Burger King, the king of fast food, doesn’t rule in Saudi Arabia anymore. 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 gain a local voice, become top-of-mind and ultimately win Saudi hearts.

But how we can do so when Saudis can't even get our name right!

Our idea started with an obvious but much overlooked fact: In Saudi Arabia, global brands transliterate their names. The Problem is that the sound “G” as in Burger doesn’t exist in Arabic; which generates all types of mispronunciations in funny ways: Burjer kinj, Burgher Kingh, Burqer Kinq. And for purebred people like studies we saw this linguistic challenge as opportunity and sparked a national debate about how it should be pronounce, which eventually lead us to propose a new Arabic letter to end this issue.

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 we received the brief to launch an enhanced version of the Whopper to target a young audience, we thought of doing so indirectly by launching the Whopper under a 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 posted a classic whopper ad with mispronounced “burger”, Our deliberate slip of the tongue struck a nerve on Twitter. People felt strongly about how it should be pronounced, so we replied to their tweets with their preferred versions.

To fuel the debate further, we've posted another light-hearted film staring well know local social media influencers arguing on the proper way to say “Burger King”. The Internet exploded with suggestions, theories and discussions. And the campaign took a life of its own, sparking a debate on modernizing the alphabet.

Then came our proposal: In Arabic, dots on identical letters are designed to indicate different sounds. So we added one dot to the Arabic letter “Jeem ?” to make it sound like “G”. The new letter found its way on our logo and identity.

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

By tapping into a linguistically controversial topic and trying to hack the phonetics of the Arabic language, we managed to mobilize a massive online army of followers, influencers and even brands to promote and spread our message organically. This collective effort created an unprecedented brand exposure and earned us more than $2.4 million in PR value.

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 and over 16 million campaign views.

18% more sales than our objectives. And the cherry on top was an overall sales increase of 4.2% on average per store; An achievement, in a very competitive category.

Eventually, Saudis can pronounce our name right :).