BK, comparison, and the real problem at hand

AdAge's article What Crispin's Lauded BK Work Doesn't Do: Gain Ground On McD's reflects on the last 5 years of work by Crispin Porter & Bogusky and Burger King, noting that while creative, ground-breaking and buzz-building, it hasn't made a dent in the gap between BK and top dog McDonalds.

I'm compelled to immediately think two things:

1>> Again it comes to light that there's a stark difference between driving advertising/awareness, and solving the real problem at hand (evidently this goes beyond just traditional advertising and reaches into sacred social media ground as well). Is BK's problem that they aren't branded/social media'd/buzz-generatingly rad enough??? Or: is it that they essentially serve chunks of meat in various manufactured forms? Not to say that with any definite expertise, because I'm certainly no burgerologist or anything (it's prob been approx 5 years since I've even been to a BK, and a McD's maybe twice or so in the same period) so it's reasonable/likely that it's some other third thing. But I think it's a question worth asking and I think this is becoming increasingly more obvious.

2>> Does comparing BK to McD's measure how well BK is performing to the people that matter (read: consumers)??? Or: does it measure something that only matters to executives and people reading ad/industry magazines?

These two probably contradict each other on some level, but my end thought is this: A successful brand always lives and breathes some raison d'etre, and it's never 'money' (or any other metrics for that matter). It's almost always 'other people.'

illusion of control, "about" vs "around," and @theBKlounge/Skittles/Snickers

@theBKlounge hijacker Caleb Kramer was recently invited by Edelman to join them in an all-expenses-paid-for trip to Orlando to preview the world's first Whopper Bar.

While there, he was reflecting on this as BK's response to his hijacking, as well as the stark contrast between the Skittles approach to brand control against Snickers' recent and coincidentally timed lawsuit re: Snckrz.com.

Snickers reminds me that there's this "illusion of control"-ish idea where people fool themselves into believing something to the effect of "if you take away the channels with which people can say bad things about your brand, they'll have to stop thinking bad things about your brand."

This is silly, of course. People will continue to think bad things about your brand. Worse yet, they will continue to say bad things in the 2384905723 other places you don't control.

As I remember, there was a time where the Skittles home/twitterfeed page was hit with some vulgar phrase that the crowds were playing around with; I don't remember exactly what it was but I'm pretty sure it was bad enough that if I did remember it's not something I'd want to type out anyway ha.

I imagine this is the kind of thing Snickers is trying to "avoid." But it's faulty thinking: did anyone actually think "[derogatory/offensive phrase]" about Skittles? No. Rather, it was a simple silly crowd trick for people who just wanted to show up on the page "saying" something bad around Skittles.

Not at, not about, but around Skittles.

Does anyone think [derogatory/offensive phrase] about Snickers now, for taking away a cool webtoy people were having fun with? You bet.

control, branding, and @theBKlounge

So there's a well-thought out (and oft hilarious) reveal of the @theBKlounge project written by Indiana-University-student-turned-brand-hijacker Caleb Kramer that's hit the press today.

What I find most interesting is that the project reflects the all-too-often-forgotten truth that we have control over what we build/present to the world, but no control over what people do with/take out of it.

Where Caleb's original intent was:

"I thought, how cool would it be if Burger King created a Twitter account called theBKlounge? Users could tweet “@theBKlounge” every time they visited the restaurant."

the end result was a much different beast.

In the comments, there's a good piece where he talks about being followed by creatives at CP+B. An excellent thought about the true nature of transparency and control comes to mind, because it begs the question: to what extent can BK / CP+B / anybody truly have control over brands/characters that are so easily hijacked?

But actually... this isn't really an "easy" task, right? Do a quick search for any number of branded characters (@ronaldmcdonald came to mind, appropriately enough) and you'll find that a good many of them have zero to few followers.

It's not about just taking the name, it's about doing it well.

The conversation of late seems to be "the task is no longer to manage the brand, rather to guide it" (Kelley Mooney's The Open Brand is a great read on this). And that's exactly what has happened here. Caleb's project has become less an act of thievery and more an extension of the brand, by necessity guided by the rules that the BK brand has laid down well in advance. If he didn't play by those rules, he would never have seen the same kind of results, right?

If there's a lesson for brands here somewhere, I think that's where it can be found: brand "creators" still have a great responsibility in being the rule-setters and ultimately the brand's foundation. Users can take it wherever they want, but they've got to start somewhere.

Were you following @theBKlounge? What other hijacked faves do you guys have?