At B K, Have it your way!
Maybe with these new marketing changes Burger King is making, we can truly have it our way!
This month I am plugging Ranken Jordan Pediatric Hospital. To donate, please visit https://rankenjordanfoundation.org/donate/
SOURCES:
https://www.marketingdive.com/news/inside-dominos-first-refresh-in-a-decade-including-its-cravemark/801945/
https://hbr.org/2016/11/how-dominos-pizza-reinvented-itself (Archived: https://archive.ph/oz0B4)
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/26/business/burger-king-new-whopper
https://news.bk.com/blog-posts/burger-king-r-puts-its-president-on-the-line-giving-guests-direct-access-to-share-feedback
https://abcnews.com/GMA/Food/burger-kings-new-whopper-recipe-change-after-customer/story?id=130526679
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/02/26/burger-king-ai-chatbot-patty-employee-friendliness/88879396007/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Every year in my qualitative research course, I buy pizza for my students during one of our meetings, and it’s usually not just any pizza – I like to buy Domino’s Pizza because it has a very particular story behind it.
See, back in 2010, Domino’s Pizza got a new CEO named Patrick Doyle who was tasked with turning around the brand. Doyle realized that the main reason people ordered Domino’s was because the chain was good at delivery. But everything else? Not so much. Especially the pizza. Domino’s Pizza was terrible. I can tell you as a pizza lover myself – it tasted like soggy cardboard with bland sauce, boring cheese and uninteresting toppings. It was edible, sure, but it was rare you’d find anyone who’d get excited about Domino’s.
So, how did Doyle and his team turn things around? First of all, they recognized that the technology underneath their delivery system had to be their core competency, and they doubled down on that, which is one of the reasons Domino’s today has one of the gold standards for mobile apps for ordering food. But they also decided to completely reinvent their pizza with new dough, new sauce, new cheese blends and better toppings.
And then, instead of just saying “new and improved!”, they went on a publicity tour telling the world that they’d done marketing research, found out that their customers hated their pizza, and they’d used the feedback to fix it.
Think about that for a moment. It’s a stunning strategy for one of the biggest and most recognizable pizza brands in the world to take on, and yet the humility of it – and the fact that the new pizza was actually pretty good! – allowed Domino’s to enjoy a major comeback. In fact, while competitors Pizza Hut and Papa John’s are closing stores right now, Domino’s just unveiled a refresh on its brand last fall.
To people heading out into the world of marketing and research, Domino’s is a great case study.
But you know who’s using that same playbook to try to make a comeback of their own? Burger King. And I was actually rather stunned this week to find out that they’re so invested in addressing feedback about their iconic Whopper that their company president is currently on a mission to talk to consumers directly for two weeks by taking daily phone calls from them.
That’s pretty amazing, and I’m gonna tell you all about it in this episode!
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So, when was the last time a company president gave you their phone number and asked you to call and give them feedback? I do it all the time with my clients, but I have a small number of people I serve and I don’t mind them calling. I’d never dream of doing it if I ran a company like Burger King, though, because I’d expect to hear all sorts of complaints.
But right now, you can call or text (305) 874-0520 and talk to Tom Curtis, the company president, about how Burger King can be better. In fact, I did this myself – I sent him a text to let him know we’d be talking about this on The Marketing Gateway, and I also mentioned that as a vegetarian, I love the Impossible Whopper and also that I wish Burger King would improve its service model and suggested that they study Chick-Fil-A for inspiration, because nobody does fast food better than Chick-Fil-A right now.
And I’m saying that as someone who can’t even eat there because they don’t have much of anything a vegetarian would want on the menu!
Side note: Chick-Fil-A, introduce a vegetarian chicken sandwich and I’ll be a loyal customer. It’s not hard. I make ‘em at home all the time.
So, what’s driving Burger King to seek feedback this way? It’s actually a pretty interesting story. See, Burger King has this very iconic sandwich called the Whopper, which is a huge beef burger on a sesame seed bun with lettuce, sliced white onions, pickles tomatoes, mayo, ketchup and, if you want it, a slice of cheese. But the problem is, it’s also their most-complained about sandwich.
Customers regularly complain to Burger King that their Whoppers are smushed or smashed or just falling apart, or that they get cold almost immediately after they’re served, especially in the drive-through. The main problem is how they’re packaged. Whoppers are assembled and then rolled up in wrapping paper, which means customers need to unwrap them to eat them. That whole process is leading to the Whopper being compressed and then springing to life when the paper’s opened, and the buns also don’t hold up very well under that abuse.
