Burger King vs. McDonald's: They Both Just Sell Burgers — Why Make Life So Hard for Each Other? | The Ad Wars, Part 2

In an industry as settled as fast food, it is rare for a product or a technology to upend the competitive order. And an advertising strategy that attacks a rival, once it is shown to work, gets used again and again — until it loses its magic.

"There is no final defeat."

That was how Roger A. Enrico, then general manager and chief executive of the Pepsi-Cola Company's cola division, summed up the "ad war" fought between Pepsi and Coca-Cola in the 1960s.

It is one of the earliest cases in the history of marketing, and still one of the best. By challenging Coca-Cola, Pepsi won the number-two spot in the market, and Coca-Cola grew stronger through the fight. All that consumer attention expanded the market itself.

But as Roger also said, the trick is that the "cola wars" have to be fun. If the war starts to look as though one company is on the edge, dogged by bad luck and past saving, the mood of the whole game turns at once.

What the war has to feel like is bloodless and never-ending. Everyone's interest lies in keeping the public curious: all right, this is what Pepsi did today — can you imagine what Coca-Cola will do tomorrow?

Ad wars between big companies, full of rivalry and attack, have in fact never stopped — Microsoft and Apple, Burger King and McDonald's, Nike and Under Armour, Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

And each pair differs in subtle ways. Apple ran a series of ads taunting IBM in the 1980s; by the 1990s the target of its mockery had switched to Microsoft; now Apple is the one being challenged. The "ad war" between BMW and Mercedes-Benz, by contrast, reads more like two best frenemies. Working out these differences is an interesting exercise.

That is one reason we are starting this series. The more important one: behind every "ad war" is corporate competition — the two sides may be evenly matched, or a new challenger may be rising. Through that window you can see how a market is changing and who gets to set the terms.

In their ads they often open fire on each other's stupidest moves. The fighting between them is done with live ammunition.

We are talking about advertising, but it is never only advertising.

How tense is the rivalry in fast food? McDonald's founder Ray Kroc once said: "If any of my competitors were drowning, I'd stick a hose in their mouth."

There is only so much you can do with a small hamburger, and it is hard for a fast food company to win a breakthrough in product or technology. So copying the rival and then mocking him has become the industry's most common form of "attack."

Burger King, founded in 1953, and McDonald's, founded in 1955, have been at each other for nearly 60 years. Both claim to sell the world's best-selling burger: Burger King boasts that it sells 2.1 billion Whoppers a year, while McDonald's puts Big Mac sales at around 550 million.

McDonald's launched the Big Mac in 1968, in fact to counter Burger King's Whopper. Burger King had quickly realized it could not compete with McDonald's 15-cent burger, so it decided to sell a bigger burger for 37 cents. Yes — McDonald's was once the one chasing. In the early 1960s, not long after both companies were founded, Burger King was the faster of the two.

American fast food was growing quickly then, and Burger King's slogans were blunt: "The bigger the burger, the better the burger" and "hold it with both hands." Its chain count in the US climbed fast, but the expansion soon ran into a cash shortage. After a failed attempt to go public, Burger King accepted a merger offer in 1967 from the Pillsbury Company, which guaranteed it funding.

McDonald's, meanwhile, caught up and passed Burger King in the same stretch. By the early 1970s it had far more stores, and it was the market leader.

From then on, Burger King, in the role of challenger, kept picking fights with McDonald's.

1973

Burger King launched the "Have It Your Way" campaign. Its ads called McDonald's a "highly automated but inflexible" burger machine, while Burger King could suit your own taste.

1982

Burger King launched its "broiled, not fried" ad war, claiming that in blind taste tests the Whopper beat McDonald's Big Mac and the Single from Wendy's, the third-largest burger brand in the US.

1986

Burger King ran a TV ad nationwide in which a McDonald's billboard not only appeared on screen but was provocatively swapped for a Burger King sign.

1997

The "Home of the Whopper" went after the "Golden Arches" again, with the line "taste that totally beats McDonald's."

2002

Burger King introduced the "Big King" (which joined the permanent menu in 2013). The name and the look closely resembled the "Big Mac," and the marketing deliberately invited the comparison: the "Big King," it said, had 25% more beef than the "Big Mac," yet cost less and carried fewer calories.

In Japan, Burger King even told customers to bring in a "Big Mac" receipt for a discount on the "Big King."

2010

Burger King released a contentious ad in which its character Sneak King slips into McDonald's headquarters and steals the recipe for the sausage-and-egg muffin. The campaign's tagline was large and unashamed: Not the original! But cheaper!

2013

Burger King ran a test on its Facebook fans: it would give a fan a free McDonald's "Big Mac," on the condition that the fan agree to unfollow Burger King's page forever.

