Burger King Whopper: Real Meals

Jimmy George, Annabelle Butler, Jane Dorsett

Source: WARC Awards, Shortlisted, Effective Use of Brand Purpose,
2020
Downloaded from WARC

Quick-Service Restaurant chain Burger King partnered non-profit organisation Mental Health America
in a multiplatform campaign that changed the national dialogue around mental health among young
people in the US.

Thanks to social media and the need to present a perfect image to the world, mental illness was
at an all-time high among Burger King's target audience of 18- to 24-year-olds and the brand
aimed to destigmatise the subject by getting them to talk about it online.
The brand launched a Public Service Announcement across its YouTube, Facebook and Twitter
channels and supported it with Real Meals, a line of custom-packaged Whopper combo meals,
with each box featuring a different mood.
The Feel Your Way campaign delivered over 3bn impressions and a 67% increase in social
conversation about mental health.

Campaign details
Brand: Burger King Whopper
Brand owner: Restaurant Brands International
Agency: MullenLowe US
Market: United States
Industries: Restaurants & takeaways
Media channels: Online video. Packaging & design, Public relations, Social media
Budget: 0k

Executive summary
So much of Burger King's marketing is outlandish that it's easy to forget its history of social good. In 2019, we
wanted to help people in the US 'feel their way' by tackling a pressing issue: mental illness.

We understood that no one is happy all the time. With the pervasive nature of social media, there is pressure to
appear happy and perfect, but with Real Meals, Burger King celebrates being yourself and feeling however you
want to feel.

In a jab at the McDonald's Happy Meal, our Real Meals came in a variety of different moods, and 'happy' was
not one of them. They included the Pissed Meal, Blue Meal, Salty Meal, YAAAS Meal and DGAF Meal.

Our honest, buzz-driving public-service announcement and new menu item took the internet by storm, exceeding
all targets for online engagement with both the brand and the issue.

We delivered 3.05bn impressions from over 2,400 earned press hits, the equivalent of around $33m in earned
ad value. We saw over 100,000 campaign social media mentions and a 67% increase in social conversation
about mental health.1 By driving volume of conversation, we impacted brand health, while also positively
affecting the national dialogue surrounding mental health.

Market background and objectives

Burger King as a force for good

You might not expect a Quick-Service Restaurant (QSR) to be synonymous with 'social good marketing', but
Burger King isn't a typical QSR. Usually, the brand is irreverent. Occasionally, it's noble. In recent years in the
US, Burger King has released a variety of buzz-driving 'social good' marketing stunts that became part of
national discourse. The brand lives its inclusivity-driven 'have it your way' ethos by bringing to light issues of
national importance – the plight of bullying among today's youth,2 the negative effects of a repeal of Net
Neutrality laws,3 prostate cancer awareness4 and more.

Each of these efforts was met with tremendous support in both sentiment and brand health metrics – earned
media, earned advertising value, impressions, engagements, and memorability all saw historic spikes for the
brand which, in turn, affected brand perception and, eventually, revenue.5

These kinds of lifts would be particularly important in Q1, which is typically slow for most QSRs. With short-lived
resolutions to cut out unnecessary expenses and inclement weather impacting in-store foot traffic, Burger King
saw a three-year sales low through the quarter.6

Taking note of the downward trend for the quarter, and recognising the impact that buzz-driving work had had
on the brand in years past, Burger King tasked us to once again contribute to the national dialogue in a way that
would not only be noticed, but would make a lasting impact. In turn, we selected one of the most pressing and
under-addressed issues for our audience: mental illness.

Strategic challenge

Find a distinctive way for Burger King to engage its audience on the issue of mental health.

Objectives
The most-talked-about brands grow 2.5 times faster than the rest of the category,7 and this became our primary
objective – driving the volume of conversation surrounding the campaign, which would impact brand health,
while also positively affecting the national dialogue surrounding mental health.

Commercial objectives

1. Drive substantial campaign mention volume on social media.

Target: 70,000 mentions.

Burger King product campaigns see approximately 1,500 mentions on social media, while the average buzz-
driving campaign sees approximately 34,500 mentions. We needed to double this volume.8

2. Drive an unfair share of earned media impressions.

Target: 2bn.

Burger King's two most successful social good-focused campaigns, Whopper Neutrality and Bullying Jr., saw an
average of 1.9bn earned media impressions. We needed to beat both.9

Social-impact objective

3. Drive significant growth in social conversation surrounding mental health.

Target: 50% growth during the campaign window.

The conversation surrounding mental illness idled around 97.3K mentions per day in 2019. We set an
aggressive target to make a significant impact on the national dialogue.10

Insight and strategic thinking

Mental illness was at an all-time high among our target audience.

Our target comprises 18- to 24-year-old, digitally indigenous iGen and young millennials. This group has been
notably deemed the 'loneliest' generation and they struggle with high anxiety and record levels of
unhappiness.11 Over 90% of this audience reports high levels of stress, the highest of any age group and
they're the generation least likely to report 'excellent' or 'very good' mental health, and the most likely to report
their mental health as 'fair' or 'poor'.12

The pressure to be perfect.

