I called Burger King president Tom Curtis a few times this week, but it went straight to voicemail. You can try too, his number is (305) 874-0520.
Okay, so maybe it’s not his personal cell number, but Curtis is still taking calls and texts from anyone and everyone. On February 17, Burger King announced he would be spending at least four hours a day over the next two weeks—including nights and weekends—taking unfiltered calls and texts from customers, hoping to hear their input about all things Burger King. Want a new Whopper variation? Call him. Have a complaint about your local BK? Call him. Come up with a fun marketing idea? Call him. Want to propose marriage? Maybe think twice.
“I’ve had a couple of those, but I’m married,” Curtis tells me after I eventually tracked him down.
It all feels like an elaborate bit, doesn’t it? This is the same brand that offered free Whoppers to clowns, hacked Google Home devices, offered a free hamburger to anyone who deleted 10 Facebook friends, and tried to usurp the Belgian monarchy.
What corporate executive speaks outside carefully curated remarks, PR photo ops, and earnings calls, let alone mix with the hoi polloi?
The biggest challenge here for Curtis isn’t answering all those phone calls, but convincing everyone that it’s a genuine effort to permanently embed customer opinions into the company’s culture and operations, and not just another stunt for the marketing hype cycle.
“People need to see action,” says Curtis.
These first two weeks of Curtis taking calls is the latest move in the company’s broader “Reclaim the Flame” project, a $400 million multi-year turnaround plan launched in 2022 for the then-struggling brand. That year was marked with restaurant closures and declining market share as Wendy’s overtook it as America’s no. 2 burger chain. Now, it’s heading in the right direction. Fourth quarter revenues were up 2.1% to $383 million. (Meanwhile, Wendy’s? Don’t ask.)
This is a compelling example of what too few brands—and company executives—take to heart. Despite all the technology, social media, and always-on mentality, so many companies still find themselves out of touch with what their brand is in culture and to the people they are serving.
Witness the seven circles of Super Bowl hell Ring found itself in after what it saw as an ode to lost dogs, turned into public fury around mass surveillance. On the other hand, Lay’s is hyping a recent price drop across PepsiCo Foods brands on social and giving credit to customer feedback.
Have it your way
In 1974, Burger King’s slogan was “Have it your way,” putting a focus on customer menu customization. So the idea of rooting the brand in customer feedback isn’t completely out of left field.
This idea of Curtis, and the brand more broadly, taking direct calls from customers started small. When he first joined Burger King in 2021, Curtis got the ball rolling by asking everyone on the leadership team to wear a brand logo of some kind as much as possible whenever they’re traveling, or even at the grocery store. The idea was that the logo would be a magnet for real people to talk about the brand unfiltered. Sure enough, at every weekly leadership meeting, stories began piling up.
“About four months ago, we said, ‘Hey, what if we took this to a whole new place and just wide open, let everybody in as much as we could, just to get as much feedback as possible?” says Curtis. “That was the spirit behind this.”
Utilizing customer feedback is something Curtis has some experience with. He was at Domino’s when that chain launched its “Pizza Turnaround” that used direct customer comments to spark that brand’s resurgence. Curtis also points to Domino’s famed Pizza Tracker, launched in 2008, as a result of listening to customer feedback.
“It was an answer to an insight,” he says (that insight being customers wondering, Hey, where’s my pizza?). “And I think what we’re doing here is similar. We’re going to get a variety of insights from this process, but I want to emphasize it won’t be a two-week process. This is a kickoff to a permanent process.”
Burger King has spent the better part of a decade building a cheeky challenger brand image, through irreverent work of varying success. The creepy King mascot that began popping up in 2004, was permanently retired in 2015. The brand phased him out because, frankly, even if he was making the stoners giggle, he was scaring the kids.
Whopper Detour in 2019, which used geo-fencing and its app to offer anyone within 600 feet of a McDonald’s a one-cent Whopper, was a legitimate hit, driving app downloads and enthusiasm. But “Moldy Whopper” (2020), which was a very artful, 34-day time-lapse video of their signature burger rotting and becoming covered in mold to make the case for its fresh ingredients, was more a marketers’ darling than a wide success.
Curtis says the goal now is to make sure the brand image is genuine and likeable, which can still include fun campaigns, but must be rooted in that customer connection. He credits CMO Joel Yashinsky and the brand’s agency partners like BarkleyOKPR for its new positioning. “Let’s be a brand by consumers, and let them define where it goes,” he says. “That really is empowering people to feel like the architect of this brand.”
