CASE STUDIES

CASE STUDIES

So how do you get your name out when you’re the num-ber two burger joint in the country? By the turn of the
millennium, in the minds of many, Burger King had been
relegated to sitting the bench in the fast-food industry.
And in a way, after having changed owners and being
rebranded so many times, it might come as no surprise.
Then, in 2003, Burger King hired the advertising agency
Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which brought on some major
brand changes for the fast-food franchise. At the time,
Burger King was viewed as a boring brand with very
little personality and identity. Crispin Porter + Bogusky
quickly took steps to give Burger King a new image, an
image that would be fun and that people would want
to be associated with. Over the last few years, Burger
King’s new advertising campaigns have certainly caught
people’s attention.
Attention, however, is not necessarily a positive
thing. The Crispin Porter + Bogusky agency has been
known for edgy and controversial advertising, and its
work for Burger King has been no exception. It certainly
gave Burger King a new face. Early promotions included
Burger King’s “subservient chicken” Web site, where a
man in a chicken suit sitting in front of a video camera
would respond to commands put in by viewers. Burger
King spun off the subservient chicken theme in 2005
with a faux metal band called Coq Roq to promote its
new Chicken Fries. The campaign included commercials
featuring the band—a group of six musicians wearing
chicken masks—along with a Web site and music videos
for four songs singing the praises of subservient chick-ens and Chicken Fries.
If the name of the band itself did not set the tone
(never mind the lead singer: owl Mouth), the Web site
launched with a photo gallery containing pictures of
young women with captions like “Groupies love the
Coq.” The images set off a major controversy, with many
viewers claiming the images were demeaning to women
and inappropriate for children. The captions quickly
came down. The company blamed the captions on mal-functions in Flash and XML programming. The innu-endo of Coq Roq was not an anomaly in Burger King’s
new advertising messages either; at about the same time,
Burger King released a series of commercials featur-ing former Hootie and the Blowi sh frontman Darius
Rucker singing a rewritten version of the “Have it your
way” theme song with suggestive lyrics while travel-ing through a fantasy land of food and provocatively
dressed women. Though controversial, Crispin Porter +
Bogusky was setting Burger King apart, and sales began
to improve.
Burger King’s advertising, however, has not just re-lied on sex to sell its products. While it  has established
the 18- to 34-year-old male as a major target demo-graphic, many of Burger King’s latest advertising cam-paigns have been simply designed to surprise consumers
and shake things up. One of Crispin’s early moves was
a resurrection of Burger King’s stale old mascot: the
King. But rather than give him a hip contemporary
makeover, they kept the crown, red beard, and kingly
apparel topped with a creepy smiling immobile mask.
The King has since been featured in many of Burger
King’s recent campaigns, such as their “Waking up with
the King” feature in which a confused young man wakes
up to i nd the King in bed right next to him. The King
then gives him a breakfast sandwich. In 2007, Burger
King launched its “Whopper Freakout” hoax campaign,
where they pulled the Whopper off the menu at a couple
of select Burger King locations and i  lmed  customers’
reactions on hidden cameras.
In late 2008, Burger King advertisers stoked further
controversy with their “Whopper Virgins” commercials.
The campaign focused around taste tests between the
Whopper and McDonald’s Big Mac similar to Pepsi-Cola’s “Pepsi Challenge” against Coca-Cola, but as
ever, Burger King added a twist. Their ad i  rm hired an
independent research team to perform the tests among
three separate people groups (the Inuit tribes of Iceland,
the Hmong in Thailand, and a group of rural farmers in
Chapter 17 Case Study:
Burger King
Having It Their Way for a Change
2
CASE STUDIES
Transylvania) who they identii ed as having no expo-sure to either the McDonald’s or Burger King brands
or marketing (or fast food at all). The taste testers ap-peared in their traditional garb, and according to the
i lming by the research team, the majority choose the
Whopper. And while the research team and the adver-tisers at Crispin claimed that the project was under-taken with the utmost care and respect for the people
and their cultures, the ads (again) set off a l  urry  of
controversy with accusations that Burger King’s cam-paign was exploitative and culturally degrading.
Whether their advertising crosses the line or not,
Burger King’s promotions have certainly been success-ful. The subservient chicken Web site drew 439 mil-lion visitors, the Coq Roq Web site drew substantial
trafi c as well, and the Chicken Fries proved a success
on the Burger King menu. When Burger King released
an Xbox video game featuring the King, the game sold
several million copies. Burger King caught signii cant
attention as well with its latest stunt, titled “Whopper
Sacrii ce.” The campaign, featuring the tagline
“Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger”
was run on Facebook, where the company created an
application that would send out a message every time
the user defriended someone. For every ten people us-ers defriended, Burger King offered them a coupon for
a free Whopper. Shortly after the launch, Facebook
banned the application. Burger King responded by
posting the following message on the campaign’s Web
site: “Facebook has disabled Whopper Sacrii  ce after
your love for the Whopper proved to be stronger than
233,906 friendships.”

Questions
1.  What do you think of Burger King’s advertising
tactics? Is it OK to attract new customers while
alienating others? Is Burger King’s advertising ethi-cal? Explain.
2.  How did Burger King manage the negative publicity
it received over the content of its Coq Roq Web site?

SOURCES:  Joe Kovacs, “Fowl-Mouthed Slogans too Hot for Burger King,” World-NetDaily, July 28, 2005. Available at www.worldnetdaily.com (accessed January
20, 2009); Elaine Walker, “Crispin + Bogusky Revs Up BK’s Image,”  Miami Herald,
August 1, 2005; Andrew LaVallee, “Burger King Cancels Facebook Ad Campaign,”
The Wall Street Journal, January 15, 2009. Available at http://blogs.wsj.com/
digits/2009/01/15/burger-king-cancels-facebook-ad-campaign/ (accessed Janu-ary 20, 2009); Brian Grow, “Burger King: Raunch with Those Fries?” ed. Dan Beucke,
BusinessWeek , August 15, 2005, i3947, 9; Todd Wasserman, “Burger King Doesn’t
Have It Your Way,” BrandWeek, January 19, 2009. Available at www.brandweek.
com/bw/conten t_display/currentissue/e3i4edf08b57868094d4c25f75cbb9bab13
(accessed January 20, 2009); Suzanne Vranica, “Fresh Palates for Burger King,”  The
Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2008. Available at http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB122834728675077461.html (accessed January 20, 2009).

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