A Whopper of a Blunder - The ConsumHERist

Posted on | January 22, 2009 |

by Delia Passi

A few weeks ago I saw a news item announcing a new campaign for Burger King, crafted by the award winning agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky. The campaign, via an application that you would install on your Facebook profile, encourages users to “de-friend” people who had been “friended” by you previously, in exchange for credit toward a Burger King Whopper. Drop ten friends and earn a Whopper coupon.

This seemed to be an interesting way to tie BK to a need that a lot of Facebook users probably have, which is the need to eliminate a lot of so called friends that they had taken on but were no longer, or perhaps never were, close to. Now normally Facebook lets you drop a friend without any notice, but this application added the startling step of sending the de-friended individual a blunt but supposedly tongue-in-cheek message that they had been sacrificed (hence the name Whopper Sacrifice) for a tenth of a Whopper. To top it off, the deleting user’s profile gets a list of the deleted friends posted on their “Wall” for all to see.

I found it kind of stunning that someone felt this kind of treatment was somehow amusing and would elevate Burger King in the eyes of the consumer. I even posted a comment to the effect that I thought women especially might not find this the decent thing to do to their “friends” regardless of the degree of their friendship. But I felt somewhat in the minority as a lot of people, most of who seemed to be men, thought the campaign was a brilliant word-of-mouth campaign, another Crispin gift of marketing magic. I scratched my head.

About a week later, it was announced that Facebook had asked BK to modify the application so that users weren’t notified. In response, BK politely cancelled the campaign on the basis that without the notification the campaign wouldn’t have the same impact. Facebook cited their privacy policies.

I felt a bit vindicated, but again I scratched my head. Hadn’t Facebook been involved in the development of this campaign? Surely an account and an agency as large as BK and Crispin would not have ventured forward without alerting Facebook, and surely Facebook would have known about the notifications. I sensed something inaccurate about the whole unraveling of this campaign, but everyone involved had a cover story.

I wonder if the de-friended users took offense to this campaign. I wonder if women were in the majority of those who did. The whole thing gave me a sense that something else was wrong.

Eventually (maybe I’m slow), I came to recognize that the biggest flaw with this whole program wasn’t so much some violation of the users’ privacy so much as a violation of the concept of friendship, which is fundamental to the existence of Facebook. If this is just a place where it is fun to dump your friends, how much longer will people equate the site with friendship? And by the way, have you ever heard of a woman who was dumped publicly that reacted to it with humor?

BK and Crispin are guilty of gross crassness at best, but Facebook made the bigger blunder, by allowing something like this to happen to their users in the first place. Oh, yeah, but they didn’t allow it. They say.

P.S. I don’t maintain a profile on Facebook, so maybe I don’t understand the psyche of those (generally younger than myself) who do.

Delia Passi, Founder of WomenCertified® and author of Winning the Toughest Customer: The Essential Guide to Selling to Women is a regular columnist on ReachingWomenDaily.