Burger King is the home of flame grilling. It’s what our guests love about us. So the scariest thing for a fan of Burger King is a fried burger off a flat top grill from the competition. We decided to poke a little fun at our biggest competitor (McDonald’s), while landing our key point of differentiation and entertaining our guests.

Halloween was the perfect occasion to pull-off this risky stunt. In the U.S., it’s one of the biggest and most iconic holidays with many people dressing up in costumes and trying to spook each other. One of the most famous Halloween costumes is the simple bed sheet, cut up with a couple eye holes to make you look like a scary ghost. We took this iconic costume to a whole new level, by using it as our prop to transform ourselves into our competition to scare our guests.

On Halloween in 2016, Burger King decided to scare its guests by dressing up a restaurant in New York city as a McDonalds restaurant. To do this, we hung a giant ghostly sheet costume covering the entire Burger King restaurant. It was a comical effort to mimic a McDonald’s restaurant, featuring their logo, yellow eyebrows resembling the golden arches, and through the ghost’s eyeholes the Burger King logo was clearly visible, all explained in the big sign with the caveat “Booo! Don’t’ worry. We still flame grill our burgers. Happy Halloween.” The Whopper burgers were also in costume: custom-made clamshell boxes resembling those of the Big Mac.

We wanted a home-made look and feel, something that could be created by anyone so that the stunt felt more relatable.

After a few hours, the internet and the media took over. All to prove, there’s nothing scarier than a fried burger.

With one single restaurant stunt we achieved:

+ 2 Billion Impressions

+ USD $11 Million in Earned Media

488% increase in Brand Mentions

1000 Tweets per hour in the first day only

Global Facebook Trend Topic

+300.000 Shares

SOURCES: ABPR / WEBER SHANDWICK / HAWKEYE MONITORING & EMANATE / KETCHUM / FACEBOOK / TWITTER GNIP (10/24/2016 – 11/09/2016) / DAILY GLOBAL BURGER KING BRAND MENTIONS FROM TWITTER GNIP

Dressing up our Burger King restaurant as a McDonalds for Halloween is a stunt that promoted the brand’s personality and values while highlighting our point of differentiation from the competition in a playful way. We went further with the experience and gave guests their Whopper burgers in costumes as well: limited edition boxes resembling those of the Big Mac but with a message inside: “Booo! Just kidding, we still flame grill our burgers.” The entire stunt was designed for intrigue, to get people talking about the brand, and to attract people to our restaurants.

Demonstrate our core point of differentiation (flame grilling) from our key competitor (McDonald’s) in a fun and playful way that generates tons of attention, press and buzz to bring more attention to both the core point of differentiation as well as the brand positioning of Be Your Way.

As the media capital of the U.S., New York city provided the perfect location to drive press, social media mentions and ultimately wide spread conversation about the activation.

Our target was the entire US population, but focused mainly on BK fans that recognise and love the flame-grilling efforts of the brand.

Burger King is the home of flame grilling. It’s what our guests love about us. It’s something only we do, as opposed to others (namely McDonald’s) who use a flat top to fry their burgers. We’re on a constant quest to make sure everyone in America knows this key point of differentiation between Burger King and the other QSR’s (Quick Service Restaurant). Because we believe flame grilling makes the difference in taste, along with the other things we do every day (fresh cut daily tomatoes and onions and making every Whopper to order).