Remember when Wendy’s had its shit together? The U.S. burger brand with the square-patties spent decades in the dusty brand wilderness, but then suddenly it started smashing it.
It started with product truth. Fresh, never frozen beef. Not a tagline invented in a workshop but an actual operational fact, hammered home relentlessly while McDonald’s kept defrosting.
Then came the voice.
Wendy’s Twitter account started roasting anyone who wandered into its mentions, and a teenager asking how many retweets he needed for free nuggets became, briefly, the most retweeted post in history.
Finally there was the big structural bet: breakfast, launched nationally, and backed up with proper media money.
And it worked. In 2021 Wendy’s overtook Burger King to become America’s second biggest burger chain for the first time. Let’s be honest, the brand Wendy’s deposed for that place deserved everything it got, with extra fries. Because the Burger King of that era was the industry’s most florid case of AADD: Advertising Attention Deficit Disorder.
A subservient chicken that did whatever you typed; a masked plastic King with a fixed grin sneaking into strangers’ beds; an invitation to sacrifice ten Facebook friends for a free Whopper; a marriage proposal to McDonald’s. And then there was the infamous tweet: “Women belong in the kitchen.”
Award juries loved those campaigns as much as consumers ignored them.
I’m not saying these were bad campaigns. They weren’t campaigns at all. Just brief, distracted, tactical assaults. Each used a different strategy, a different tone, a different showreel. The only consistent thing about Burger King’s advertising was its inconsistency.
Worse, while the ads chased Lions, the rest of the marketing mix was left to rot faster than that infamous Whopper. The menu bloated, and the restaurants aged.
Burger King ignored positioning, product, place, and price, all while promotion did interpretive dance moves on a cocktail of everchanging insights.
“For years, we’ve been spreading ourselves too thin across too many messages with mixed results,” said then-CEO Jose Cil in 2021, who actually appeared to be dizzy as he said it.
