Despite having an excellent and wide selection of sandwiches, Burger King was not the leader or go to place when it comes to chicken sandwiches.

In this subcategory of QSR brands, chicken specialty brands dominate the landscape. And many focuses heavily on promotions, offers and new menu items to continuously lure new customers and retain existing ones. Additionally, they tend to have similar communication messages and claims, focusing mostly on appetizing food shots of perfectly fried chicken… in many cases with a bit of steam coming out from the sandwiches to reflect freshness and to trigger a feeling of hunger.

Within this context, our brief was to launch and differentiate Burger King’s new menu item “The Crunchy Chicken Sandwich”, while doing so with a minimal budget as we cannot outspend the competition.

By observing the category, 2 things stood out:

1- The communication is extremely visually driven.

2- Most of the campaigns are offers and promotions.

Those two observations shaped our solution. Instead of focusing on images, we thought of experimenting with other sensory stimuli, to give a more immersive audio-visual experience, as food is the art of the senses, not just one or 2 senses.

So, to promote our new crunchy chicken sandwich, we thought redefining and reintroducing crunchiness, by letting our audience enjoy it through a meticulously crafted ASMR driven campaign. A campaign that elevates the food experience, stand out from the rest, while giving our audience something new to rave about. And to make it more appealing and realistic, we went straight after moviegoers as movie theaters in Saudi are equipped with Dolby 7.1 surround systems, giving our communication a whole new dimension.

Our audience is chicken lovers across Saudi, who usually go after specialty chicken brands to meet their crave. An important audience for Burger King, as Saudis are among the top consumers of poultry. However, communication in this category is mostly visually driven. Which gave us an opportunity to experiment with sound as an alternative to what everyone else is doing. From research, we knew that ASMR was trending in Saudi. Yet, it wasn’t being highly utilized in brands communications. So, we thought of using ASMR to stand out and create the needed buzz. This came at the backdrop of an exciting new change in Saudi: Movie theaters which were banned became officially legal by mid 2018, providing us with a unique communication vehicle that offered an upgraded and immersive audio-visual experience beyond the usual channels; the perfect channel to give an out of this world ASMR experience.

For our ASMR video to give the desired tingling and exhilarating, we chose a controlled environment where the lights and the sound system come together to give an unparalleled audio-visual experience. So, we created a sound-proof studio, and worked with a sound engineer, to capture every sound detail, across different channels, to create an immersive 7.1 surround experience. We then captured different sounds like unwrapping the paper, moving the soft drink, and most importantly crunching the sandwich.

To bring this experience to life, we partnered with Vox Cinemas where their Dolby 7.1 surround systems and iMAX screens provide an amplified ASMR experience.

The video was launched across 8 theaters and movie goers were given free sandwich coupons, right after they finished watching their movies.

We also launched on YouTube where food aficionados can watch full edits on their favorite screens.

Finally, we boost the campaign through outdoor and online communication.

Our objective was to sell 15 items per store per day across Burger King’s 200+ stores, we hit 23 items which is 53% more than our objective. In some stores we went out of stock and in other places we sold more than 100 items per days.