Royale seal of approval / By encouraging people to exercise elaborate displays of brand love in return for a follow on TikTok and a free meal, Burger King showed just how much people will do for one of its burgers and convince new customers in France that they must be worth having.
If someone is willing to tattoo themself with the Burger King brand or spend hours liking thousands of Burger King’s posts, it suggests there is a reason to love the brand. These organic displays of costly signalling demonstrate how genuine people's love for the brand is because it would make no sense to go to those lengths otherwise.
The decision to spur on these ‘costly’ displays of super-fandom is a tactic that other brands have used to their advantage. For example, when Heinz learned how many of its superfans were getting its Ketchup bottle tattooed on their bodies, the brand created official branded tattoo ink and stencils to encourage the extreme expressions of brand love.
Exclusive offer / Given that at the start of the campaign Burger King only followed Masdak, the draw of a follow from the brand was heightened by its exclusivity. For super-fans, it's an enviable flex to be able to show that one of the biggest QSR chains in the world follows your account, particularly if the only fellow followee is TikTok-famous.
If it were easy to get a follow from Burger King it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s while, but the scarcity of the offer made super-fans want to engage. On top of the monetary win of a free whopper, the exclusivity of the offer turned a follow from Burger King into a form of social currency and sprung its biggest fans into action.
Whopper-nise your audience / If you can get your fans to take charge and go into battle for you, it makes any claims about your product more genuine and believable and saves a lot of work (and often a lot of money). That’s exactly what Burger King did in this campaign, weaponising its audience to carry out its business objectives.
All Burger King needed to do was make a small tweak to its terms and conditions and reach out to one TikToker. This alone was enough to whip its fans into action and create their own user-generated content to show off their love for Burger King, driving huge brand engagement across TikTok. Burger King simply planted the seed and watched it grow.
Aside from demonstrating the value of mobilising your direct audience, the campaign shows how tapping into specific communities on TikTok can be an effective way to boost brand engagement. Sometimes marketers can cast their net too wide. TikTok is a densely populated platform where users compete for each other’s fleeting attention. If you’re not appealing to anyone specifically, it’s easy to go unnoticed. Instead, by targeting a niche audience – fans of commercial loopholes – Burger King uncovered a more relevant set of fans who were likely to follow up on the offer.
