👋, I’m Kimberly. I’ve been creating obsession-worthy brands for the past fifteen years. And now, I’m giving away my secrets every week in this newsletter.
My husband belongs to a Burger of the Month Club. On the first of every month, the men in the club dress up in suits and ties, gather at a fancy restaurant, and all order the burger.
“To meat!” they shout, clinking burgers across the table in a traditional toast.
No one can deny the universal appeal of an awesome hamburger. There’s a reason it’s the first food that vegetarians tried to reinvent.
And we all have our favorite burgers. West Coasters will claim In N’ Out. East Coasters will argue for Shake Shake. Then, there are the more widely known classics. Your McDonald’s. Your Carl’s Junior. Your Wendy’s, where the burger takes a square shape. And your White Castle, where the burger gets both squared and miniaturized.
But, the #1 award for burger marketing this year has to go to Burger King—whose brilliant rebrand and campaign work stood out in every respect.
Today, I’m going to:
Walk you through case studies of three of Burger King’s best campaigns
Show you how each appeals to a different element of a customer’s personality
Help you replicate this successful marketing formula
Freud's Id, Ego, and Superego
In an age where people appear to be feature obsessed (fastest speed! best bells! all the whistles!), it can be tempting to make all of your marketing campaigns all about your product. But, touting your features will only get you so far if you want to appeal to customers on multiple levels.
One way to think about multiple levels of appeal is to take a cue from Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. He divided the human personality into three elements—all of which emerge at different times and interact with each other.
THE ID: Present from birth, this is our unconscious and instinctive side. The id is driven by the pleasure principle, and demands immediate satisfaction.
THE EGO: This is the part of our personality responsible for processing reality. It weighs the costs and benefits, and provides guidance.
THE SUPEREGO: The superego houses our moral standards and our ideals. It is our conscience—and it makes us consider society at large, rather than just ourselves.
The Triple Patty of Marketing
Building a marketing plan is like building a burger with three patties.
Throughout the quarter or the year, you want to layer on campaigns and messages that hit your consumer in different ways—and that make them think differently about your product and your brand.
Otherwise, your messages will get stale and… even moldy.
Each of the marketing campaigns below (all of which were released by Burger King this year!) is perfect in its isolation of a clear and compelling message that immediately appeals to one of the three elements of the customer’s personality.
Oscillating between these types of messages is what keeps the plot line alive for your brand.
Campaign #1: The Id + The Product
Here’s The Ad
At the beginning of the year, Burger King announced that they had taken all artificial preservatives out of their their Whopper. And they released this ad—showing a Whopper decomposing into a moldy mess over the course of 28 days.
It was a stark contrast to a view of other fast food. In the documentary Super Size Me, they left similar items from McDonald’s out in the air—and it took a crazy amount of time for them to start to decompose.
Here Are the Results
Shock value at its finest. The Clio award-winning “Moldy Whopper” campaign captured attentions at levels 10% above norm. The juxtaposition created a powerful emotional response and high memorability. Research from the firm YouGov also revealed that “the Moldy Whopper campaign reached a level of awareness 50% higher even than Burger King's 2019 Super Bowl campaign, which [they] said was the most discussed of all the Super Bowl campaigns last year.”
Here’s Why It Works
This product-focused ad speaks directly to your Id. It creates an immediate instinctual reaction—and gets you in a very primal way. You see the ad and think….
Ewww! Why in the world would Burger King show me this disgusting moldy Whopper? That’s totally gross.
But then you see the tagline…
Ah, I see—this mold is a good thing, because it means that the burger is NOT filled with weird preservatives that would make it last forever. This burger is FRESH, much fresher than the rest. It is better for me. Those other burgers are ewww!
The ad is incredibly memorable because of the force and might of your reaction to the disconnect—which can only be achieved by appealing so strongly to the Id.
Campaign #2: The Ego + The Reality
Here’s The Ad
Last week, Burger King released at ad that had nothing to do with moldy food. In fact, there was no food in sight.
Instead, the ad showed empty Burger King restaurants and focused on personal items “left behind” by customers pre-pandemic: a kid’s backpack, a stuffed bunny, a charging phone, a cell phone, a happy birthday balloon.
You see the items from the vantage point of the outside of the restaurant, through the windows—as well as the dates they were left and locations of the restaurants. The tagline reads: Come and get it back. Reopening our restaurants June 9, 2021.
Here Are the Results
The actual restaurants open tomorrow—but this ad from Belgium immediately received international press coverage from publications like Fast Company, which put it on the radar of the global community for its combination of cleverness and strong emotional appeal. I’d also say it is a strong contender for upcoming award seasons.
Here’s Why It Works
The feelings-focused ad speaks directly to your Ego. For the past year and change, we’ve all had to exercise our egos to repress our primitive and immediate desires in some way—socially isolating and avoiding the things we usually love. We’ve all walked past restaurants and stores and looked longingly into the widows.
The moments “frozen in time” in the Burger King ad immediately hit you in the gut in a very powerful way. The objects they chose to focus on tell stories—and you fill in the narratives.
Maybe the little boy who left his backpack was going to his last little league game. You can see the kids gathered around the table singing and blowing candles… only to disappear like ghosts in this year of no parties. How many calls has that abandoned cell phone missed?
The view from outside the restaurant puts you right in the reality you’ve been all year, and gets you excited about the normalcy you can now return to very soon
Campaign #3: The Superego + The Community
On October 2020, the day after a second set of strict lockdowns started in Europe, Burger King rolled out this arresting ad.
Here Are the Results
“A whopper of a gesture!” and “Kindness on an unprecedented scale!” raved CNN, and 1350 more media outlets. The campaign garnered 4.5 million interactions, 17.7 billion impressions, and +18% sales for promoted businesses around the world.
Here’s Why It Works
The community-focused ad speaks directly to your Super Ego. Anyone seeing this ad would think…
Burger King is telling me to order from McDonald’s? This is an unlikely and upstanding thing for them to do during this difficult time for the world.
The ad plays to your sense of morality. It put the spotlight on on the bigger issues facing the world that went way beyond the fierce fast food competition. This is the “what’s larger than me” layer of storytelling.
As a customer, you immediately feel good about Burger King, a company that would be selfless enough to promote this message. And it makes you feel good about supporting them and their competitors—because you’re also supporting your community.
Your Key Takeaways
The next time you’re planning your marketing for the quarter or the year, step back and think about which element of your customer’s personality you’re appealing to with each campaign.
Make sure you’re mixing it up—with some id, some ego, and some superego.
Try to focus each campaign message on one element to be the most effective.
Have Branding Questions?
Are there any branding topics or questions you’d like me to write about next? Let me know in the comments—or shoot me an email at kimberly@brandsthatgetyou.com. I want to make sure I’m writing about what’s most relevant to you!
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About Me
I help early stage founders create the kind of brands that get customers so obsessed, they’ll do your advertising for you.
Based on my experience founding my own consumer brand, I developed The Branding Sprint—a uniquely collaborative, streamlined, and agile approach to brand creation.
Click here to learn more about The Branding Sprint, or schedule a call with me.