Real humans?!
One of the first areas of AI implementation for many organizations is in customer service, where chatbots are used to process mass amounts of customer feedback into digestible reports quicker than ever. Research firm Gartner has predicted that AI will autonomously solve 80% of common customer service issues by 2029. But Curtis says that there is a risk of losing touch amid the waves of data.
“There’s just a magic in human interaction that I think we’re in danger of losing if we allow those processes to completely take over how we understand the consumer,” he says. “So by institutionalizing and operationalizing human interaction, real human interaction, I think we can unlock a powerful force of understanding of the consumer, because they’re legitimately and genuinely being heard and reacted to.”
It’s a surprisingly rare approach, but not wholly unique. E.l.f. Beauty, for example, has largely built its brand around how it engages with and implements ideas from its community. CMO Kory Marchisotto has often talked about how the brand’s participation on platforms like TikTok, Twitch, and beyond is all about what its customers are saying about the brand and the places they’re saying it, and those signals become a guide that shapes everything that follows.
“The starting point is cultivating community,” Marchisotto told The Drum in December. “We’re able to catalyze community data into insights and once we have that we co-create. We co-create content experiences, platforms, products that are for them, by them.”
Burger King has already begun that process with its Whopper By You work launched last summer, which solicits ideas for new Whopper variations from customers and then releases them as limited edition drops like the BBQ Brisket Whopper and Crispy Onion Whopper. According to the company, it’s received more than 600,000 submissions, and considers the releases so far among its most successful limited edition products.
This approach is in line with other chains looking to make personalization more fun and community-oriented by featuring fan suggestions as limited menu items. Starbucks, for example, launched its “secret menu” last summer and asked customers to submit and vote on their favorite customized beverages.
Burger King isn’t abandoning utilizing complex data analysis to make sound decisions, though. After finding that its apple pie dessert was the most requested discontinued menu item at its drive-thrus, the brand brought it back in January for the first time since 2020.
Suspicion economy
Ad agency BarkleyOKRP has been Burger King’s lead ad agency since 2022, and worked closely with the brand on not only this overall idea, but how to tap into it for brand marketing campaigns. The challenge is walking the tightrope between hyping the idea that Curtis and his team want to hear from you, without making it feel disingenuous.
The age of AI slop, media manipulation, and waves of brand BS has helped forge (or accelerate) a suspicion economy, where no one really thinks anything is sincere. BarkleyOKPR executive creative director Matt McNulty says what got Curtis and his team excited was how listening to people—hearing the good, bad, and ugly—was vulnerable. “People often think vulnerability can appear as weakness, at least in the cultural lexicon of brands,” says McNulty. “But this is sincerely vulnerable. It’s asking someone, how can I be better? And it’s honest.”
This all sounds rather obvious for brands who are constantly talking about how they want to resonate with culture. So why isn’t this approach more common? McNulty’s fellow executive creative director Ben Pfutzenreuter says it comes down to risk. “If you look across corporate America, I think you see a position of hedging and risk mitigation,” says Pfutzenreuter. “But I think the answer to a culture of anxiety and risk mitigation is actual conviction.”
Not a stunt man
Ultimately, the only real way to combat suspicion is with consistent action. As Curtis says, this is only the beginning.
So far there have been largely two types of feedback: The kind about people’s local restaurant, and then that about the broader brand, like menu items and marketing. “The good news on the feedback about their local experiences is we’ve got those channels set up,” says Curtis. “We’re calling the owners of those restaurants back. Many of those restaurants we own ourselves. So they’re going to see that type of change instantly. Brand actions will take longer. If I’m going to change the french fries, I’ve got to do the right research, testing, and set up suppliers to be able to support that.”
Unfortunately for Curtis, until a major product or innovation of some kind that customers can really see, touch or taste emerges, we’re forced to take his word for it. That’s not lost on him, either. In fact one of his biggest challenges is making sure the focus remains on the feedback and not talking about the feedback.
“The agency is trying to do its job and capture amazing content,” he says. “But I’m trying to make sure that everybody feels heard and knows that this isn’t a marketing stunt.”
For now, the only way to do that is to keep putting Curtis on the phone and let him cook.