I called Burger King President Tom Curtis a few times this week, but it went straight to voicemail. You can also try, his number is (305) 874-0520.
Okay, so maybe it’s not his personal cell number, but Curtis is still taking calls and texts from everyone. On February 17, Burger King announced he would spend at least four hours a day for the next two weeks – including evenings and weekends – taking unfiltered calls and texts from customers, hoping to hear their opinions on all things Burger King. Do you want a new Whopper variant? Call him. Do you have a complaint about your local BK? Call him. Want to come up with a nice marketing idea yourself? Call him. Would you like to make a marriage proposal? Maybe think twice.
“I’ve had a few, but I’m married,” Curtis tells me after I finally track him down.
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It all feels like a complicated piece, doesn’t it? This is the same brand that was offered free Whoppers for clowns, hacked Google Home devicesoffered one free hamburger for anyone who deletes 10 Facebook friendsand tried it take over the Belgian monarchy.
What business leader speaks outside of carefully crafted comments, PR photos and earnings calls, let alone mingling with the hoi polloi?
The biggest challenge here for Curtis isn’t answering all those calls, but convincing everyone that it’s a genuine effort to permanently embed customer opinions into the company’s culture and operations, and not just a stunt for the marketing hype cycle.
“People need to see action,” says Curtis.
These first two weeks of Curtis taking calls are the latest step in the company’s broader “Reclaim the Flame” project, a multi-year, $400 million plan launched in 2022 for the then-struggling brand. That year was marked by restaurant closures and declining market share as Wendy’s overtook it as America’s No. 2 hamburger chain. Now things are going in the right direction. Fourth-quarter revenue rose 2.1% to $383 million. (Meanwhile, Wendy’s? Don’t ask.)
This is a compelling example of what too few brands (and business leaders) are taking to heart. Despite all the technology, social media and always-on mentality, many companies are still out of touch with their brand in the culture and the people they serve.
Witness to the seven circles of Super Bowl hell Ring found its way after what it saw as an ode to lost dogs turned into public anger over mass surveillance. On the other hand, Lay’s is hyping a recent price drop across PepsiCo Foods brands on social media, giving credit to customer feedback.
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Do it your way
In 1974, Burger King’s slogan was ‘Have it your way’, with an emphasis on customizing menus for the customer. The idea of basing the brand on customer feedback is therefore not completely out of the blue.
This idea for Curtis, and the brand more broadly, to take direct calls from customers started small. When he first joined Burger King in 2021, Curtis got the ball rolling by asking everyone on the leadership team to wear a brand logo as much as possible when traveling, or even at the grocery store. The idea was that the logo would be a magnet for real people to talk about the brand unfiltered. And sure enough, during each weekly leadership meeting, the stories started piling up.
“About four months ago we said, ‘Hey, what if we took this to a brand new place and just wide open, letting everyone in as much as possible, just to get as much feedback as possible?’ says Curtis. “That was the spirit behind this.”
Leveraging customer feedback is something Curtis has some experience with. He was at Domino’s when that chain closed its doors.Pizza wrapwhich used direct customer responses to fuel that brand’s revival. Curtis also points to Domino’s famous Pizza Tracker, launched in 2008, as a result of listening to customer feedback.
“It was in response to an insight,” he says (that insight is customers asking themselves, Hey, where’s my pizza?). “And I think what we’re doing here is similar. We’re going to get different insights from this process, but I want to emphasize that it won’t be a two-week process. This is a kickoff to an ongoing process.”
Burger King has spent the better part of a decade building a brash brand image through irreverent work with mixed success. The creepy King mascot that emerged in 2004 was permanently retired in 2015. The brand phased him out because, honestly, even when he made the stoners laugh, he scared the kids.
Whopper Detour in 2019, which used geofencing and its accompanying app to offer a one-cent Whopper to anyone within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, was a legitimate hit, driving app downloads and enthusiasm. But “Moldy Whopper” (2020), a highly artful, 34-day time-lapse video of their signature burger rotting and becoming covered in mold to highlight the fresh ingredients, was more of a marketer’s darling than a smash hit.