Now, we marketers know that when the product isn’t consistent, there are plenty of ways to fix it. Packing is a big one, and Burger King is addressing this by changing the packaging of the Whopper from a paper wrap to a clamshell-style cardboard box. This will actually make a huge difference, and I’m speaking from experience here as a former McDonald’s manager, because the boxes protect the sandwich from getting smashed, limit the amount of compression on the bun and also keep the food warm. For a sandwich like the Whopper, it’s a good call.
But Burger King didn’t arrive at this decision just to copy the competition. They actually tried a lot of different ways to pack the burger, even looking at building it upside-down, with the ingredients below the meat instead of on top of it, so the burger would stay together. They spent seven months looking at all sorts of alternatives, and ultimately realized there was no reason to change the design of the Whopper – just a need to optimize it.
And optimizing often means making changes to the product to make it seem like it’s new and improved, and that’s exactly what Burger King is planning. They’re reformulating their mayonnaise to have a creamier texture and a hint of citrus and they’re changing their buns to be higher in quality and adding a glaze, which helps the sesame seeds to stick to the bun better than before.
I’ll add, they didn’t just do this overnight! They had to convince their network of bakeries to install new equipment to make the buns and they also are raising costs on franchise operators by around $4,000 a year while asking them not to pass those costs on to the customers. The hope is that the new enhanced Whopper will have enough pull to bring customers back into Burger King to try it, and if so, those franchise owners will get a return on their investment.
But Burger King is also realizing its problems don’t just involve the Whopper, hence the request for public discussion with the company president. They need to work on the rest of their menu, too, and also their service model. And this is where they’ve turned to another interesting idea:
A chatbot named Patty.
So at Burger King, employees serving customers wear headsets that they use to take orders from drive-through customers. These headsets are now going to be integrated and an AI system called BK Assistant that will assist with taking orders and also prompting employees to say words like “please” and “thank you.” The technology will also analyze orders and offer suggestions on scripting and phrasing to enhance clarity.
Burger King claims this will be more in a training sense than a performance analytics sense, but of course how that works out remains to be seen. I have taken many a drive-through order, and I’ve found a lot of the problem isn’t the order taker; it’s the customers not knowing what they want. So we’ll see if that works out or if Patty’s constant nagging becomes one of the reasons employees stop wanting to work at Burger King.
What’s more interesting is the technology can alert managers when there are stockouts or customer service issues. Customers will be able to report concerns to the system and the managers will receive a notification and suggestion about what to do. That allows managers to do their job better so they can spend more time interacting with the customers, and to me, that sounds like a positive use of the technology, provided that the managers have enough staff and resources to actually do anything about the problems they’re facing.
And that’s really the key to all of this – Burger King can be humble enough to accept feedback, it can enhance its Whopper and its menu and it can use technology to improve its service model. But Burger King needs to invest in its people, too, and if the chain can’t build a culture that attracts and retains employees, all of this will be for naught, because the only other strategy is to lower prices, and Burger King absolutely cannot afford to do that right now. No one in the food service industry can without making huge compromises somewhere.
So here’s my suggestion to Burger King – when you’re done talking to your customers, start talking to your front-line staff and ask them what recommendations they have. You might be surprised how wise and insightful they are when it comes to serving customers! Many of them have stories about how they went above and beyond to make a customer’s day better, and many more have feedback about how the kitchen could be better organized, how the drive-through service could be improved or how the order-taking system could be refined.
I mentioned Chick-Fil-A before, but let me mention another thriving chain: In-N-Out Burger, that California staple that blows every other burger chain out of the water with its great food, affordable prices and excellent customer service. You’ll never find an In-N-Out that’s struggling for business because their service model is about simplicity. They have a limited menu, they don’t freeze any of their ingredients and they staff their stores to always be busy. They also offer generous pay, great benefits and a structured environment in which you’re expected to work hard, but everyone else is, too.
I hope Tom Curtis is doing his homework on what those competitors are doing right, because Burger King could absolutely pull a Domino’s Pizza move and rebuild its brand to be one of the biggest and best while rivals are closing down around them.
It makes for a great story and the marketing team would probably love to be able to talk about the underdog who’s striving to be better, not just a Whopper with new packaging and some creamy, lemony mayo.
But it’s gonna take more than a little bit of change. It’s going to take a willingness to admit that you could be better and then find a way to get there.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway. See ya next time!
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