A New Rule?

I don’t study Marketing as a discipline, although I’ve learned a few things about it between the MBA program and working with some of the Marketing students here at MSU. Thus I’m not really sure if it’s fair to have a specific Rule of Business just for marketing campaigns; the Second Law (e.g. “Don’t annoy the customer!”) already applies to advertising activities that are so annoying that no one in their right mind would ever do business with your company, for example. What most people outside of the business community may not realize is that Marketing is a scientific discipline that involves extensive mathematical modeling designed to determine what specific elements of our society will do in response to specific documents, audio/visual programs and other information; advertising is just one of the instruments used to achieve the results the marketing people want. However, that still doesn’t explain why anyone thought the “Freaky King” ads for Burger King were a good idea…

According to an online story in The Atlantic Magazine, the ads (print and electronic media) which feature an actor in a plastic costume portraying the eponymous Burger King character have not allowed the company to keep pace with the industry leader (McDonald’s), and have actually coincided with a measurable loss in market share. This does not suggest that McDonald’s is actually taking market share away from Burger King – there are many smaller players in the market who may have taken some or all of the lost share – but McDonald’s sales have been growing at twice the rate Burger King has managed during the same period. Which suggests that while the competition’s advertising has been neither as distinctive nor as innovative as the Burger King offerings, they appear to be more successful in terms of both market share and sales growth…

Now, it’s certainly possible that without these ads the company would be faring even worse in the market; we should acknowledge that the Freaky King ads are defiantly memorable, and that having people talking about your advertising in national publications (even if they are saying bad things about it) is always better than people not being able to remember your advertising. We should probably also concede that most people do not make purchasing decisions about fast food on the basis of advertising anyway; we’re more likely to go to the restaurant that’s on our way than to the one with the best television commercials. Brand loyalty is difficult enough to generate in products with highly differentiated features (Apple vs. PC or GM vs. Toyota, for example), whereas one cheaply-made hamburger functions pretty much like any other cheaply-made hamburger to the average consumer. Which is what gives rise to promotional tie-ins, games, contests, give-away items, and advertising mascots…

It’s also possible that the whole campaign is intentionally being made to be bad, creepy or disturbing, in what is essentially a self-referential joke – saying, in effect, that all fast-food advertising is stupid and creepy. McDonald’s uses a clown mascot, Jack-in-the-Box uses an actor with a plastic headpiece over his head, Taco Bell has used a number of disturbing images over the years (a man in drag, pretending to be pregnant in order to smuggle nachos into a sporting event under his dress, being the most recent example), so why not combine all of these elements into a single, creepy, revolting image? Sort of the advertising equivalent of a gross-out comedy movie, right? The only problem is that for every successful gross-out movie, there are a dozen more that are panned by the critics, blasted by various civic leaders, and quickly removed from public view. Which makes this a questionable model for an advertising strategy…

In the long run, while it would be amusing to issue pronouncements such as “Don’t select advertising figures that creep people out” or “Strategies that work in one medium (e.g. movies) may not work in another (e.g. advertisements)” I think I’ll just repeat one of my long-held points of faith: do not assume that just because you don’t understand something it must be simple. Oh, and don’t get your information on specialty subjects from people who leave comments at the end of online articles – or bloggers…