Marketing campaigns are a core part of the customer experience. If a brand want sot stand out in a crowded industry, it needs to get very creative, especially on social media. This remains true for even the largest of brands. Recently, Burger King has implemented a marketing tactic that has seen surprising success; targeting Facebook users that are complaining about McDonalds.
As Adweek reports, advertising agency Uncle Grey launched a new and clever social media campaign for Burger King Denmark recently targeting its biggest rival McDonald’s. In a stroke of genius, Burger King did not target their competitor directly. Rather, they put their focus squarely on the disgruntled customers complaining and commenting on McDonald’s Facebook page.
Customer service agents working for Burger King were tasked with reading and responding to complaints about McDonald’s and its service. The responses are all “fun,” but more importantly include a link to grab a Whopper for free.
“Customer service is a big part of the entire guest experience, and we haven’t been doing a good enough job in taking care of our guests online. When addressing this, we realised there are even more burger fans out there that deserve a reply. We did what we can to help out, hoping some flame-grilled Whopper love can help make things better again,” said Daniel Schröder, marketing director at Burger King Sweden and Denmark.
This strategy also comes alongside a pledge by the company to respond to all queries on Facebook within 48 hours, which should stop McDonald’s considering copying the idea in some form.
We’ll be able to tell how well this campaign worked by waiting to see if it gets copied by Burger King in other regions of the world. However, based on some of the fiery yet incredibly popular social media posts by fellow fast-food giant, Wendy’s, such tactics have proven to resonate incredibly well with the millennial and Z generation of social media users.
