Burger King's Confounding and Unconvincing Message
trust the guy who has no idea what he’s talking about
Posted Dec 21, 06:08 pm in branding, business, marketing
The geniuses at Burger King’s ad firm have been deeply committed to their long-standing tradition of churning out increasingly edgy and attention-grabbing (read: disturbing and borderline offensive) commercials. The latest in its decades-old string of abominations is the controversial series of commercials it is calling “Whopper Virgins.”
Here’s the basic idea: Let’s take a Big Mac and a Whopper around to isolated communities around the world— communities that are steeped in their local traditions and largely unaffected by trends in globalization— feed them these sandwiches, and see what they prefer.
Many observers were aghast by the company’s use of tribal peoples to hawk fast food; BK’s apparent lack of compunction in traveling to remote areas of places like Tibet, Thailand, and Romania to film natives eating greasy Western-style burgers apparently reeked of exploitation and cultural insensitivity. Gee, who would have thought?
But let’s leave ethics aside for a minute, and think hard about what this ad’s message is trying to tell us: It’s saying that people who have never had a burger before prefer the Whopper. This, apparently, is supposed to make you feel confident that the Whopper is the superior burger. I find this an odd conclusion to draw.
If the Miller Brewing Company told you that they’d served a 21 year old kid who’d never had a drink in his life a Miller High Life and a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale, and the kid chose the Miller, you’d probably wonder about their line of reasoning in stating that this shows Miller to be the better beer. In this case, the kid’s choice of Miller as the winner alone calls his judgment into question, but the fact that the kid has no experience in drinking beers should cause you to wonder about his qualifications in making a particularly informed judgment. In fact, you’d probably be a lot more convinced by the judgment of someone who had drunk thousands of beers over his life, including hundreds of different brands. A borderline alcoholic with a good job and a taste for la dolce vita might be a good choice. Why on earth would you trust someone who didn’t know what he was talking about? You’d be more inclined to trust a connoisseur, or at the very least, someone whose tastes resembled your own.
And speaking of people whose tastes are like yours, Burger King is soliciting the culinary opinions of people who whose cultural palates differ wildly from that of typical Westerners. Tibetans, for example relish Yak’s milk, whose smell alone would make most people in the U.S. nauseous. Do you trust their judgment in eating a broiled piece of meat smothered in western condiments like pickles, ketchup, and mayonnaise? Most of the aforementioned ingredients aren’t even available in Tibet. Why would anyone think they’d be good judges of what a Westerner might seek in a sandwich? Imagine if you were asked by a Chinese restaurant to compare the relative merits of their jellyfish entree with one made by the restaurant’s competitor. How confident would you be that you had any qualifications whatsoever to make an informed judgment? And how much credence should be given to your opinion, anyway?