Burger King was losing market share to deep-pocketed and well-established players, new local joiners, along with food aggregators. This translated into a decline in the value share of Burger king; dropping from a peak of 4.5% in 2014 to 4% by 2018.

The brand needed to urgently regain relevancy and improve sales or risk more losses.

Within this context, our brief was to launch an enhanced version of Burger King’s hero burger “The whopper” and reignite interest in the brand, while pushing for trial, among an audience less familiar with the Whopper.

While building our monitors, we faced a linguistic challenge. In English, the word burger is written in one form, in Arabic however, it is written in several forms since the Arabic language lacks the sound “G” as in burger. And the same applies for the Whopper, which is written in several variations also due to the lack of the sound “P”. This difference in writing is a source of ongoing online debate among the language speakers.

Since there is no consensus on how to pronounce burger or whopper in Arabic, and since each one defends their way of writing or pronouncing both words, we used this linguistic debate as an opportunity to go bigger and focus on the “Burger Word”, enabling us to steal the show and reintroduce our new Whopper in the “Burger World”

Burker or Burjer or Borghor?

We launched with a fake post promoting our enhanced whopper while pronouncing Burger as “Burker”; followed by tweets with different pronunciations like “Burjer” and “Borghor” … our tweets fueled the internet; and many of our fans and none fans alike took it personally and joined the ongoing pronunciation debate.

It’s a Whopper

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 suddenly changed into some imaginary nostalgic Arabic school teachers to dramatize the story.

To end the feud, one of our characters asks the drive-through staff about the proper way to say burger. The reply comes: “it doesn’t matter as long as it is a whopper; and your tongue knows the difference”.

Finally, to solve the pronunciation dilemma, we proposed on our fans to use an adapted letter that would reflect the true sound as in Burger, which was made by using the existing letter “ج” and adding a dot to it.

This was supplemented by in-store merchandizing including items like tray paper, wraps, and posters, where the logo of the brand was changed by replacing the existing letter “ج” into the new letter.

By ditching the traditional food promotions and creating fun content that transcends the cliché food shots while digging deep into the local culture, Burger King was not only able increase sales beyond target by 18%, but also capture the category’s conversation, Saudi youth’s interest, and loyalty (25% increase in followers) and gain $2.4 million in earned media.