In recent years, Burger King Denmark has initiated a wide range of improvements to better the customer experience. From made-to-order Whoppers, to fresher ingredients, to new and improved restaurants and of course, a better customer service.

The brief was to change the perception of Burger King’s online customer service and drive new customers to the restaurants to try the Whopper.

Objectives:

Promote Burger Kings online customer service

Increase customer service as a core Burger King attribute

Get McDonalds customers to sample the Whopper

We made a deep sweep of fast food brands social channels to understand past customer interactions and how to improve them in the future, which paved the way for

“The Whopper Reply”.

With a tongue-in-cheek tone of voice we helped the McDonald’s community, as well as our own, to some long-lost customer service with more than 1100 unique replies to individuals who had publicly complained on Facebook.

This created a direct dialogue with the burger community and brought awareness to Burger King Denmark's promise of answering all inquiries within 48 hours on their customer service platforms.

News across the globe realized this when McDonald's woke up to a Facebook page full of Burger King comments: ”It turns out anyone can respond to customer complaints” as Yahoo, Fox News and other media wrote.

We successfully shifted focus to both our product and brand using our competitor's comment section and community as a canvas for our PR space – getting fans and the public to discuss Burger King and our pledge to better customer service.

We built the PR strategy around the crucial insight of keeping “The Whopper Reply” a secret.

Any leak of the campaign would ruin our ambitions because all it would take to stop us, would be for McDonald’s community managers to block Burger King Denmark’s Facebook account.

The night before launch we placed the story with the biggest national media to motivate reach and spillover on other platforms.

On launch day we shared a national press release with the key message that “We’re just trying to help”, aiming to share the press release before editorial meetings we reached out to everyone on our media list.

Later in the day, we followed up with the media in order to adapt the results, share fresh stats and talk about the effect of the campaign.

Media list: dailys, lifestyle and trade media – print, online, TV and Radio.

After months of confidential planning, we gathered a team of 15 copywriters to write as many funny and unique replies as possible over the course of one night to make sure that every online community manager from McDonald's were sleeping and wouldn’t block Burger King’s profile.

We wrote more than 1100 unique responses on McDonald’s Denmark’s Facebook page as well as over 30 local pages stretching more than 8 years back in time.

At 8AM we launched a film about the project that we edited overnight and tagged McDonald’s saying “we’re here for you” as a last comment on the stunt we just pulled and our main piece of evidence that created PR for the activation.

Fans of McD woke up to long-awaited replies on comments they had made – and free Whoppers as a reparation. The reactions were beyond positive.

• Reach

248 million impressions worldwide.

• Engagement

Consumer reactions:

80% of the online reactions were positive towards the initiative.

• Claimed vouchers:

93% of all vouchers got claimed in the restaurants.

• Influencers:

Micro-influencers distributed the campaign with an engagement rate of 8,6%.?

• PR:

Over 100 news articles both national and global. 95% of them were positive.

• Achievement against service level on social media:

Burger King went from a disadvantage to at tie in the battle of the burgers: BK up with 10,19%, McD down with 16,37%

• Preference towards Burger King against McDonald's:

The campaign tips the scales in Burger King's favour.

Increasing intent significantly: BK up with 4,62%, McD down with 9,12%

• The target audience say:

Perception of great customer service in relation to BK went up 110%

• Preference to visit Burger King instead of McDonald's went up 43% across the entire country.