers hired by Burger King are tasked with finding once and for all who has the better Burger ? Mcdonanlds or Burger King. This documentary created by ad firm Crispin, Porter and Bogusky goes into remote villages of Greenland ,Romania and Thailand places that have never seen a burger where the term Whopper Virgins come in. Through comparative taste tests between the Whopper and Big Mac from a taste test of these populations the researchers come to the conclusion that tasters preffered the Whopper.
While some claim that the whole idea offensive or even exploitive, I thought it was brilliant! Barring all the arguements that its intruding on these villagers, making light of hunger issues or exposing them to potentially harmful North American culture( is a single burger so bad?) it none the less sparked discussion and feelings about Burger King and its Whopper sandwhich,something that every promotional campaign builds towards.
I’m sure this documentary won’t be seen by a large portion of the population and it won’t create new markets in Greenland any time soon but more importantly it went on to instill ideas and has even sparked discussion among consumers making it more likely that BK will stay in their top of mind awareness . This is unlike general commercials from Mcdonalds and Wendy’s which may spur a quick hunger pang from the thought of all of that greasy goodness ( mmm burgers!) but will be forgotten within a few minutes of viewing like all the other commericials consumers are bombarded within a day.
I’ve included the documentary below (its short!) check it out if you can:
Tags: Branding, Burger King, Marketing, News, Whopper Virgins, Youtube
It looks like “Whopper Gate” is starting to gain some serious momentum! http://beyondbanner.com/2008/12/22/whopper-gate-a-global-phenomenon/
hmmm I’m interested to see the effect on sales as to whether they went up/down/stayed the same for this current quarter. My argument for the success of this campaign is that despite the bad press it still has people talking. People wouldn’t be posting on their blogs about this if people didn’t notice this campaign. I think it would be a really cool analysis to see the Market research numbers after this. I’m curious to see if all this negative posting is from people who would not eat at BK in the first place and what affect this campaign had on people who eat fast food on a regular basis and if they really cared about the larger debate on the documentary.
Thanks for the update April!