12 Jan Would you Sacrifice your Friends for a Free Whopper?
The economy is bad. Everyone is downsizing. Jobs are being lost, no one is buying anything unless it’s on sale. People are tightening their belts and staying in. What to do? Purge, that’s what. And there’s a social media marketing campaign that is helping you do just that. Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice is a Facebook application that encourages users to actually DELETE 10 friends with the promise of a free Whopper. So BK believes that their crappy food is more important than your crappy friends.
There’s no group to join, no fan page, just an application that actually notifies your friends on their feed that you have sacrificed them for free food. So not only will they know you axed them, but all of your other friends as well as theirs will know just how little they mean to you. This might be one of the more despicable and underhanded attempts to shill a lousy product I have seen in a long time.
I love it.
Why? Because people are talking about it, and people are doing it. Burger King has had some, er, interesting campaigns in recent days, one of which has proven to be more possibly offensive than anything, the Whopper Virgins. You might have seen the commercials where BK reps bring Whoppers to the ends of the Earth, providing delicious processed salted meat burgers to folks who would have otherwise never known the convenience and low-cost of fast food. Personally, I thought this was a failed attempt at marketing for brand affinity.
BK Guy: Hey, Mongolian yak herder, try this delicious and cheaply manufactured cow meat sandwich.
Yak Herder: (translated) Hey, this tastes amazing!
BK Guy: Yeah, I know. Everyone knows except you.
Yak Herder: (translated) Wow, why have I been sequestered away from capitalism and processed food for so long? I should open a BK right here in the freaking Himalayas.BK Guy: We knew you’d see it our way. (Sinister laugh.)
Ok, so maybe it isn’t that underhanded, but nonetheless, BK made a pretty big assumption that people around the world would be as into their mayonnaisey sandwiches as much as Americans. I’ll refer you to the BK campaign, Whopper Freakout, in which actual customers were given substitutes such as Big Macs in lieu of their sacred Whopper, or were told that the sandwich was no longer on the menu. The results speak for themselves. On the video on this site, one production person says, “We’re not doing this to be mean, we’re doing this to prove a point.”
But is Burger King bent on making people angry in order to sell their products? Possibly. What I think is actually happening is that BK’s ad firm CP+B is leveraging the anger that already exists in our faltering economy. Heck, BK has even released a new version of the classic sandwich called the Angry Whopper, complete with special “Angry Sauce.” This is a case of utilizing existing sentiment in order to hit customers where it makes the most sense.
So what do you do? I’ve had 2 friends who have already opted in (don’t worry, I am still safe—for now), Facebook reports 30,000+ monthly active users of the application, and the Twitter-sphere is blowing up about it. Here’s some of the Twitter sentiment I found recently:
- This cracks me up. Sacrifice 10 of your facebook friends for a free Whopper 🙂
- If this app is real, I would totally sacrifice our friendship for a whopper.
- Sacrifice your friends for a Whopper! Burger King marketing stunt on FB is quite brilliant
- don’t sacrifice me for a free WHOPPER…!!
- Burger King wants you to “sacrifice” 10 friends in exchange for a Whopper? Where do I start?
- I would never sacrifice you for a whopper. Chicken Fries… maybe.
- first sacrifice for a whopper – done!
I think this proves that the campaign is working quite well, since it is engaging the social media stage with gusto and unadulterated backhandedness, and getting some great results. I can’t wait to see what BK comes up with next, and I can’t wait to see how this affects their sales. I think their tagline for this ploy kind of says it all, though: Friendship is strong, but the Whopper is stronger.
