On Monday, Burger King announced a campaign to get more women into the culinary field, which almost immediately backfired. While others used International Women’s Day as a way of promoting feminism on social media, the UK Burger King twitter account tweeted out “women belong in the kitchen,” echoing the decades-old sexist remark about women’s place at home. This was followed by another tweet stating “if they want to, of course. Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We're on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry by empowering female employees with the opportunity to pursue a culinary career.” In addition to these tweets, Burger King also ran a full-page ad in the New York Times with “women belong in the kitchen” printed in big bold letters.
The goal of the ad campaign was to bait people with the obviously problematic statement, and then reveal to them the second half. Twitter users complained that using misogynistic baiting is wrong, and criticized Burger King’s intent to use a controversial statement to attract readers. In a statement responding to the controversy, Burger King said they are “committed to helping women break through a male-dominated culinary culture in the world’s fine dining restaurants – and sometimes that requires drawing attention to the problem we’re trying to help fix.” However, in this day and age, attracting negative attention to one’s business or cause is not an effective way to promote a message. Data shows that the idea “there is no such thing as bad publicity” isn’t true, and that bad publicity can damage one’s brand forever. Burger King claimed that they believed people would read the thread, which PR experts thought was unreasonable.
According to Linda Zayer, a marketing professor at the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago, “Burger King doesn’t have authority on gender equality, and coupled with a bad trope, it’s a recipe for disaster.” Clearly, Burger King doesn’t have the cultural capital required to make an edgy joke that promotes equality this way, especially given how the pandemic disproportionately cost women jobs. The brand also has a history of sexist ad campaigns, like their 2018 World Cup Whopper Baby campaign, and by showing a pattern in this behavior, it might be difficult to recover Burger King’s already tainted image.
How has social media changed the way brands and the public interact? Is having “cultural capital” as important as other factors of production for businesses in the modern age?
7 comments:
I think the tweet and all of Burger King’s messaging surrounding this advertisement have just been ignorant and in poor taste. If anything, using the “women belong in the kitchen” trope to capture people’s attention perpetuates the very stereotypes they are trying to challenge, regardless of whether or not they added a (not so) clever reveal afterwards. While their intentions may be honorable, their whole defense is undermined by the fact that you can’t dispel misogyny by throwing it in the consumers’ faces; moreover, progress is rooted in changing and evolving the narrative, not falling back onto the frameworks that entrench divide and inferiority. I also think the idea of “cultural capital” that you bring up is interesting—I feel like there are contexts in which using controversial material to challenge societal norms is probably more socially acceptable, like in comedy, for instance, but I think the distinction lies in the difference in motives between a comedian, and say, a large multinational enterprise. I think that also begs the question of what different responsibilities or obligations do these big businesses have to consumers when it comes to advertising, creating products, etc.
I think the way Burger King phrased their tweet was very poor. Rather than waiting to put a second tweet, they should've had an explanation within the same tweet to make sure people understood they were not being sexist. I get the general idea around the advertisement, and if it is true that there is a gender imbalance within Burger King, I think it is a good idea to make a tweet highlighting it, but that wasn't the way to go about it. Because they separated the tweets, we really don't know if the marketing team thought about the implications of their initial tweet, but because it was meant to attract so much attention, I feel like it was done on purpose. On a side note, one unexpected outcome may be that conservative families who believe in gender roles will go to Burger King more because of it, but I think that group of people compared to their consumer base is so small that this will end up hurting Burger King much more than helping.
While Burger King's intentions were good, their entire methodology was flawed. Their failure can be compared to the way people view news articles in general; many people only see the flashy headline and will not bother to do any further research, so their only impression is whatever the title is. Despite this error, Burger King's publicity loss will likely not be very damaging due to their sheer size in addition to the fact that it is known that their actions were a result of a poor marketing decision rather than trying to be sexist.
Their choice to tweet that as an advertisement really shows how ignorant some can be, I don't know how they decided that tweeting that would be okay and that they wouldn't face backlash. While they chose to tweet this to generate attention, why did they think this would be the best way to do so? Especially knowing that there are plenty of people that hold these outdated beliefs about women's role, it really isn't something to make a joke out of. I'm sure plenty of people saw this tweet and don't have the want/need to see if they really mean it or not and clearly with big companies they need to be mindful with what they send out as it represents themself.
This is another example of an epic fail within advertising. I think that judging the seriousness of this situation depends critically on the intention that this advertisement was executed on. It is clear that they did it intentionally to attract people's attention with an extremely sensitive sexist statement. The usage of "women belong in the kitchen" is insulting whether they did it as a catchphrase or their company culture is genuinely like that. I don't think that this is the correct way of advertising for occupation, especially when you try to save it by saying "it's to promote empowering" of women in this industry.
Clearly, Burger King was playing with fire. In the midst of a pandemic of cancel culture, the marketing geniuses who came up with this tweet should have known better than to say something as infuriating as this. As other people in the comments section have noted, the tweet is of poor taste and just a horrible overall marketing strategy. The follow up is not good either. Who is Burger King to reference the "culinary culture in the world’s fine dining restaurants." They sure must not have been talking about themselves, cause they are not fine dining. Certainly, BK's marketing team needs to humble themselves, and keep the fire on the grill, not on twitter.
Clearly, Burger King made an extremely rash decision when they put out the tweet with an insensitive message. As a big company, that tweet should have never been posted in the first place. As mentioned in your post, their goal was to "bait" people by separating their tweet into two. Tweeting out "women belong in the kitchen" on International Women’s Day was a totally wrong move by their team as all it did was shine a negative light on their company. They should have been able to predict that their words would be met with backlash. Social media has definitely created a forum in which people can voice their opinions on a lot of issues while also amplifying their voices by making it easier to spread information to others. It is becoming increasingly important for social media users to think before they put something out for everyone to see.
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