McDonald's vs Burger King: How One Campaign Hijacked Millions of Customers

0:00Hello everyone and welcome back to Secret Leaders. I'm Dan. i'm chris and chris what have you been up to lately um well it's business shows i might talk a little bit about business oh spoil us yeah for been thinking recently about doing my first in-person mastermind oh yeah yeah the classic well-trodden path yeah and obviously you know I run a cohort and lots of people in the cohort have asked to do in-person much more extensive training with me and so that's what I'm wrestling with at the moment where to do it how to do it and yeah for those that don't know obviously like cohort is I've been training people to build personal brand I've been training people to build digital products scale their digital businesses lead gen etc and a huge group of those people want to do like much deeper in-person training and i remember i was part of a mastermind when i was 25 as an entrepreneur like i think my business was making a million pounds a year i think when i was 25 and i joined a mastermind of other entrepreneurs who also were similar position and i thought it was awesome at that age yeah so that's kind of what i want to try and do so people who are making you know medium seven figures so like one to five million turnover businesses i will help them scale their businesses um so yeah i've been really enjoying how to put it together.

1:23It will be probably in the US, which is where a lot of my customs are. So yeah, I've been kind of last couple of weeks really diving deep on that. You're sort of like a sexy younger Richard Harpin. What was his thing? Business leader. Yeah, but it's eight secrets to being a billionaire. No. Five secrets to get you into bed with home serve. he does have that great saying which a lot of people say which is copy and pivot i do like that yeah that's good isn't it yeah i can't remember the other eight well he also came up with the one which was um uh was it coachment yes coaching mentoring i was like they're not all gonna land they're not all gonna land for the whole audience i'm not comparing myself to richard harpen he did and i don't think that's true you know richard harpen has legit built a four billion company true but you are younger and sexier sure are you gonna sit here and dispute that he's a good looking man um so damn what's new with you what's me with you well seeing as you ask i'm going uh tomorrow i'm going skiing are you yeah i'm going with margot and my wife and uh she's pregnant his kid yes exactly sorry well well Well, corrected.

2:46Yes. So my wife and my three-year-old. He's an experimental man. Yeah, exactly. Fair enough. It needs clarification this time. And Melissa isn't like that keen. It's more like I was like, I'm taking Margot skiing. She's unfussed about it. And then she got pregnant. And I was like, well, probably won't be doing much skiing. You can sit at home on your own if you want. But it kind of seems pointless. Why don't you just come with and then you just eat fondue and whatever it is people do in Switzerland. whilst I take her skiing and it'll be nice. So Margot and I are going skiing. She's going to learn how to stick some skis on her feet and probably have a few tantrums.

3:24And I probably won't do any skiing, but I have this vision in my head that I will be. I'm going with a friend who's housing us in his chalet and I think it'll be a really nice few days. Is it an entrepreneur friend? Obviously. Yeah. Yeah. It's actually really... Do you have any friends who are entrepreneurs? Not really. Yeah. But it's actually very cool. He's like, you know... Can you name names? I'm not going to name names. Also, this guy is particularly, he runs a multi-billion dollar company, so I won't actually name him this time. Amazingly, I was like, do I need to rent a car? We get into Geneva, what should I do?

3:55And he's like, there's a car. I've got, basically, I don't really understand it, but his exact words were, there's a car for you in Geneva. I'll give you the details when you land. As in, not like a driver's picking you up, but my spare Geneva car is there or something. Pretty cool. So I won't need to rent a car. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah. And I mean, other than the flights cost me nothing, which is even better. Sensational. Best kind of skiing. Very cool. So before we get onto the main episode, I hope you listened to our episode with TJ Power on dopamine. I thought it was absolutely awesome.

