Burger King’s TikTok Strategy Continues Its Mission to Give Consumers Their Way

Burger King has been a marketing powerhouse for decades, but TikTok was a whole new realm for the international fast food chain a few years ago.

To help it navigate the new frontier in the U.K., Burger King turned to an independent social media agency that named itself after its mission to reinvent water cooler moments for the digital age: Coolr. The brand started working with the agency five years ago as it was just getting started, so the teams grew together as they laid out social plans.

Adweek talked with the agency and the brand at Social Media Week Europe in London about how BK’s social marketing strategy took shape, especially as it pertains to TikTok.

“We were growing internally as a team, but they were also growing, and I think that journey has allowed us to explore different things and also to take some risks together, to learn about the brand and to grow,” said Soco Nunez, brand and communications director at Burger King U.K.

Adam Clyne, co-founder and CEO at Coolr, added that the team at Burger King took a chance on what was essentially a startup agency at the time with just three employees.

“We have gone on that journey together, and five years later Coolr is 90 people. I attribute a lot of our success to the partnership and an initial collaboration that we have,” he said. “We really wouldn’t be where we are today without that, so we have a special love in our heart for the brand.”

From initial post to viral status

Coolr had been following TikTok as a platform that was bubbling up in 2019, and encouraged Burger King to experiment on the platform. Since there were no benchmarks, the brand and agency used trial and error, and managed to gain traction with a post from 2020 of a guy tossing chicken fries into a container from a distance. Pull back, and the stunt was revealed as a playful hoax.

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.

“People started to have some fun with the audio, we saw it starting to trend, so we leaned into it. I think one of the observations on TikTok and other platforms is when you lean into what the audience and community think about the brand and the fun that they’re having and give that recognition back, that’s when they start to love it,” said Clyne.

The remixes kept rolling, with one even using a Daft Punk track, which went viral and produced thousands of comments.

“One of the things that we know about TikTok is the comments can outperform the posts. It’s not always about being visible on your own post, but if someone else is talking about Whoppers, we should be in their comments,” said Clyne.

Burger King U.K. continues to be nimble on TikTok because it is able to react nimbly to trends and get posts approved quickly over WhatsApp. Clyne said some of the top work that Coolr and the brand have done together has been reactive, playing in music, sports and popular culture.

“You can only do that if a brand is willing to play in the way that allows you to do that with speed and agility. Otherwise, it’s just not going to work. And I think we are fortunate to have a client in Burger King where we get stuff approved on WhatsApp that will take other agencies and brands three to five days to get through,” said Clyne.