The whole campaign started by monitoring the social chatter which led us to the insight: the word burger is written in several ways as the sound “G” is none present in Arabic.

So, we launched with a creative that brought this feud to the surface through weirdly written tweets and an online teaser video with mispronounced and misspelled VO. Soon after, twitter went on fire and thousands joined the conversation, praised the work and even tweeted of their intention to order from Burger King after seeing the campaign. And order they did! The campaigns engagement translated into a big jump

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. We saw this linguistic challenge as opportunity and sparked a national debate on modernizing the alphabet. Then came our proposal to design Arabic letter.

Burger communication in Saudi is extremely similar and brands tend to compete on price and promotions and products that are copycats. Our strategy was to find a different angle to communicate our enhanced whopper without allowing the competition a chance to retaliate or compare.

Through online research, we found a very interesting angle that no other brand has approached: How to pronounce burger correctly? The proper pronunciation was an ongoing feud with no consensus among our audience.

Accordingly, our creative idea was to use this linguistic issue of mispronunciation and create a story around it to promote our whopper without really going into the details of the sandwich, the price or the ingredients.

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 :).

In English, the word burger is written in one form, in Arabic however, it is written in several forms since the Arabic language lacks the sound “G” as in burger and there is no one letter to represent the sound “G”. This difference in writing is a source of ongoing online debate among the language speakers on how to correctly pronounce foreign words with sounds that do not exist in Arabic.