As those of you who read my blog know, I HATE Burger King's ad campaign with the freaky looking King character. And, it appears others do too and Burger King has finally killed the King character and has hired a new ad agency to focus on selling the product. Even though the "King" was an award winning ad campaign, IT LOWERED SALES! So, that pretty much shows you that the people who give away advertising awards have no clue what is good advertising.
The point of advertising is to INCREASE SALES. That's it. Advertising is supposed to be salesmanship on a mass scale. Too bad most ad agencies have forgotten that and think advertising is about being "edgy" whatever the hell that means. Actually, yes I do know what edgy means. It means the ad agency has no clue how to sell the product so they create some super "creative" ad campaign that has almost nothing to do with selling the product. However, the ad agencies will argue that sales are not the main focus. What they are doing with their creative ad campaign is building mind share, and branding, and fancy BS statements like that that basically mean, we have no clue how to sell your product but we want your money to create your advertising.
Remember, the purpose of advertising is to increase sales and not to win awards.
Peter Geisheker, CEO
The Geisheker Group marketing firm
http://www.geisheker.com
(920) 471-163
"We don't help you compete, we help you dominate!"
1 comments:
Hi Peter! Love this post.
I too have not been a fan of "The King" and here's why.
Burger King has always been the home of “flame broiled” and while the imagery of this has remained consistent in their marketing, in recent years, it seems that the focus of Burger King’s unique benefit has shifted to “have it your way” and various forms of “The King Behaving Badly”. The difficulty with this is, many of Burger King’s competitors can easily shift their attention to provide customization which nullifies this unique benefit. Most consumers today understand that they can ask restaurants to “hold the pickles” and it will be done, so this benefit isn’t as unique as it once was. With regards to “The King Behaving Badly” this may resonate with teenage boys but does little to attract those more affluent and family decision maker consumers.
I’d like to see a return to the benefit of “flame broiled” as it is more difficult for competitors to mimic. I think the difficulty has been in the fact that the ways one can creatively convey this unique benefit are considered limited. I think the success of the “Sacrifice Your Friends” campaign shows that there are other highly effective ways to creatively look at the “flame broiled” imagery and I’d like to see them build on that.
If they continued along this vein using the mildly "hellish" or "hellion" attitude combined to convey the flame broiled image, I think they could have a long lasting position to hold onto.
Burger King's burgers are flame broiled. That's the USP and should be the only position.
Just my 2 cents
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