burger king

Crowdsourced Burger Photography

A fast food giant faces a lawsuit because their burgers don’t look like they do in the marketing. It’s not the first time.

Marketing photograph showing Burger King's "Whopper" burger. — Did you ever see a Whopper™️ that looked like this? Me neither.

If I ran a fast food franchise affected by this kind of legal action, do you know what I would do? I’d try to turn it back around into marketing exercise with a bit of crowdsourcing!

Think about it: get your customers to take photos and send them to you. For every franchisee that uses a photo you take, you get a voucher for a free meal (redeemable at any outlet, of course). And where it appears on the digital signage menus they all seem to have nowadays, your photo will have your name on it too.

Most submissions will be… unsuitable, of course. You’ll need a team of people vetting submissions. But for every 50 people who send a blurry picture of an unappetising bit of sludge-meat in a bun; for every 10 people who actually try hard but get too much background in or you can see the logo on their clothing or whatever; for every 5 people that deliberately send something offensive… you might get one genuinely good candid burger picture. Those pics get pushed out to franchisees to use. Sorted.

Now if anybody complains that you fake your photos you can explain that every one of your food pictures was taken by a real-life customer, and their name or handle is on the bottom of each one. Sure, you get to vet them, but they’re still all verifiably genuine pictures of your food.

And you probably only have to do this gimmick for a year and then everybody will forget. Crowdsourcing as a marketing opportunity: that’s what I’d be doing if I were crowned Burger King.

Burger King Love Us

A new-looking manager (young, with a shiny badge) is making Changes at the Burger King around the corner from us. From Monday, the entire restaurant will become No Smoking (yay!), and the old upstairs toilets – once closed owing to vandalism – have been re-opened. Claire and I were in there this evening, discussing our comparative days (mine at work, hers learning Japanese), and met the new-looking manager, who gave us vouchers each, redeemable for free meals there in future. Nice.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #34:

Go into Burger King, and ask for an nuclear-powered intercontinental ballistic duck-burger, with medium fries and a Sprite. Get rather upset when they refuse to serve a nuclear-powered intercontinental ballistic duck-burger. Ask them what kind of establishment they are, anyway, that doesn’t serve nuclear-powered intercontinental ballistic duck-burgers. Ask for a complaints form. Half way through filling it in (and when the staff are thoroughly scared and/or confused), ask them what you asked for. When they reply, look embarrassed and apologise, and say that you meant a Double Whopper. Shuffle away sheepishly with your burger.
The whole affair would have been a lot less fun if I hadn’t had my floormate in there with me, trying desperatley to work out whether I was doing it as a joke or had actually (finally) lost my marbles.

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.

Cool Thing Of The Day

Cool And Interesting Thing Of The Day To Do At The University Of Wales, Aberystwyth, #9:

Steal a flag from a golf course, and, without the aid of alcohol, smuggle it through town, into and out of burger king, and onto campus, with the overall aim of setting up your own course near your room, and hide it under a bridge near your back door, and have somebody steal it from you… bugger…

The ‘cool and interesting things’ were originally published to a location at which my “friends back home” could read them, during the first few months of my time at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, which I started in September 1999. It proved to be particularly popular, and so now it is immortalised through the medium of my weblog.