2015

In a Brazilian ad called "Every change leaves a mark," Burger King gathered five McDonald's die-hards from around the world — people who had tattooed McDonald's flagship "Big Mac" on their bodies — and invited them to try Burger King.

Four agreed on the spot to have their tattoos altered, adding a few diagonal lines to the burger already inked on them, to stand for Burger King's classic flame-grilled mark. One declined, because he did not want to give up a tattoo he had matched with his brother.

In August 2015, just before the International Day of Peace, Burger King took out full-page ads in The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other mainstream papers, calling across to McDonald's: "McDonald's, join us for the McWhopper, our International Day of Peace project." It wanted the two companies to shake hands on September 21, the International Day of Peace, and do something useful for society.

Most of the time McDonald's ignored Burger King's provocations. To the "International Day of Peace" overture, for instance, its only answer was a coolly worded Facebook post from CEO Steve Easterbrook, which called the idea "wonderful" and then politely turned it down.

The post said the relationship between McDonald's and Burger King was friendly corporate competition, not worth mentioning beside the suffering of a real war. The two brands could do something bigger for world peace, and perhaps Burger King would like to join a more meaningful global effort McDonald's already had under way.

The meaning was plain: go play by yourself, we'll pass.

To be fair, Burger King's attacks on McDonald's follow no obvious plan. "Broiled, not fried" pointed at a real difference, and "shake hands on the International Day of Peace" was at least funny; most of the rest of the time, Burger King looks like it is stretching. What Burger King has been clever about is its sense of proportion — though it has admitted that some of its own ads were not its best work.

The question is why Burger King keeps hounding McDonald's.

The most direct answer: for Burger King, the industry's number two, it works, and it has been shown to work many times over.

Burger King's first attack ad went straight at the thing McDonald's was best at — standardized, convenient service. Burger King simply turned it around, calling McDonald's a "highly automated but inflexible" burger machine, while presenting itself as the place that could suit each customer's own taste. There are no sales figures for the campaign, but the slogan Burger King coined then, "Have It Your Way," stayed in use until 2014, when it became "Be Your Way." The positioning, we can assume, worked.

Turning a rival's strength against it is something Samsung has done to Apple too: Samsung once mocked the iPhone as the arcade machine everyone has already played, and told you to choose something different. What is being borrowed, you can see, is the competitor's influence. A rival's greatest strength is usually also the thing consumers know best, so turning it around is the easiest thing for people to grasp — and even to cheer for.

The "broiled, not fried" war Burger King launched in the 1980s ran on comparisons: taste tests, the fact that Burger King's ordinary burger was bigger than McDonald's. The "evidence" came from Burger King itself, yet it still gave consumers the feeling of fact. This round of attacks worked better than expected. Burger King's sales and market share rose fast, and the company claimed at the time that nearly 2 million customers had switched to it. McDonald's and Wendy's eventually had to go to court to get the ads pulled.

For whoever is behind in a market, attacking the leader is a way of borrowing the leader's influence. Compared with what we analyzed in the previous piece — how the sportswear upstart Under Armour handled its ad war with the industry giant Nike — Burger King's challenge to McDonald's is far more direct, even crude. That difference comes down to the industries.

Fast food has always been a settled business. Its core is a standardized service system and a global chain mechanism, which means competitiveness does not come from the burger, or from the food at all. McDonald's pushed standardized service to its limit, and that is what finally secured it first place.

In fast food it is hard for any product or technology to break that structure, and there is not much room for market segmentation or price tiers either. Fast food is now being challenged by the fast-casual restaurants that rose after it, but that is a separate story, one brought on by the turn toward healthier eating.

So what you often see in fast food is this: McDonald's puts out a $5 menu that lets you pick two signature items, and Wendy's and Burger King answer with cheaper $4 menus of four or five items; McDonald's all-day breakfast sells so well that Burger King and the other rivals quickly follow. Besides copying and following on products, there is of course room to stir things up in advertising too — especially once that has been shown to work.

In fact, after its 1973 attack on McDonald's made a splash, Burger King abruptly stopped. Lawsuits from competitors had convinced Pillsbury that Burger King was out of hand. Burger King turned instead to a so-called "big umbrella" plan, entering burgers, breakfast and chicken at the same time, and in 1977 paid a large salary to hire McDonald's number-three executive, Smith, as chairman and copy McDonald's strategy. None of it did much good.

In the late 1980s, Burger King turned to the marketing strategists Jack Trout and Al Ries. Trout told it to bring back the attack.

By then American life had sped up, service speed had become the decisive factor in fast food, and taste mattered less. Trout noticed that McDonald's held another strong position in customers' minds: the playground. Almost every McDonald's had children's play equipment. Since McDonald's had taken children, Burger King should aim at adults — more precisely, at everyone from big kids up.

