This week there was a call for peace in the Burger Wars — but the results look more like brand warfare.
In case you missed it: this week Burger King extended a co-branded olive branch to fast food rival McDonald’s, offering to “Settle The Beef ” with a one-day partnership in honor of World Peace Day on September 21st.
“Burger King genuinely wants to unite with McDonald’s on September 21 2015 to prepare and serve the McWhopper and get the world talking about Peace Day,” the brand announced on its fully-designed proposal site, McWhopper.com.
The goal? To boost global awareness of Peace Day by serving a limited edition, co-branded burger — the “McWhopper,” of course — at a pop-up restaurant on neutral ground (aka Atlanta, Georgia).
Burger King launched the so-called “McWhopper proposal” with a content marketing full-court press, with the dissemination of McWhopper-related content across the brand’s digital channels, as well as full-page ads published in The New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
Opinions are divided over whether the McWhopper proposal was an earnest call for collaboration or a thinly-veiled publicity stunt… but from a marketing perspective, it was a runaway success.
Across every channel, Burger King’s “McWhopper” content is a hit so far, including above-average engagement on Twitter (7X as many interactions as the brand’s average tweet)…
…Tumblr (4X as many interactions as the brand’s average post)
…and YouTube (2X as many interactions as the brand’s average post).
On Twitter, Burger King’s retweets rose by over 3K thanks to the #McWhopperProposal!
McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook responded to the stunt via the brand’s Facebook page, calling for the brands to “do something bigger to make a difference,” but also “acknowledge that between us there is simply a friendly business competition and certainly not the unequaled circumstances of the real pain and suffering of war.”
War or not, Burger King clearly came out on top. We declare Burger King the McWhopper marketing winner!