Results and Effectiveness

The communications were able to convince consumers of Burger King’s product superiority and get people to visit the store to try the products. On 10 March 2011, all 36,429 BK Tendergrill Chicken burger were sold out in 44 participating stores within hours. Compared to the same day in 2010, traffic rose by 45%. The one week long campaign garnered 2,523 new Facebook fans, and #makeitevenbetter became a trending topic on Twitter. “Burger King Singapore” was even listed number two on the Google hot searches list in Singapore, losing only to the popular IT Show 2011.

Creative Execution

As the underdog brand without huge media budgets, the strategy was to respond swiftly and boldly with a product superiority stance. We taunted the competitor by first hijacking and spoofing their campaign, “Make it Better”, with the cheeky “Make it Even Better” theme, and drew attention to flame-grilling by taking a controversial position to challenge McDonald’s directly: Flame-grilled, not fake-grilled. We taunted the competitor with a teaser web video “Chicken spots fakes. Chicken gets fired up”. Then fueled conversations by spoofing McDonald’s McGrill microsite. Through a series of educational videos, BK Chicken showed Fake Chicken what flame-grilling was all about. All videos were hosted on BK Singapore’s Youtube channel as well as on the microsite. Last of all, we trumped the competition’s offer and came up with $1 Tendergrill Day, which was promoted through social networking sites, forms, discount websites, social ads, PR and EDMs.

Insights, Strategy and the Idea

Background and objectives: Burger King Singapore has always taken pride in its flame-grilling equity. The issue arose when current market leader McDonald’s launched the Chicken McGrill with an aggressive 1-for-1 promotion. Our objective was to launch a retaliation campaign to re-establish Burger King’s Tendergrill Chicken as the King of flame-grilled chicken burgers—with less than one-tenth the media spend. McDonald’s, the market leader, has a stronger affinity with fast food users in Singapore. Upon closer inspection, we realised that the McGrill was, fake-grilled. It uses a “chargrill” sauce and was “grilled” using a clamshell press. Burger King, the underdog, never chickens out from a good challenge. We had to educate consumers that its patties are flame-grilled, not fake-grilled. To Burger King, it was to protect its flame-grilling equity, and to the consumer, it will be up to them to decide what’s real flame-grilling and not be kept in the dark.