Trout's advice was to attack through the burger itself, which came down to this: once you've grown up, go eat Burger King's flame-broiled burger. But that meant a strategic trade — giving up children and tearing out the play equipment already in its stores. The point of the positioning was not really to abandon children; it used children's dislike of being treated as children, their wish to go where the grown-ups go, to draw them in. Burger King still thought the risk enormous, and in the end did not take the advice. "Attack McDonald's," though, became a marketing strategy.

Burger King did not always win. In a taste-test ad war it launched again in 2008, what consumers saw was racism, not humor.

"Ads that point straight at a competitor carry controversy and risk," Greg Paull, global CEO of R3, wrote in a case commentary sent to QDaily. "You have to get the proportion right, and more than that you have to know where the line is. Sometimes it is not the competitor's line, but the consumer's."

McDonald's habit of ignoring things can annoy consumers too. On the "peace burger" proposal, many called Easterbrook's Facebook statement "lame" and "humorless," and some said that even if McDonald's would not play along, they would buy a Big Mac and a Whopper and build their own "McWhopper" at home.

McDonald's is not always the passive one. In Europe it has been more aggressive than in North America.

In 2011, McDonald's ran an ad against Burger King in the German market. A little boy cannot eat his beloved McDonald's burger and fries in peace, because (they are too good) somebody always takes them from him. At last he hides the food inside a Burger King bag, and nobody bothers him again.

Burger King protested loudly against the ad, titled "Packaging," and issued a statement in Munich saying McDonald's had crossed the "line" for comparative advertising.

The bigger exception is France, an emerging market for fast food. Burger King entered France briefly in 1980 but pulled out in 1997 after losses. During its absence, from 1997 to 2013, McDonald's took nearly 50% of the French fast food market. In 2013 McDonald's sales in France reached €4.46 billion, and France became McDonald's second most profitable region.

At the end of 2013, Burger King came back to Paris to start again. It opened more than 50 stores in France over the next two years and quickly became the country's second-largest fast food chain after McDonald's. In September 2015 it announced 509 more stores across France, Belgium and Luxembourg.

One of the first things it did, naturally, was tease its old rival. In its ads Burger King claimed that since its return it had been getting tearful pleas from die-hard fans who wanted a Burger King near home. (Against McDonald's 1,200 stores in France, Burger King could not resist joking about how few it had.) So it launched a campaign called "Whopper Move Out": weighing the cost of opening stores against the profit outlook, instead of opening in remote small towns it offered to move fans' homes, free, to places that had a Burger King. More than 500 customers took it up.

It followed straight on with a campaign called "Whopper Provocation," mocking the people who could not get a Whopper — how sad, you actually live somewhere without a Burger King — and posing as the scarce, precious thing.

Against a Burger King with that much self-mockery in it, anything McDonald's said looked weak. But this time, breaking with habit, McDonald's did go on the offensive.

You have probably seen this famous roadside billboard. On the giant sign McDonald's spelled out, in detail, how to drive to Burger King: you would need 258 kilometers to reach the nearest Burger King. If it was McDonald's you wanted, it was five kilometers ahead.

Burger King's answer came fast. It simply added an ending to McDonald's own footage: a couple follow the sign, drive to McDonald's, buy a large coffee to wake themselves up, then drive straight on for 253 kilometers to Burger King, thanking the ubiquitous McDonald's for helping them reach "delicious" Burger King.

Self-mockery from one side, a not-so-innocent jab from the other — what both are watching is store count. In an emerging market, opening stores is the real work.

China is an opportunity for Burger King too, though the difficulties there are much greater. "We don't have enough stores in China yet. Loud, high-profile marketing is not right for Burger King at this stage," said Wang Wei, chief marketing officer of Burger King China. As of August 2015, Burger King had 351 stores in China, nowhere near its rival McDonald's 2,196 — let alone KFC.

China's Advertising Law and related rules also forbid showing another company's logo or name in an ad, which is why you are unlikely to see Burger King and McDonald's stirring things up here.

After more than half a century of fighting, McDonald's is still the undisputed leader. In 2013, Wendy's briefly passed Burger King to become the second-largest fast food company in the US. In 2014, Burger King's US sales rose 1.6% to $8.64 billion, second only to McDonald's $35.4 billion, putting it back in second place in American burger sales. By the figures from CHD Expert and the Christian Science Monitor, McDonald's held 34.3% of the US burger market in June 2014, while Burger King's 15.4% was less than half of that.

Neither side has much to celebrate. Fast food is losing its appeal to young people as the taste for healthier eating spreads, and the whole industry is still in the middle of trying to rescue itself.

Under those conditions, nobody expects much entertainment from the ad wars anymore.