2020/2021 Winners & Shortlists

Background

Burger King, the king of fast food, doesn’t rule in Saudi Arabia. With other brands dominating the market and new local joints popping up weekly, the brand was facing tough competition and slowly losing market share among the youth, to more trendy and modern brands. Within this context, our brief was to launch an enhanced version of Burger King’s hero sandwich “The whopper”. However, the whopper doesn’t have much equity in Saudi especially among the young generation. Accordingly, our challenge was not only to launch the enhanced whopper but to ignite interest and push for trial among an audience that is less familiar with our sandwich.

Describe the creative idea (40% of vote)

Our idea started with an obvious but much overlooked fact: In Saudi Arabia, global brands transliterate their names. The Problem is that the sound “G” as in Burger - among other sounds - doesn’t exist in Arabic; which generates all types of mispronunciations. This creates friction and an ongoing debate among Arabic language speakers on how to pronounce letters like “G”, and a headache for brands when it comes to writing their names in Arabic. So, to launch our enhanced whopper, we banked on this linguistic challenge by introducing a new variation of the letter “ج” by adding another dot to the existing one. An idea that encouraged Arabic speakers to use a simple solution for an age-old problem which is also very relevant to our brand when we know many of our audience can’t get our name “Burger King” right.

Describe the execution (40% of vote)

Since the letter “G” doesn’t exist in Arabic, our name was always mispronounced in different funny ways: Burjer, Burgher, Burqer. We saw this linguistic challenge as an opportunity, so we released a classic whopper ad with a mispronounced “burger” and sparked a national debate on modernizing the alphabet. Then came our proposal: since in Arabic, dots on identical letters indicate different sounds, we added one dot to the Arabic ‘jeem’ (ج) to make it sound like “guh”. After re-aligning the dots and changing the colors to make the new letter pop while keeping the overall design balanced, we introduced the new letter into our Arabic logo, which we then used to update branch signs and collaterals. Ultimately, we found a localized design solution so that Saudis and Arabs can get our name right, and today, we’re looking into making it our official Arabic trademark.

List the results (20% of vote)

Instead of narrowly focusing on our Whopper Sandwich, we went full fledge into the bigger “Burger World” by literally fueling a nationwide conversation on how to pronounce the “Burger” word in Arabic, while offering a solution to an age-old feud among the language speakers. During which, our brand saw a spike in social chatter, where brand mentions outperformed our highest spending competitor by 16% and eclipsed our YoY brand mentions by a factor of 16. Along with brand mentions we saw a 25% increase in followers, 61.2 million impressions, 16 million campaign views & a total of more than $2.4 million in PR value. On a business level, our goal was to double the whopper sales, which we not only did, but overachieved it by 18%. Our results were crowned by an overall sales increase of 4.2% on average per store; An achievement, in a very competitive category.