Burger King at Forefront of Viral Marketing with New Fragrance "Flame"

Newswise — Burger King’s marketing campaign of a new men’s fragrance “Flame” that has a partially clad “King” looking seductively while laying on a fur rug in front of a fireplace may be a bit on the creepy side but it shows that the hamburger chain is at the forefront of viral marketing, according to a University of New Hampshire communication professor.

“There is nothing new about linking food with romance in ads — especially desserts and diet food for women, beer for men — but the Flame campaign derives some of its humor by subverting this connection. The taste of the Whopper, rather than the promise of romantic connection, as spoofed by the King’s repulsive entreaties, is the real focus of desire in the ad,” says Josh Lauer, assistant professor of communication at UNH.

“It remains to be seen whether this ploy will be successful. Ultimately, the fragrance is beside the point. The publicity associated with the humor and absurdity of it is an end in itself. It demonstrates, once again, Burger King’s commitment to pushing the envelope in viral marketing,” Lauer says.

According to Lauer, Burger King’s latest marketing campaign of the Flame fragrance comes on the heels of its “Whopper Virgins” campaign, in which the Whopper is pitted against McDonald’s Big Mac in taste tests with fast-food naïfs in remote locations such as Thailand, Romania, and Greenland. The campaign generated significant controversy, with critics condemning its ethnocentrism and promotion of unhealthy Western food, but also lots of buzz.

As the second largest fast-food hamburger restaurant behind McDonald’s, Burger King is responding to intense competition. Earlier this year Burger King issued a mandate requiring its franchises to remain open until 2 a.m., an effort to attract late-night and after-party customers with the munchies.

“The Flame fragrance campaign is presumably aimed at younger male customers who enjoy the King character’s creepy irony as a corporate anti-mascot,” Lauer says.

Burger King has been at the forefront of online marketing innovation since the launch of its memorable 2004 Subservient Chicken website, Lauer says. This promotion invited online visitors to submit real-time commands to a seemingly live webcast of a person dressed in a low-budget chicken costume performing in their living room. (The chicken figure was actually pre-programmed to respond to hundreds of commands.) Burger King struck advertising gold again earlier this year with its Whopper Freakout campaign, which featured real customers reacting to (false) news that the Whopper had been discontinued.

“Both campaigns generated enormous interest in Burger King and an avalanche of hits at its sponsored website (as well as YouTube) to watch and share its message. The appeal of such promotions is that they cut through advertising clutter by offering novelty and entertainment rather than a conventional one-sided advertising message,” Lauer says.

More importantly, such promotions are viral — they are rapidly passed along from friend to friend online and encourage active participation in the marketing campaign, he says.

“In an ad-saturated environment, word-of-mouth promotion may be more persuasive because it is rooted in the trust and authenticity of real personal relationships. Even better than product placements, in which brands are embedded in entertainment content, word-of-mouth marketing inserts a brand directly into conversation among friends. Viral marketing campaigns are successful when they inspire thousands of positive, admiring conversations about one’s brand,” Lauer says.

Lauer holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication.

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Value of Direct-to-consumer Drug Advertising Oversold

Newswise — Direct-to-consumer advertising may not be giving big pharma such a big bang for their buck after all. Despite the billions spent on bringing drug marketing campaigns straight into patients’ living rooms, such strategies have a modest effect at best—and in some cases, no effect at all.



“People tend to think that if direct-to-consumer advertising wasn’t effective, pharma wouldn’t be doing it,” says Harvard Medical School professor Stephen Soumerai, principal investigator on the study. “But as it turns out, decisions to market directly to consumers is based on scant data.”

This study was based at the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and appears September 2 online in the British Medical Journal. It is the first-ever controlled study of direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of pharmaceuticals.

Currently, the United States and New Zealand are the only countries that allow drug companies to advertise directly to patients. When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration eased advertising restrictions on the pharmaceutical industry in 1997, consumer advertising jumped 330 percent over the next 10 years. As of 2005, pharma was spending about $5 billion annually on such campaigns. Some data implied that such ads increased prescriptions, but these studies simply correlated ads with sales, begging the question, are drugs that sell more simply advertised more?

But examining the effects of advertising on sales via a controlled study is problematic. Given the overwhelming amount of advertising in the U.S., how do you find two groups that are very similar, yet one is exposed to pharmaceutical advertising and the other isn’t?

The answer: Canada.

