Burger King, often abbreviated as BK, is a global chain of Hamburger Fast Food Restaurants. It is headquartered in unincorporated Miami-Dade Country, Florida, USA. Since its foundation in 1954, Burger King has gone through varied advertising programs, both successful and unsuccessful. It has several well-known and parodied slogans such as “Have it your way” and “It takes two hands to handle a Whopper”. It also has some unsuccessful programs like “Where’s Herb?” One of the biggest successful campaign was the “Whopper Sacrifice”, a promotional campaign created by Burger King which was located exclusively on Facebook. This campaign was “live” in early January of 2009. It is considered as the best examples of how to create positive brand engagement and viral marketing through Facebook.

A brief summary of the campaign is as follows: Facebook users were asked to download the “Whopper Sacrifice” widget into their Facebook page. In the widget, users were then asked to “unfriend” or “sacrifice” 10 of their friends. Upon deleting 10 of their Facebook friends, the Facebook user was given a coupon for a free whopper. When one would delete a friend and that now deleted friend would receive a notification that he or she had been “sacrificed” for a whopper. The individual who deleted a friend would have a notification appear on his or her Facebook newsfeed that he or she deleted a friend for a whopper. Encouraging Facebook users to have fewer connections (i.e. Facebook friends) angered Facebook and when Facebook asked Burger King to revise the promotion, Burger King opted to end the promotion outright instead. By the time the campaign ended, over 200,000 friends were sacrificed by over 80,000 Facebook users in slightly over one week for a free whopper.

The processes of the “Whopper Sacrifice” widget are given below as pictures:

IMC tools used in Whopper Sacrifice: To execute the campaign, Burger King used nothing but Interactive Marketing, Direct Marketing and PR to gain publicity. BK didn’t use any other IMC tools such as sales promotion, personal selling or tvc. By attaining Viral Marketing on Facebook, its target was to publicly document brand loyalty. All of it happened over a social media platform. BK promoted the campaign by simply exposing its feature, a free whopper for 10 unfriends, in the notification of an unfriended Facebook user.

Interactive Marketing and Direct Marketing: Burger King totally run their campaign through Interactive Marketing and Direct Marketing. They chose Facebook as a social platform for their Direct Marketing and Whopper Sacrifice app as their Interactive Marketing. There were several ads like above which they used as electronic ads for communicating with their customers.

Public Relation:  The Whopper Sacrifice campaign existed solely on Facebook with no related advertising in any other medium. Nonetheless, the promotion was considered so innovative and became so popular that the online and traditional media ran stories about it, thus giving Burger King and this promotion free publicity.  By commoditizing our online friendships and giving out free food in exchange for morally ambiguous actions, Burger King has managed to spark an intense debate about the value of online relationships, and received more attention than they ever could have imagined as a result.

My Opinion: Success is based on impressions rather than interactions. From my point of view, Burger King did an extra ordinary job of promoting their product and also documenting brand loyalty of their potential customers. Social networks, in this case Facebook include built-in viral tools that help share the message generated by each interaction. The unique application served a pre-existing need of Facebook users. Small incentives increased the adoption rate of the online campaign. On the other hand, there are some bad aspects of that campaign. Morally questionable campaign lead to a lot of negative publicity. And limiting the campaign to a single social network reduced the number of potential participants.