The Burger King case: How Burger King’s ‘Whopper Sacrifice’ campaign was sacrificed by Facebook

This blog post is about Burger Kings misuse of the social technology platform ‘Facebook’ to market one its sales promotions.

 

Burger King is a global fast food chain restaurant known for producing hamburgers. It was established in the mid twentieth century and it currently has over 13,000 outlets in 79 countries with total sales revenue of about $2 Billion USD.

The sales promo was titled ‘TheWhopper Sacrifice’ which requests that facebook users delete ten people from their friends list to get a coupon for a free hamburger Whopper. To make matters worse Burger King sends out messages to delisted friends that they were worth less than one-tenth of a Whopper hamburger.

Within six days after this application for the whopper sacrifice was released, the application was installed more than 60,000 times and over 200,000 facebook friends were deleted. This led to even more unethical behavior by facebook users who created unofficial groups, offering to let other members add them as friends and then delete them for purpose of getting a free Whopper.

Facebook disabled the campaign after ten days, pointing out that it violated users privacy because the Whopper sacrifice application informed friends if they had been deleted. Facebook states that it challenged the very concept of Facebook. Some people complained about the rude message from Burger king which stated that they are worth less than one tenth of a Whopper hamburger. The following was the statement released by Facebook;

“We encourage creativity from developers and brands using Facebook Platform, but we also must ensure that applications follow users’ expectations of privacy. This application facilitated activity that ran counter to user privacy by notifying people when a user removes a friend. We have reached out to the developer with suggested solutions. In the meantime, we are taking the necessary steps to assure the trust users have established on Facebook is maintained.”

Considering Rogerson’s 8 Ethical principles, it can be seen that The Whopper Sacrifice campaign violates most of the ethical principles. The first ethical principle - honor - was violated because the application created a disapproving reaction from those that got the delisting message. It violates the second ethical principle by implicitly breaking friendship trust amongst friends. Considering the third ethical principle it can be seen that Burger King did not properly consider Facebook’s policy as regards removing friends from friend’s list – Facebook regards this as a bridge of privacy because normally when people delist people from their friend list Facebook does not inform the affected person. In regards to the fairness ethical principle, it can be seen that all stakeholder’s views was not considered with regards to the action.

The consequence was the ban of the campaign by Facebook. But much worse is the tension that it must have created amongst friends. This impact cannot be measure, but friends will have it at the back of their mind that why would you pick them for the delisting amongst your over 100 friends.

In the future, Burger King should put other stakeholders into consideration before launching an offensive social marketing campaign such as the whopper sacrifice. If possible they should consult with all the key stakeholders that will be affected either directly or indirectly. Rogerson’s 8 ethical principles will also come in handy to help prepare for future social media campaigns.

  

Do you find the sacrifice campaign that was rather sacrificed by Facebook to be interesting and eye opening? Share your thoughts and ideas below in the comment area.

References

Rogerson, S., & Fidler, C. (n.d.). A practical perspective on information ethics. Retrieved from https://www.academia.edu/322961/A_Practical_Perspective_of_Information_Ethics

Dawson, R., Hough, J., Hill, J., Winterford, B., & Alexandrov, D. (2008). Implementing enterprise 2.0. San Francisco; Sydney: Advanced Human Technologies.