Burger King, the king of fast food, doesn’t rule in Saudi Arabia. With other brands dominating the market and new local joints popping up weekly, the brand was facing tough competition and slowly losing market share among the youth, to more trendy and modern brands. Within this context, our brief was to launch an enhanced version of Burger King’s hero sandwich “The whopper”. However, the whopper doesn’t have much equity in Saudi especially among the young generation. Accordingly, our challenge was not only to launch the enhanced whopper but to ignite interest and push for trial among an audience that is less familiar with our sandwich.

Burger communication in Saudi is extremely similar and brands tend to compete on price and promotions and products that are copycats. Our strategy was to find a different angle to communicate our enhanced whopper without allowing the competition a chance to retaliate or compare.

Through online research, we found a very interesting angle that no other brand has approached: How to pronounce burger correctly? The proper pronunciation was an ongoing feud with no consensus among our audience.

Accordingly, our creative idea was to use this linguistic issue of mispronunciation and create a story around it to promote our whopper without really going into the details of the sandwich, the price or the ingredients.

In Saudi, the surge in new burger joints and the excessive communication by competitors left many of Burger King’s young audience apathetic towards the brand. So much so, that many are not familiar with our famous Whopper. So, when are brief was to launch an enhanced version of the whopper to target a young audience, we thought of doing so indirectly by putting the whopper aside and going after the bigger Burger conversation, especially that when we were doing our online research regarding the category, a key observation came out: There is no one consensus on how to pronounce burger in Arabic due to the lack of the sound “G” as in “Burger”.

This presented us with an opportunity to move beyond ingredients or type of buns and into the phonetics of the Arabic language. Enabling us to own a higher ground by staying away from comparisons and price clichés.

We launched with a fake post promoting our enhanced whopper while pronouncing Burger as “Burker”; followed by tweets with intentional wrong pronunciations like “Burjer” and “Borghor” … the tweets fueled the internet and people started debating on how to say Burger.

Then we released a light-hearted video of two young men at a Burger King drive-through, arguing on the proper way to say “Burger”. Their discussion continued but our characters changed into some imaginary Arabic schoolteachers to dramatize the story. In the end, one of them asks the drive-through staff on the proper way to say burger. The reply comes: “it doesn’t matter as long as it is a whopper.

Finally, to solve the pronunciation dilemma, we asked people to use an adapted letter that would reflect the true sound as in Burger.

Our campaign lasted for a month and mostly relied on social networks to spread the message.

Instead of narrowly focusing on our Whopper Sandwich, we went full fledge into the bigger “Burger World” by literally fueling a nationwide conversation on how to pronounce the “Burger” word in Arabic, while offering a solution to an age-old feud among the language speakers. During which, our brand saw a spike in social chatter, where brand mentions outperformed our highest spending competitor by 16% and eclipsed our YoY brand mentions by a factor of 16.

Along with brand mentions we saw a 25% increase in followers, 61.2 million impressions, 16 million campaign views & a total of more than $2.4 million in PR value.

On a business level, our goal was to double the whopper sales, which we not only did, but overachieved it by 18%. Our results were crowned by an overall sales increase of 4.2% on average per store; An achievement, in a very competitive category.