17th of January 2019 it became widely known in the world press that McDonalds lost a case where they had sued a small Irish hamburger chain called Super Macs. They no longer had the exclusive rights to the trademark name Big Mac within the EU. All global big media reported about this.

Only one week later Burger King in Sweden renamed their burgers on the meny board in restaurants - The Not Big Macs were introduced.

New names were introduced on the Burger King standard Menu board in some restaurants:

"The Burger Big Mac wants to be"

"The Like a Big Mac but actually big"

"The Anything but a Big Mac"

"The Like a Big Mac Mac but juicier and tastier"

"The Big Mac-ish but flame grilled of course"

In Sweden McDonalds are twice the size of Burger King. Their SOV is three times as big. In order to get noticed Burger King need to do something extraordinary. Internationally there har been a long tradition of Burger King acting as a true challenger brand. It has not been the case in in Sweden, where Burger King have done very traditional communication. It was time for a change.

So when the world press wrote about that McDonalds lost the exclusive rights to their signature product Big Mac, the opportunity was to good to waste. A strategy emerged to target the same journalists, but with a follow up story they hopefully couldn't resist. Less than a week later the "Not Big Macs" were launched.

A simple name change on the existing menu board was basically the campaign. The burgers new name all had references to Big Mac, but in a cheeky way. Instead of ordering i.e. "A Whopper Cheese King", customer now ordered "A Big Mac-ish but flame grilled of course".

A very simple launch film was made showing a handfull of people ordering the the new burgers. The film was sent out to practically all of the same media that one week earlier had reported about the lawsuit loss for McDonalds.

The news spread from country to country and media outlet to media outlet. Newspapers, TV news shows and all sort of media platforms took up the story, from Australia and Japan to US, South America and Europe wrote about Burger King "trolling" McDonalds. On blogs, Twitter and Instagram.and the news of the campaign was alive for weeks. BBC, Fox News, Washington Post, Guardian, El Pais and 2 frontage posts at Reddit at the same time to name a few. At the end The Not Big Macs counted 4,77 Billion impressions.

It was a commercial success - The sales week after the launch was the best January week for Burger King in Sweden ever.