Think It Through

There are times when I really wish I had chosen to study Marketing in business school instead of Management. The first time, at MBA level, I still believed that there was a place in the world for a generalist who just wants to get on with the job at hand. The second time, I was looking for the answer to why the senior management teams of otherwise perfectly good companies keep running their firms directly into the ground, and it seemed reasonable to study the actions and strategies of the senior managers themselves. And, of course, both times through I knew I didn’t have the math for it. But quite apart from that, and leaving out the absurd bias my former department has against applied research (and the practitioners who apply it), I have noted a large number of the aforementioned management failures that relate directly to marketing decisions that even a reasonably bright six-year-old would have known better than to make…

A case in point would be Burger King’s attempt at a marketing tweet this week. I picked up the story from USA Today, but you can find details about it all over the Internet as of today. Actually a series of three tweets, the first one said “Women belong in the kitchen.” The second one pointed out that women comprise only about 20% of all professional chefs, and the third tweet introduced a new Burger King program to provide scholarships for women attending culinary schools – thus correcting the shortfall. It’s a marketing/public relations move that has some real potential, timed to coincide with International Women’s Day 2021, but whoever came up with it seems to have missed just how badly the first tweet would be received – and how likely people were to ignore tweets two and three, particularly if they were already angered by tweet number one…

It seems possible that the company was attempting to emulate the success that Wendy’s has already had with their company’s Twitter account, which has become known (if not exactly famous) for its humorously sarcastic tweets over the last few years. Unfortunately, whoever came up with this triple tweet appears to be unfamiliar with the convention of indicating a multipart tweet by putting the notation 1/3, 2/3, and 3/3, or however many tweets the message takes up. They’re also ignoring the tendency of people to stop reading something that angers them, as well as the fact that this particular message is neither sarcastic nor amusing…

Now, I don’t mean to imply that if I had a Marketing degree I would be able to tell any company when their attempt at being hip, edgy, or at least relevant was about to crater. But this isn’t the first attempt at Twitter advertising or other online marketing attempts to fly wide of the mark, and it isn’t even Burger King’s first absurdly offensive failed marketing attempt. Regular readers of this blog (assuming I have readers) will recall an earlier post about a Burger King ad featuring a new oblong burger product and a woman’s face apparently looking at it with an expression that could be interpreted as awe, fear, or revulsion, depending on your point of view…

It doesn’t take a lot of familiarity with failure analysis, let alone a graduate degree in Marketing, to recognize that the company has an unfortunate history with advertising that is not as clever or funny as they think it is, or that any future attempts at witty, edgy, or viral advertising are likely to attract greater scrutiny than they seem to have expected. You have to wonder if the person operating the Burger King  twitter feed ran this idea past anyone else – and if so, whether the “anyone else” included any actual women. Or, for that matter, anyone who had ever met an actual woman…

Other authors have written about the propensity of supposedly brilliant leaders in movies and television programs to formulate elaborate plans in which any ordinary six-year-old would be able to find obvious flaws, and suggested that if they ever have the chance to be the “evil overlord” or equivalent they will run all of their plans such an individual. It seems excessive to suggest that the senior management at Burger King should consider the same advice, but if they want the advice of a scruffy blogger who used to teach Business Strategy at a top business school, I do have some time available…