What Burger King Gets Right About Facebook
Posted by meredith on 01-13-2009
Let this be a lesson to all the brands out there marketing to youth that simply slap together a Facebook app and call it a day. Whopper Sacrifice, a new campaign from Burger King that rewards participants with a Whopper for every 10 Facebook friends they “deface,” is one of the cleverest of its kind. Not only does the campaign set itself apart from countless nice, harmless apps out there, but it demonstrates a unique understanding of how users actually view the the social networking site…
We all know we have too many “friends.” We know that a quarter of them (and that’s being conservative) are probably people with whom we’ve had one interaction with, and whose profiles we’ll most likely never look at again. The truth is: if we actively thought about it, we’d probably have removed them already.
Enter “Whopper Sacrifice”. Not only does it make you actively think of those people you would delete from your list (a less cruel exercise than it sounds,) but it gives you incentive to take action. Okay, so personally a big, juicy burger doesn’t really tempt me much, but replace Whopper with a free cup of coffee, a t-shirt, even a donation to pro-social cause and I’d probably browse through my own networks for some expendable friends.
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Categorized under: Youth Marketing
January 13th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Excellent post and to further prove how smart Burger King was to do this, check out Advertising on Social Networks: The Lights Are On, But No One’s Home
January 13th, 2009 at 10:23 pm
A truly brilliant post on so many levels. I am now motivated to weed my garden and clean out my friends from Facebook and Linkedin. Interestingly, the only social network where i actually prune my firneds is Twitter. And that’s a totoally different story altogether.
January 14th, 2009 at 1:26 pm
Good post and great promo for BK on Facebook. What I’m still shocked about is that Burger King, like most companies, is not leveraging its already existing Facebook Page presence
http://tinyurl.com/burgerkingFB
They literally have 200,000+ fans just waiting to be activated with a promo like this or more important, long term loyalty, offers, word of mouth, etc.
January 14th, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Hey Meredith – you do a great job of explaining the appeal (or offer) from a youth perspective. I looked at the campaign from a corporate marketing point of view and it raises some issues (here: http://tinyurl.com/9g54gm) that have implications for interactive marketing. But I am working hard to get rid of my “10″ and get that free Whopper (and I will get fries with that!).
January 15th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
Excellent post, Meredith. I loved this campaign.
I found some more good Facebook figures here:
http://www.youthmarketing.com/its-facebooks-world-we-just-live-in-it/
January 15th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
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