Persuasion Scripts Blog

Burger King is running a funny and successful new ad campaign, the Whopper freakout.  You’ve probably seen the ads on TV.  They show real-life customers at a Burger King restaurant being told that Whopper’s are no longer on the menu.  What follows is a classic rendition of Reactance.  The customers react with shock and outrage that is clearly unfaked.  These folks are really disappointed.  They want their Whopper and they can’t believe it’s been taken away from them.

In other words, they show the reactance response.  Whenever people perceive an unfair restriction on their choice and action, they react (hence the name) with umbrage.  The persuasion news in this obvious element of human nature is that you can use this natural response to your own devices or in our case, your own persuasion script.

Burger King capitalized on this fact of persuasion to create a clever, attention getting ad campaign that appears to work.  Morningstar noted,

Unlike archrival McDonald’s Corp. (MCD), which last week said its U.S. comparable sales were flat in December, Burger King reported Thursday that sales in the U.S. and Canada rose 4.2% last month. January’s performance remains on that track. “We have not and are not seeing a slowdown,” Chief Executive

John Chidsey said on a conference call, after the world’s second-largest hamburger chain reported fiscal second-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street expectations.

Shares of Burger King were trading recently up $1.39, or 5.8%, to $25.55 at about three times the normal volume.

Sales got a boost from promotion of the 50th anniversary of its flagship Whopper sandwich. Its comparable sales were up double-digit, in part, the company said, because of what it labeled its “freakout” TV commercial showing customers’ shocked responses when told the Burger King they were visiting wasn’t selling Whoppers any longer. (One restaurant actually did that temporarily while hidden cameras recorded reactions.)

That last parenthetical comment illustrates the persuasion scriptyness of the Burger King effort.  They knew they’d get a response (although they may not use persuasion mumbo-jumbo terminology).  And they knew if they could capture it on video, that it would move viewers in a positive way.

See, you can take dry persuasion theory and make it work for you.