Curtis says the goal now is to ensure the brand image is authentic and likable, which can still include fun campaigns but must be rooted in that customer relationship. He credits CMO Joel Yashinsky and the brand’s agency partners, such as BarkleyOKPR, for the new positioning. “Let’s be a brand for the consumer, and let them decide where things go,” he says. “That really gives people the power to feel like the architect of this brand.”
Real people?!
One of the first areas of AI implementation for many organizations is customer service, where chatbots are being used to process large amounts of customer feedback into digestible reports faster than ever. Research agency Gartner has predicted that AI will solve 80% of common customer service problems autonomously by 2029. But Curtis says there’s a risk we could lose touch amid the waves of data.
“There’s just a magic in human interaction that I think we’re in danger of losing if we allow those processes to completely take over the way we understand the consumer,” he says. “So by institutionalizing and operationalizing human interaction, real human interaction, I think we can unlock a powerful force of consumer understanding because it’s being listened to and responded to legitimately and honestly.”
It’s a surprisingly rare approach, but not entirely unique. Elf Beauty, for example, has largely built its brand around the way it engages with and implements ideas from the community. CMO Kory Marchisotto has often talked about how the brand’s participation on platforms like TikTok, Twitch and more revolves around what customers say about the brand and the places they say it, and those signals become a guideline that shapes everything that follows.
“The starting point is to cultivate community,” says Marchisotto said De Drum in December. “We can catalyze community data into insights and once we have them, we co-create. We co-create content experiences, platforms and products that are for them, by them.”
Burger King has already started that process with its Whopper By You effort launched last summer, where customers solicit ideas for new Whopper variations and then release them as limited edition drops like the BBQ Brisket Whopper and Crispy Onion Whopper. According to the company, it has received more than 600,000 submissions and considers the releases to be among the most successful limited-edition products to date.
This approach is in line with other chains that want to make personalization more fun and community-focused by offering fan suggestions as limited menu items. Starbucks, for example, launched its “secret menu” last summer and asked customers to submit and vote on their favorite custom drinks.
However, Burger King is not giving up on using complex data analysis to make good decisions. After discovering that the apple pie dessert was the most requested discontinued menu item at drive-thrus, the brand brought it back in January for the first time since 2020.
Suspicious economics
Advertising agency BarkleyOKRP has been Burger King’s main advertising agency since 2022 and worked closely with the brand not only on this overall idea, but also on how this could be leveraged for brand marketing campaigns. The challenge is walking the tightrope between hyping the idea that Curtis and his team want to hear from you, without it feeling disingenuous.
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The era of AI sloppiness, media manipulation, and waves of brand BS have helped create (or accelerate) a distrust economy, where no one really thinks anything is sincere. BarkleyOKPR executive creative director Matt McNulty says what excited Curtis and his team was how vulnerable listening to people was – hearing the good, the bad and the ugly. “People often think that vulnerability can come across as weakness, at least in the cultural lexicon of brands,” says McNulty. “But this is genuinely vulnerable. It’s asking someone: how can I be better? And it’s honest.”
This all sounds pretty obvious for brands that are constantly talking about how they want to resonate with culture. So why isn’t this approach more common? McNulty’s fellow executive creative director Ben Pfutzenreuter says it comes down to risk. “If you look at corporate America, I think you see a position of hedging and risk mitigation,” Pfutzenreuter says. “But I think the answer to a culture of fear and risk mitigation is actual belief.”
Not a stuntman
Ultimately, the only real way to combat suspicion is consistent action. As Curtis says, this is just the beginning.
So far, there have been largely two types of feedback: that about people’s local restaurant, and that about the broader brand, such as menu items and marketing. “The good news about the feedback about their local experiences is that we’ve set up those channels,” says Curtis. “We are calling the owners of those restaurants back. We own many of those restaurants ourselves, so they will see those kinds of changes immediately. Brand promotions will take longer. If I am going to change the fries, I have to do the right research, testing and set up suppliers to support that.”
Unfortunately for Curtis, until a major product or innovation of some kind comes to market that customers can actually see, touch or taste, we are forced to take his word for it. He didn’t miss that either. One of his biggest challenges is ensuring that the focus remains on the feedback and not on the feedback.
“The agency is trying to do its job and capture great content,” he says. “But I try to make sure that everyone feels heard and knows that this is not a marketing stunt.”
For now, the only way to do that is to keep Curtis on the phone and let him cook.
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