We needed to promote Burger King's new positioning "BE YOUR WAY", use it as an ignition for conversations around acceptance and equal rights, and get people to our stores. To achieve all of this, we decided to let our own products talk. With a simple change in one of our flagship products - wrapping the Whopper with the colors of the rainbow -, we managed to get our message across, sell burgers, and get people to use our own product as a token, a souvenir, an ignition of conversation around acceptance and equal rights.

Our objective was to promote Burger King’s new positioning “BE YOUR WAY” and use it to ignite conversation about acceptance and equal rights around the world. And sell burgers, of course. Our idea was to use the brand's own product. We thought that, if Burger King could build over 200000 different burgers, it accepts any burger, no matter what it is. So we created a new one: the Proud Whopper, a regular Whopper wrapped with the colors of the rainbow. Inside the wrapper a message explained everything "We are all the same inside."

In just one week, the Proud Whopper reignited conversation about equal rights, generating over 7 million views, 1.1 billion media impressions worth $21 million in earned media, over 450 thousand blog mentions, and became the #1 trending topic on Facebook and Twitter, gathering 57000 and 14000 new fans, respectively. According to IPSOS research, the Proud Whopper reached 1 out of every 5 Americans. The wrappers became souvenir people took home and a true symbol of acceptance, taking over Instagram, and even being sold on EBAY for up to US$ 1,000. The film with people’s reactions to the launch of this “new” burger also generated hundreds of response videos online. In short, the Proud Whopper became a true proclamation of equality.

We launched the Proud Whopper during San Francisco Pride parade, at the Burger King at 8th and Market Street, exactly where the parade ends. People flocked the store to try this rainbow colored burger. The reactions during the whole process of buying the burger, unwrapping, and discovering the message generated an online film, which spread our message further, through social medias and mass media publications. With a simple, product-centric idea, we managed to achieve all our objectives: promote our new positioning, ignite a conversation around it, and sell burgers.