This stress is often attributed to the digital looking glass – the pressure to appear happy, with a 'perfect life' so
often seen among peers through a highly-curated social media presence.13

Online, we portray idealised versions of ourselves, detached from reality. Feeds are plastered with smiles and
thigh gaps and highlight reels of lives best lived, amplifying pressures to appear happy at all times. Instagram
was recently noted as the 'worst social media platform for mental health'.14 It's never really real, but an endlessly
scrolling feed can quickly make happiness seem like the norm.
Yet, nearly 45% of mental illnesses go untreated, often the result of public stigma.15 People take care to avoid
the negative perceptions associated with mental illness, and the lack of public discourse drives mental illness
stigma, which is exacerbated online.16 People anonymise their identities when discussing mental illness online,
which doesn't contribute the same social proof that a public discussion would.

Studies show that discourse surrounding a stigmatised subject can drive de-stigmatisation – getting people to
talk about mental illness can help those afflicted seek treatment.17 We needed to get our audience in a public
debate about mental illness on the very platform where they were ignoring it.

Strategic insight

What better answer to fake happiness than a dose of 'real'? We wanted to give consumers permission to feel
however they want to, because no one is happy all the time – and that's OK.

Implementation, including creative and media development

The plan was simple: Get Burger King an unfair share of attention, but make it mean something. Born from the
brand's values of inclusivity and its 'have it your way' ethos, we created the Feel Your Way campaign to
communicate a simple message: no one is happy all the time. And that's OK.

To ensure that our impact was not only heard, but also felt, we partnered with Mental Health America to create a
first-of-its-kind mental health awareness campaign, which launched on May 1st, the first day of Mental Health
Awareness Month.18

The campaign combined an array of modern marketing techniques to create something new and different by
mixing product development, packaging, film, music, social good, honesty, local-market testing and an underdog
spirit into one compelling, PR-able package.

Public service announcement film

The first piece to the campaign was a digitally focused Public Service Announcement (PSA) to ignite the
conversation on social media.19

The film evolves the classic Have It Your Way jingle from a 1970s Burger King commercial to a modernised take.
The style abandons shiny and happy, opting for raw and honest as it follows individuals expressing themselves.

A high-school girl faces bullying. An empowered young woman walks out on her boss. A college grad faces the
reality of living at home with his parents. The chorus of 'Have It Your Way' is replaced with 'Feel Your Way.' A
rhythmic base allows a cast of real people, not trained singers, to deliver their performance however they felt.
Shot on film, it takes a raw look into the reality of feeling your way, that's both empathetic and celebratory.
We launched the film across Burger King's YouTube, Facebook and Twitter channels, hitting thousands of feeds
within minutes. The end card encouraged users to visit Mental Health America's website for more information
and to seek treatment.

Our community management strategy promoted discussion of the video, and of mental health. This began to
spark the discourse about mental illness that we aimed for and was soon supported by countless mental health
professionals and advocates.

Real Meals
To make the campaign more real, Burger King introduced Real Meals, a line of custom-packaged Whopper
combo meals, to stress the importance of owning how you truly feel.

Five different Real Meals were rolled out at five individual BK restaurants in Austin, Seattle, Miami, Los Angeles
and New York City. They represented angry, sad, ornery, excited and apathetic.

There's the Blue Meal, for those feeling down; the DGAF Meal, for people who don't care; the Pissed Meal, for
angry eaters; the Salty Meal, for those a tad upset; and the YAAAS Meal. (OK, so that last one is kind of a take
on happy).

Each of the five Real Meals came with the same food: a Whopper, fries and a drink. Each with its own distinctive
packaging. Each box featured a different mood, from negative to positive, accompanied by smile or frown
variants and the name of the mood underneath. The boxes echoed the campaign with a simple statement, 'No
one is happy all the time. And that's OK,' along with the logo for Mental Health America.

This was in notable opposition to competitor McDonald's, which since 1979, has offered its famed Happy Meals
as the only emotive option for purchase. With the Real Meals boxes, Burger King gave customers the option to
own their emotions, whether negative or positive, and to not feel confined to a false 'happiness' that only further
contributes to mental health stigma.

Performance against objectives

The campaign became a lightning rod for conversation about mental health, trending across the nation. We
outpaced our objectives, and even contributed to the efforts of Mental Health America.

Commercial objectives

1. We drove substantial campaign mention volume on social media.

Target: 70,000 mentions, double the average of similar campaigns.

Result: More than 100K campaign mentions, a 198% lift over the average Burger King buzz campaign.20
2. We drove an unfair share of earned media impressions.

Target: 2bn, topping Burger King's record for similar campaigns.

Result: 3.05bn, the result of over 2,400 earned press hits and the equivalent of approximately $33m in
earned ad value.21

Social impact objective

3. We drove significant growth in social conversation surrounding mental health.

Target: 50% growth during the campaign window.

