These are the 10 Best Burger King Marketing Campaigns of 2018
The marketing campaigns of Burger King have always been a delight. Hence, it is business as usual so far in the year 2018 for the fast food restaurant’s marketing and communications wing. Plentiful campaigns, which are buzzworthy, are being rendered from its various locations across the globe.
The social media presence of the Burger King’s Global Chief Marketing Officer, Fer Machado, and the mentions, pertaining to the campaigns, in popular online media like Adweek and The Drum prompted me to list down BK’s 10 best marketing campaigns of 2018 so far. So, in this article, I present my list in no particular order.
1. A wrap to transmogrify a bus into a fire truck:
Agency: &Partner
&Partner, an advertising agency from Copenhagen, wrapped the right side of a bus to transmogrify the transit vehicle into a Burger King-branded fire truck. The meaty idea, inspired by the iconic fire trucks in New York, is the agency’s entry in an outdoor advertising competition in Denmark. In the contest, each participating agency was asked to select its client and come up with an idea to advertise the chosen brand with a bus. The concept bolstered the focus of the fast-food chain on flame grilling.
2. Free WhoppHER for every Saudi woman behind the wheel:
Agency: Grabarz & Partners
To celebrate women driving in Saudi Arabia, post the lifting of the decade-old controversial ban on the same, Burger King offered free Whopper sandwich to every woman passing through its drive-thru restaurants in the country. The quick service restaurant chain set the ball rolling for the campaign from June 24th through July 24th.
Click here to watch the campaign video!
3. A parabolic solar cooker to sear a burger:
Agency: Memac Ogilvy
Burger King’s Kuwait operation and Memac Ogilvy together devised and executed an idea to cook up Whopper using the heat produced by parabolic solar cookers, which mobilize direct sun rays to generate the heat. In Kuwait, when the temperature reaches 122 Fahrenheit, BK prepares this Sun-Flamed Grilled Whopper. This offering is available only at select locations in Kuwait (provided when the temperature favors).
Marketing Journo
4. A Good Samaritan Day video presenting a good-natured stunt:
Agency: David the Agency
For this year’s Good Samaritan Day, Burger King treated everyone with a good-natured film. In the video, you see a car fire on the side of a highway. Alongside the car is a guy who appears to look up to travelers vrooming past him to lend him a hand. People who pull over to assist the guy are in for a surprise when Burger King’s advertising mascot, flame grilling Whopper, welcomes them. What appeared as an engine fire are actually the flames from the grill. The Samaritans are then offered Burgers and iconic Burger King Crowns.
Also Read: What Can ‘The Burger King’ Mascot Teach Marketers?
5. Whopper Neutrality stunt to explain the potential effects of Net Neutrality:
Agency: David
Burger King got behind the topic, Net Neutrality to explain it to not just a handful of its store customers but in fact to possibly every internet user with one of its brilliant in-store stunts. At one of BK’s outlet, if customers were to get served their Whoppers quick then they had to pay the QSR more than the actual price of the food offering. What if they don’t? The answer is simple. Even if the Whopper is ready, the customers had to wait pointlessly for a certain amount of time to collect it.
The expansion which the Burger King had displayed for MBPS over the pricing board (i.e., from “megabits per second” to “making burgers per second”), to be showcased to the customers, was also innovative. Hidden cameras placed in the store captured the goings-on inside the store and varied emotions of the customers in focus and rendered an edutainment.
6. An ‘explainer’ video on ‘Pink Tax’:
Agency: DAVID the Agency (Miami)
This is yet another instance of the fast food chain getting behind a topic concerning the public. The topic in this campaign is ‘Pink Tax’, a price, which refers to the products made for women like razors, shampoo, and conditioner, that is significantly higher than the cost of the male equivalents of those products. In a film released by Burger King, one can see female customers charged $3.09 for “Chick Fries”. Whereas, “Chicken Fries” being charged at $1.69. Wherein, the only difference between the two food items is the box in which they are served i.e. “Chicken Fries” in a yellow box and “Chick Fires” in a pink box. Like Whopper Neutrality, the goal of this campaign as well is to render infotainment around the focal topic and to convey the stand of Burger King on the same.
Watch the ‘Chick Tax’ spot by clicking here!
7. Gift Whoppers or Oreo shake to ease co-workers stuck at the office in summer:
Agency: Buzzman
Burger King Belgium and the agency Buzzman collaborated and yielded the summer special digital campaign, ‘Whopper Out of Office’ that kick-started on July 3rd. In which, the fans, enjoying their summer vacation in a remote destination, were given an innovative option to taunt and then pacify their fellow coworkers stuck at the office by treating them with eatables. All they have to do is provide their destination, duration of their journey and a description in the website set up for the campaign. So, when a person contacts them, he/she will receive an automatically generated email along with a gift voucher for a Whopper or an Oreo shake and their individually tailored message for him/her.
Click here and have a look at the campaign video!
8. Summer pairing of Burger King and Budweiser – A paragon of Collaboration Marketing:
Agency: David and MullenLowe
The pairing of the US brigades of Burger King and Budweiser is what I call as a perfect example of Collaboration Marketing. Targeting the summer season, the partnership, in addition to yielding the limited-edition burger ‘American Brewhouse King Sandwich’, revived the American beer maker’s iconic campaign, ‘Whassup’. To top it all, the BK’s mascot, holding a set of the new burger in his hand, “spoke” in the spot. The ad was meant for supporting the revitalized campaign.
Also Read: 4 Examples of Captivating Fusion Marketing Campaigns (And Why They’re So Great)
9. King Popcorn campaign to hack Whopper into the movies:
Agency: McCann Lima
As soon as the prohibition in the Peruvian Law on taking outside food to the theatres was ceased, movie halls started letting consumers enter their premises with foods ‘similar’ to those sold in the cinema’s concession stands. Burger King Peru and McCann Lima sensed a marketing opportunity, seized the situation and ended up with the King Popcorn campaign. Wherein, the fast feeder, located in food courts close to the movie theatres, packed a popcorn tub with a Whopper at the bottom, a French Fries pack above it and a tray containing a handful of popcorns at the top. The outward appearance of this food item named King Popcorn resembled the snack sold in the theatres. Thereby, it facilitated the hacking of the Whopper and French fries inside the movie. This innovative move by Burger King increased its sales by 40% in the activation period and put the brand in the consumer spotlight.
10. Incendiary print and outdoor ads for a recruitment campaign in Germany:
Agency: Grabarz & Partner Werbeagentur GmbH
For the Burger King Recruitment campaign in Germany, the fast food chain in the country and Grabarz & Partner came up with a series of incendiary, eye-catching print and outdoor ads. The ads depicting real-life events had the text, ‘LOVE FIRE? CONTACT US’ accompanied by the web address, ‘bk-careers.com’, catchphrase, ‘FLAME GRILLING SINCE 1954’ and the Burger King logo.
Conclusion:
Even though I consider the aforementioned campaigns as best of Burger King in 2018 so far, I can’t resist myself in admiring the other efforts of the restaurant like Burger King China’s celebration of International Women’s Day 2018 and Burger King Romania’s “Whopper No Show” campaign. Also, it sounds appealing when coming across tweets from BK’s Global CMO that gives a glimpse of the interiors of the fast feeder’s outlets of different countries. Overall, I find the collective marketing and communications efforts of the QSR chain to be lively!
Having documented a list of best Burger King marketing campaigns of 2018 so far, I now eagerly look forward to what the chain has in store for the remaining months of this year.