The Saudi QSR segment is one of the most challenging in the world. And with new brands popping up frequently, the competition is intense.

Success in this market means continuous innovations and being able to satisfy the taste preferences of Saudis. And today a lot of their demand is for spicy food. This is why every brand, big or small, pushes for their version of a “spicy menu”.

To steal the show from the competition, Burger King has just created the spiciest menu of them all. So spicy that it will make the manliest of men cry. Our brief was to promote and differentiate Burger King’s new spicy menu and capture the attention of Saudis when every brand is trying to do the same.

Our audience was young Saudis. However, because the new spicy menu is supposed to make the manliest of men cry, and in the patriarchal society of Saudi, men are not supposed to cry, we thought of banking on this social norm, and narrowing down our audience to focus primarily on young men. A population that are very proud of their masculinity and are preoccupied with other important “manly things”. Things like cars, online challenges, and heated football conversations.

Our strategy was to ride on the most trending “manly”conversation that can be linked to our menu’s proposition: So spicy, it will make even men cry.

At the time of our brief, young men were busy trolling or defending Al-Hilal football club – Saudi Arabia’s number one team – who had lost the league. Which was the perfect opportunity to spice up the ongoing conversation and then high-jack it to our

To bring our strategy to life, we needed to lock down the link between Al-Hilal’s defeat and men crying. And that link was Sami Al Jaber, Al-Hilal’s previous striker, coach, and a symbol of masculinity in Saudi, who previously admitted crying while in shower.

We then deleted our previous posts, unfollowed everyone and followed just Sami Al Jaber; making our Twitter account seem hacked by Al-Hilal rival fan. Then we poured gasoline on fire with a tweet: ‘When in shower, do you cry?’. Believing our account was hacked, fans went crazy, and even Twitter fell for it. We fueled the conversation further through random ‘crying’ tweets, along with fun content showing Saudi men comfortable with their tears.

Our content went viral, and fans waited for our next eye-watering post … we finally revealed our Spicy Menu asking: “Who said men don’t cry?”, “our spicy menu, a taste worth crying for.”

Online Engagement results:

• 5.6 million views across Twitter and YouTube.

• 45.5 million impressions

• More than $1 million in PR value.

• 100% community growth.

• In 8 days, we had more brand mentions than the entire mentions of 2018.

• From second worst share of voice in the industry to the most talked about brand among direct and indirect competitors in only 8 days

Business Results:

Over-achieved our sales objective by more than 35%. Broke sales records in some branches and went out of stock in key branches.