Result: 67% increase in social conversation about mental health compared with the 2019 average.22
The irony of a fast-food company provoking this dialogue was not lost on us – we anticipated a polarised debate
about our belonging in this conversation.

But public dialogue about mental illness was our goal – the best way to crack the stigma – and public debate is
what we got.

Additionally, we saw significant attention directed toward Mental Health America, our partner for the campaign.
Our campaign resulted in the following amplification for MHA:

4. We drove MHA site visits.

A significant increase of 22%.23

5. We delivered the most ever MHA page views.

82% above benchmark for MHA's online mental health screening tool.24

6. We drove mental health screenings.

We saw 15,894 mental health screenings during the four-day campaign window, a 33% increase in MHA's daily
average.25

7. We delivered substantial attention on MHA's social channels with:

A 367% increase in Twitter engagement, 266% increase in impressions26

A 117% increase in Instagram engagement, 109% increase in impressions27
An 8% increase in Facebook engagement, 8% increase in impressions28

Eliminating other factors

Could it have been assisted reach?

No. This campaign received a media budget of $0, relying on an entirely organic launch to grab attention. This is
typical of Burger King buzz-intended campaigns, which derive value from their content and relevance, rather
than media spend.

Could MHA performance have been association with Mental Health Awareness Month?

Not likely. While we intentionally aligned the launch of this campaign with Mental Health Awareness Month to
maximise reach, the performance and lifts seen across Mental Health America's owned properties were
benchmarked against year-on-year performance – also during Mental Health Awareness Month.

Lessons learned
Typically, brand purpose campaigns are issue specific and that issue is linked to the category or product. This
case study shows how Burger King adopted a different approach: starting with its audience rather than the
category.

Rather like a media brand, Burger King leveraged its understanding of and depth of relationship with its young
audience to tackle a social issue of huge importance to young people – mental health.

It was a controversial move. When a brand associates itself with an issue that's not obviously linked to its
product or category it opens it up to criticism of piggy backing or exploitation. After all, what have burgers got to
do with mental health?

But there's a counter argument. There may not be a connection between mental health and burgers but there is
a strong connection between mental health and Burger King's youth audience. And Burger King knew how to
talk about this issue in a way that would get that young audience's attention.

By creating Real Meals in opposition to Happy Meals, Burger King used empathy for its target audience
underpinned by the irreverent wit and shameless one-upmanship, it is famous for, to get young people talking
about the brand but also, crucially, about mental health.

Mental Health America also acknowledged our contribution as noteworthy, unusual and significant:

"Working with brands like Burger King, a company that reaches young people, and that young people go to for
reasons other than their mental health worries, might help destigmatise mental health issues and encourage
people to get help earlier in life… When companies outside of this [health and pharmaceutical] space put this
kind of value on messages about mental health – that, for us, is priceless."

– Paul Gionfriddo, CEO, Mental Health America

Footnotes
1. Cison, 2019, Crimson Hexagon, 2019.
2. Time.com, "This Anti-Bullying PSA from Burger King Emphasizes See Something, Say Something," October
2017
3. Theverge.com, "Burger King made a surprisingly good ad about net neutrality," January 2018
4. Marketingdive.com, "Burger King gives brand mascot a clean shave in honour of 'Movember,'" November
2017
5. Burger King Internal PMIX Data, 2017-2019
6. Burger King Internal PMIX, 2017-2019
7. Bain & Company, "Value of Word of Mouth," 2013.
8. Crimson Hexagon, 2017-2019
9. Cison, 2017-2018
10. Crimson Hexagon 2019
11. NBCNews.com, "Americans are lonelier than ever – but 'Gen Z' may be the loneliest," May 2018
12. Boston25news.com, "Gen Z most likely generation to report poor mental health," January 2019
13. Time.com, "More than 90% of Gen Z is stressed out," October 2018
14. Time.com, "Why Instagram is the worst social media for mental health," May 2017
15. Mentalillnesspolicy.org, "About 50% of individuals with severe psychiatric disorders are receiving no
treatment," January 2019
16. NCBI, "Peer Communication in Online Mental Health Forums for Young People," August 2017
17. Psycnet.apa.org, "Long-term effects of public health preventative interventions," 2007; NCBI, "Children in
Beardslee Family Intervention," November 2012
18. Mhanation.org, "Excited to Partner with Burger King," May 2019
19. Burger King YouTube Channel, "#FeelYourWay," May 2019.
20. Crimson Hexagon, 2019
21. Cison, 2019
22. Crimson Hexagon, 2019
23. Mental Health America Owned Traffic Data, 2019
24. Mental Health America Owned Traffic Data, 2019
25. Mental Health America Owned Traffic Data, 2019
26. Mental Health America Owned Platform Data, 2019
27. Mental Health America Owned Platform Data, 2019
28. Mental Health America Owned Platform Data, 2019
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