As a business owner, would you ever ask your customers to buy from your biggest competitor? Certainly not.
The business industry is built on the opposite foundation, taking customers away from your competitor and towards you. So at the first glance, requesting your customers to visit your competitor’s business would seem bizarre.
But you don’t become as big as Burger King by doing conventional things anyway, right? This absurd act of sending your customers to their competitors was done by none other than this fast-food giant in 2019.
Burger King Sends Customers To McDonald’s
McDonald’s held its traditional McHappy Day in which it donates $2 to the Children With Cancer Foundation for every Big Mac signature burger that it sells. It is a noble cause indeed and Burger King decided to extend its own nobility by holding ‘a day without Whopper’ in Argentina that year.
It stopped the sale of its best-selling product, Whopper and urged its customers to visit the nearest McDonald’s branch and buy a Big Mac instead. It was especially endearing when the Burger King himself visited a McD and bought their burger.
That day, Mcdonald’s sold extra 73,437 Big Mac burgers, raising the record-high donation for the charity.
A Gesture That Won Hearts
Burger King may have lost its sales that day, but it won something better – people’s hearts from across the globe. It was a bold step by Burger King, especially after its McWhopper initiated was outright rejected by McDonald’s.
In a full-page newspaper ad in the NY Times, Burger King proposed, “How about we call a ceasefire on these so-called ‘burger wars’?”
It was planning to create McWhopper, “all of the tastiest bits of your Big Mac and our Whopper united in one delicious, peace-loving burger, developed together, cooked together and available in one location for one day only.”
Except, it hadn’t consulted anyone from McDonald’s beforehand. The latter heard about it the first time through the newspaper ad itself. And what did they do? McD’s CEO turned down the proposal on Facebook saying, “A simple phone call will do next time.”
Read More: In Pics: Burger King Invites Local Eateries To Advertise On Its Insta For Free
Burger King Asks Customers Again To Order From McDonald’s
Urging customers to order from McD was not a one-time thing. It did so in 2020 as well, when the world was grappled with the COVID-19 pandemic.
It posted a flyer on Twitter with the headline being “Order From McDonald’s”. The content urged people to order from its rival food chains for the sake of thousands of people employed in those companies.
“Getting a Whopper is always best, but ordering a Big Mac is also not such a bad thing,” said the flyer.
We know, we never thought we’d be saying this either. pic.twitter.com/cVRMSLSDq6
— Burger King (@BurgerKingUK) November 2, 2020
Putting your rivalry aside and coming together for noble causes is not a conventional thing in a cut-throat corporate world. But, Burger King has time and again done it for greater benefit and it’s done a pretty good job at it.
Sources: Medium, New Indian Express, LiveMint
Image Sources: Google Images
Find The Blogger: @TinaGarg18
This post is tagged under: fast food industry, burgers, whopper, maharaja mac, Mcdonald’s, burger king, a day without whopper, big mac, children with cancer, noble cause, mcwhopper, rivalry, competitors, corporate sector, covid-19 pandemic, order a Big Mac
