Seek to Misconstrue + a
Failure: The Blog 
January 2015
- Messy Desks May Not Be A Failure
- A Lesson From A Startup Failure
- Embrace Embarrassment To Find Success
- Dustin Hoffman Talks Failing and Therapy
December 2014
- [VIDEO] Will Smith's Ideas on Failure and Success
- How the iPad Succeeded when Other Tablets Failed
- Failure Is Behind Creative Innovation
- [VIDEO] How Taking A Gamble Saved Lives
- Sara Blakely Grew Up On Failure
November 2014
- Alec Baldwin On Success and Failure
- [Video] Failing So Others Can Succeed
- Fail Academy
- The Running Joke That Became a Movie
- Failure and Adaptation
October 2014
- Patrick Stewart Survived His Feelings of Failure
- The Failure That Gave Us Blue Eyes
- Theodore Roosevelt Had A Lot To Say About Failure
- A Positive Caused By Something Negative
- Operation Frequent Wind's Successful Failure
September 2014
- One Mistake Led To Another
- The Creator of Dilbert Admits He Has Failed Plenty
- J.K. Rowling Embraced Failure
- The First Man To Walk on the Moon Was A Failure
- Artists Have To Fail in Order To Succeed
August 2014
You Should Unfriend 10 People on Facebook
Your Facebook friends are real people. But one marketing campaign challenged fans to dump ten friends to get a tasty prize. Seriously.
The story comes from Serious Eats, a website of people who are not kidding around about food and especially food marketing.
Their article is titled Unfriend 10 People on Facebook, Get a Free Whopper.
Burger King [offered] a free Whopper if you unfriend 10 people on Facebook. Use the WHOPPER® Sacrifice application on Facebook to get started. Maybe you have 10 Facebook friends you don’t care about. Or join forces with other random Whopper lovers and use [aka, dump] each other just to get a coupon for a free Whopper.
Let’s all take a good look at what you’re getting in exchange for deleting people from your virtual life:
Photo © Flickr User joshuaheller
This promotion is long gone, but the comments on Serious Eats remain. One from a user named “Big B” details the brutality of this campaign:
FYI, unlike when you normally delete a friend on FB, if you do a Whopper sacrifice the victim *will* receive a notification… saying that they were sacrificed for a burger.
What does the Whopper Sacrifice marketing campaign have to do with failure? Just about everything. First: this is fairly negative as far as marketing goes. Burger King is saying (albeit somewhat jokingly) that their burgers are better than having friends. That’s just cruel.
Second, the BK team is taking advantage of self-created “negative” publicity. Being cocky is part of their brand, and apparently, it works.
Failure is the secret to success. Maybe the Whopper Sacrifice program didn’t last (perhaps because they gave away too many free flame-broiled burgers) but it shows a willingness to take risks. That’s the essence of creativity, in marketing and beyond.
Related Posts
- Email Failures and SuccessesSo, we sent out a bunch of emails to the many, many people Robby has met over the years to announce the book. We learned a lot about email failure.