There’s a New King, and It’s You.
Over the past decade at Burger King marketing, operations, everything, just… fell off. Critically: sales did too. A third of BK customers had disappeared, creating a crisis you can’t advertise yourself out of. So we rebuilt the relationship with guests methodically: first by listening, when we convinced the president of BK to give out his cell phone to everyone in America for feedback. Then by acting, really acting, like on every single thing we heard. New products, bringing back old ones, reinventing our packaging, reinvesting in restaurants and team members, and ultimately, firing the king, all so we could crown you.
Changing the industry, not just our advertising.
We conceived this less like an advertising campaign, and more like a years long documentary. One designed to evolve over time. To make sure it’s real, we started by launching a whole host of improvements to the Whopper. But that was only the beginning: every quarter we’ve been announcing new changes, like creating thousands of roles in every restaurant nationwide dedicated entirely to ensuring you have it your way:
Turning Advertising into Action
One of the major reasons fast food is a declining category? Restaurants are understaffed, employees work multiple jobs, and margins are thin. After hearing it again and again from customers, we tackled it head on, conceiving an entirely new role in every Burger King restaurant that transforms shift managers from a back of house job to something that happens in the dining room. People dedicated to fixing every problem the guest has, directly, on the spot.
Nuggets Everybody Can Feel Good About
Burger King Nuggets were awful. That’s not our words, that’s an opinion shared by guests, and Burger King. But instead of hiding behind excused, we hired an entire new director of culinary expressly to fix it, and then co-created our new nuggets directly with our harshest critics. The result? A massive upturn in sales directly off the back of the news.
First things first: Improving the Whopper
Within weeks of launching the campaign, we operationalized our biggest piece of feedback: fix the Whopper so every bite was as good as the last. That meant researching, developing, and deploying new packaging, new ingredients, and new ways of building every burger—concieved on the phone with guests in real time. The result? The first updates to the Whopper in over a decade, and double digit sales growth nationally, starting, and sustained, since the launch of the improved Whopper.
