Two recent controversial Burger King marketing campaigns have cost the restaurant chain an opportunity to grow. One campaign was objected to by the Mexican community due to its negative stereotype of a character of obvious Mexican heritage in the advertisements. The other promoted a marketing tie-in with Nickelodeon Television's SpongeBob Square Pants character.
Burger King immediately pulled the first ad at the request of several Mexican groups. They also issued an apology to the Latino community.
However they ignored complaints from religious and child advocacy groups requesting the ads featuring square buttocks be pulled from the airwaves.
The result: Burger King's sales were flat for the month while McDonald's saw a 7% increase.
There is an important business, and life, lesson in play here.
1. The risks are great when you use negative stereotypes. Sometimes negative stereotypes can be very rewarding in an ad campaign. A Canadian beer company saw sales increase following a campaign poking fun at women's love of shoes and men's love of beer. In the campaign a couple is showing off their new home. The women enter a room specially built for shoes and immediately start screaming with excitement. The screams are drowned out by the sounds of men screaming. It seems they have just entered a room specially designed to chill their favorite beverage. Although the advertisement used potentially negative stereotypes consumers did not associate any negativity, instead laughing along with the concept.
Diversity among marketing teams will reduce the risk factor. Having as many different cultures as possible on a marketing team provides a great benefit as each pair of eyes and ears relates differently to proposed commercials. Diversity needs to include as many generational, ethnic, religious, and economic cultures as possible while still remaining small enough to reach decisions. At the very minimum marketing teams should contain one or more people representing the targeted demographic.
A second safety factor is to prescreen all print marketing and video concepts to focus groups prior to formalizing your campaign. This allows problems to be raised early in the process -- before large sums of money are invested.
2. Listen to customers only at the register. There are very vocal advocacy groups throughout the marketplace. One can easily fall prey to listening and reacting to a particular group. However a counter group could be on the horizon. Domino's Pizza faced a backlash from several women's groups after prohibiting a lesbian group from touring their headquarters. The round pie folks did not give in to threats by several groups offended by Domino's action. Soon counter groups rallied to the side of the pepperoni seller urging their supporters to buy their pizzas at Domino's. The result: the boycott by the orientation advocacy groups was more than offset other religious groups.
It would have been to Burger King's advantage to have monitored sales on a daily basis. They would quickly learn if the group speaking on behalf of the Mexican community was really speaking for the whole community or just a fraction of it had they monitored sales in restaurants with a heavy Mexican demographic. Likewise monitoring sales at stores in other religious demographics would have told them the true extent of the anger of the protesters.
Reacting to the voices of those raising concern does not necessarily equal the complaints and feelings of those buying your products and services.
Following these two steps can save embarrassment while protecting your sales.
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Date Published :
Jun 19 2009