burgers

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.

McDonalds Let the Internet Create Their Own Burgers and Guess What Happened

This article is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.

McDonalds had to know what they were doing. The New Zealand branch of the franchise launched its “Create Your Taste” campaign with a special promotion: Design your own burger and get free fries and a soft drink for your trouble. Not a bad idea in theory, but then there’s the part where they let everyone share their hideous creations. There was no way that someone somewhere at the company didn’t speak up at one point and say “Hey uh, you know that the internet is just going to create the most offensive and terrible burgers possible, right?”

Tristan Cooper (Dorkly)

Razburgers

Rory‘s making some more of his delicious-looking all-steak burgers for tomorrow’s barbeque. If you want one (and are willing to pay for the mince!) drop him a comment on his blog.

This evening, I kicked off with a few hobbies I’ve neglected lately, starting brewing some wine and juggling some fire on the beach. It’s amazing how quickly you lose the fitness to juggle clubs effectively if you don’t do it for a year or two. Must get more practice.

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.