DTCA is illegal in Canada. Not surprisingly, however, national borders are leaky and American media—television and magazines and radio, replete with pharma ads—regularly crosses into Canada. As a result, Canadians, like Americans, are swamped with these ads, with one key exception.

All American advertisements are in English. Yet Canada has a significant French-speaking population. In the Canadian province of Quebec, approximately 80 percent of its 7.5 million population speak French as their first language, and tend to get most of their news from French-language media. As a result, residents of Quebec, on the whole, are far less exposed to DTCA than other Canadians.

Quebec, then, functioned as a control group for the study. The researchers compared prescription rates for advertised drugs in English-speaking Canadian provinces with rates in Quebec, where residents were purportedly less exposed to those same ads.

“It’s not an absolutely perfect control group,” says Michael Law, first author on the paper. “There’s obviously a small percentage of Quebec residents who are exposed to English language media. But as control groups go for this sort of observational study, it’s about as good as you get.”

Law and Soumerai chose to look at three specific drugs: Enbrel (rheumatoid arthritis), Nasonex (nasal allergies), and Zelnorm (irritable bowel sydrome). All three drugs were on the market for at least one year before the DTCA campaign began, and none were advertised in Canada through “softer” consumer ads, that is, ads that may mention the drug by name without identifying the relevant conditions.

The basic question was simple: did use of these drugs increase faster in English-speaking regions after American DTCA campaigns began?

Using information from IMS Health Canada, a health information company that receives data from a panel of about 2,700 Canadian pharmacies, the researchers analyzed prescription statistics for each of these three drugs for a five-year period.

They found that for two of the drugs, Enbrel and Nasonex, DTCA had no effect whatsoever. Prescription patterns in English-speaking Canada and in Quebec remained identical both before and after DTCA campaigns began.

Sales for Zelnorm, however, did spike noticeably in English-speaking Canada as soon as the ad campaign began. While prescriptions for this drug increased by over 40 percent, this jump was relatively short-lived, and after a few years, prescription rates in both groups resumed identical patterns. A similar analysis of U.S. Medicaid prescriptions found a slightly higher, but similarly brief, jump in sales.

The researchers hypothesize that DTCA may not be as effective as other types of consumer advertising due to the unique complexity of the marketing/sales trajectory.

With a typical consumer product, an individual sees an ad and then can choose to simply go out and buy the item. “But pharmaceuticals aren’t typical consumer products,” says Soumerai. “A person needs to see an ad, get motivated by that ad, contact their doctor for an appointment, show up at the appointment, communicate both the condition and the drug to the doctor, convince the doctor that this drug is preferable to other alternatives, then actually go out and fill the prescription. This is a chain of events that can break at any point.”

This hypothesis may in fact explain the disparate effects of DTCA on these three drugs. For Enbrel and Nasonex, there are a number of over-the-counter and prescription alternatives that doctors would likely recommend as first-line treatments.

Zelnorm, however, was the only drug on the market in both the United States and Canada for constipation-predominant irritable bowel syndrome. The researchers suggest that Zelnorm would have sold very well without the consumer advertising.

In March of 2007, Zelnorm was pulled from the market due to FDA concerns that it may increase risk for heart attack and stroke.

One hundred years of marketing experience and recent studies indicate that face-to-face promotion of drugs to doctors by pharmaceutical representatives is far more effective than DTCA.

This research was supported by Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, The Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

The funding and data sources for this study had no role in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; or in the writing of the report.

Full citation:

British Medical Journal, early online publication September 2, 2008

“Effect of illicit direct-to-consumer advertising on use of etanercept, mometasone, and tegaserod in Canada: controlled longitudinal study”

Michael R Law(1), Sumit R Majumdar(2), and Stephen B Soumerai(1)

1-Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Boston, MA 2-Division of General Internal Medicine, Department of Medicine, 2E3.07 Walter Mackenzie Health Sciences Centre, University of Alberta Hospital, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Harvard Medical School http://hms.harvard.edu/hms/home.asp has more than 7,500 full-time faculty working in 11 academic departments located at the School's Boston campus or in one of 47 hospital-based clinical departments at 18 Harvard-affiliated teaching hospitals and research institutes. Those affiliates include Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Cambridge Health Alliance, Children's Hospital Boston, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Forsyth Institute, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care, Hebrew SeniorLife, Joslin Diabetes Center, Judge Baker Children's Center, Immune Disease Institute, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Massachusetts General Hospital, McLean Hospital, Mount Auburn Hospital, Schepens Eye Research Institute, Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, and VA Boston Healthcare System.

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