The simple stunt earned hundreds of thousands of views for the brand, so it knew it was hitting a growing trend.
From there, they figured out that they could use TikTok to get out videos quickly and relatively inexpensively, since TikTok didn’t have the polish of Instagram. While some of the bigger brass at the brand may not have understood the appeal of the platform, the brand stuck with it and gained followers. Today, Burger King UK’s TikTok page has more than 208,000 followers.
Its first viral moment came from a post that saw a young man eating a Whopper with a knife and fork. It was meant to drive home the brand’s “Have It Your Way” marketing pledge and established TikTok as a legitimate marketing outlet.
“What we worked out quickly was Burger King could have product in its content and it wouldn’t feel overly branded. We could build the brand on an ongoing basis and talk about the things that we talked about on other channels, but with a different angle,” said Clyne.
Nunez added that most of the people in the videos are Coolr or Burger King’s employees, many of them younger. She said the videos are organic and customers can relate to them, since they’re not polished or overproduced. The team learned early in the process to respond to what was trending and jump on it.
One of those trends ended up utilizing the reimagined jingle from U.S. ads, which started to pop up in U.K. TikToks as musical remixes. The brand wondered how to take that brand-heavy messaging and make it original to the market.