How Burger King’s Unconventional Tactics Are Winning The Marketing War
By: Leon Purton
Tags: Gaming, Social Media, Advertising, Marketing, Food

The Burger King marketing team were playing the long game again. Investing in shirt sponsorship with Stevenage allowed them access to one key thing.

A move that over twelve months later is still paying dividends. The Stevenage FC match shirts and replicas continue to sell out across the globe, and it is because of their devastating two-step strategy.

Step 1; Buy shirt sponsorship in June 2019.

Burger King approached Stevenage FC in June 2019 deliberately. They took out a shirt sponsorship contract that took a 2-year deal through to the end of the 2020/21 season.

Their reason for doing it was to tap into the video game market. Purchasing shirt sponsorship in June allowed them to make the next edition of the EA Sports FIFA franchise.

Their logo would appear on the shirt of Stevenage FC in the FIFA20 edition of the game.

Again, this seems like a peculiar motivation. Stevenage are one of the worst-rated teams in the game. Each football team is rated out of 5-stars, with the big-clubs of the world game typically receiving 4.5 stars.

Stevenage FC has a rating of 0.5 stars, equal lowest in the game. No one chooses to play with them.

Right?

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Step 2; Start the #StevenageChallenge in October 2019

On the 17th of October, a few months later, both Burger King and Stevenage FC announced the #StevenageChallenge.

Here is an excerpt from the announcement on the Stevenage FC webpage;

Stevenage Football Club is delighted to announce its involvement in BURGER KING’S® brand-new global advertising campaign the Stevenage Challenge, that encourages people all over the world to try and turn Stevenage FC into the biggest Club in the online world…

They launched the challenge across ten countries; the USA, China, Mexico, Brazil, UK, France, Germany, Russia, Sweden and Spain, with the challenges themselves varying by country.

All the challenges centralised on video game players of the EA Sports FIFA20 video game choosing to play with Stevenage FC, achieving some in-game feat, and then sharing it on social media.

It started as scoring a particular type of goal; a header, or direct from a corner, but progressed into challenging gamers to get the highest-profile stars of the game to play for Stevenage FC and have the videos of their goals get onto social media.

Soon videos of Ronaldo, Messi, Van Dijk, Mbappe and Neymar Jr celebrating goals began to flood social media, all with the hashtag #StevenageChallenge and tags for Burger King.

The reason gamers were doing it was not just because of the challenge in and of itself (which is a significant challenge to get the team promoted through the leagues and allocated the budgets that enable them to sign these types of players). But, because Burger King coupled these challenges, and the sharing off accomplishing them on social media, with the incentive of free food.

People were sharing these videos and receiving free burgers!

The #StevenageChallenge that required gamer dedication and skill to achieve, coupled with the incentive of free food, has been enough to catapult the club and the product into gaming and marketing folklore.