4:28He's great. Go check out his book. But before you do that, obviously listen to the episode. So what do we got on the docket today, Chris? So this week down, we have a story called the Big Burger Heist. we want to give credit to alif hussein for sharing this on twitter but in 2018 burger king launched a really clever marketing campaign called the whopper detour that turned their biggest competitor as in mcdonald's strengths into their weaknesses so they offered one cent burgers one cent whoppers to anyone who downloaded their burger king app and placed an order while physically standing inside a mcdonald's restaurant the mechanics of the promotion were simple but required a lot of effort from customers they had to download the burger king app go into a mcdonald's place an order while inside and then travel to the nearest burger king to pick up their one cent whopper so rather than competing with mcdonald's crazy marketing budget and obviously their insane stores and the big you know yellow m mcdonald's had no legal way of stopping customers from coming into their stores to just stand there and download the burger king app this meant that burger king could freely hijack mcdonald's as locations for marketing so the campaign drove this is insane by the way the campaign drove 1.5 million app downloads in nine days making burger king's app the most downloaded fast food app in america what the campaign proved to be a massive success the burger king app became the most downloaded fast food app the company attributed six billion in sales growth to the digital initiative and i suppose the promotion and the marketing just shows how creativity can overcome a bigger competitor so what do you think about that that is sick yeah that is sick that's that's unreal yeah i'm always sitting here thinking how could you use that idea yeah in your own you know in your own businesses it's so offensively rude as well so competitive do you know what i mean it's so in your face i think to do that you you really need a very clear core enemy yeah yeah and they do i mean they are yeah totally exactly pepsi could do that to coca-cola yeah and chick-fil-a could do it to kfc but like beyond that there's not many where you're like that i want a kfc now that you've said that sorry i want a chick-fil-a now i've said that yeah so if you were mcdonald's how would you respond to that that's a great question because they've got quite a fun tone of voice as well mcdonald's yeah yeah i mean it's all in some ways i sit here and think that burger king winning means mcdonald's wins as well because like that they are both fighting a ever losing battle against healthy food yes so actually i think that by making their sector fun and interesting.

7:27I think they do probably build it together. I suppose you could do something really odd. Basically, the only way to tackle this is you'd have to basically do a plus one on it, which is once you're in the Burger King getting your burger, you then have to do another promotion back to get them back in the McDonald's. You have to take a photo of your burger in the bin, and then you can come back to mcdonald's and get a full price with you know x x x yeah yeah exactly exactly and then and just make photos of burger king and bin on the floor yeah exactly that's quite good that's quite good um do you think other big brands so we said coke and pepsi do you think other big brands could do something similar so target walmart could they do something like that thing is a lot of this i mean the answer is yes but what's interesting is how much of this sort of social media driven behavior also goes against the grain of things that people say they care about like sustainability and food waste and and we had that episode with emily austin which we'll put somewhere here uh where we talk about like pr for this here for the for the for the sake of pr yeah yeah yeah you you are selling a burger while you're fucking around with all this stuff i do think that one is genius but like if walmart target tried to do it it might look a bit budget you know it might might make the customers just be like get a grip um it's pretty cool though i like it yeah okay so now we're on to some advice right few people have sent questions in this week and uh if you want to ask us something i'm going to send your question in as well yeah send them in you're getting you're getting top dollar advice here yeah it's true you know um yeah in the link jace told me off camera there's going to be somewhere you can send the ideas to an email address of description that i don't know um so dan this is actually really expensive to get advice from now so i would get i would get this advice off him i'm still quite cheap you can't put time with you your price is going up and up i'm priceless yeah yeah yeah yeah you're you're without price exactly um uh nowadays i wouldn't know i wouldn't do one-on-one one-on-one coaching anymore okay so you get this all for free so here's the question our growth has plateaued but our costs keep rising at what point do we admit the business model might be fundamentally flawed no now you just answered it next uh our growth has plateaued but our costs keep rising yeah i mean you've got you've got to really think about the the unit economics of that business because if your growth is actually slowing down but your costs are rising it's probably a marketing acquisition thing probably your cac or something is going up you're not seeing that throughput into the business so yeah i'd question the product at that point yeah all messaging right product for wrong market yeah but something's off i mean that's quite rare but yeah is it right product for wrong market yeah in b2c that's probably quite common more common maybe um okay my personal brand is bigger than my companies and investors see it as a risk how do you balance being the face of the company versus building something bigger than yourself That's a good question and a great one for Chris.

10:56I actually see the personal brand as like a stepping off point, like a leg up for the brand, especially if you have a personal brand and you're launching a business. You can launch the business to your audience, which gives you massively free distribution and kind of an unfair advantage on your competitors that don't have a personal brand. Now if your personal brand is bigger than your business, which is a position that I actually have found myself in previously your investors will think there is a potential risk there but i would always say that the point is you're able at that point to give your business an unfair advantage against everyone else and the example i always use is when we first launched lottie we were like eight months in i was eight months into the social care sector and i was being asked to be the keynote at most conferences and it was because i had an audience and it's because i was able to bring followers and interest to things and so i i rarely think it's a negative unless it's taking your eye off the ball which i think is you know there's a lot of people now who focus on personal brand before they focus on business and i think that might be a bit of a mistake like i would always think to yourself it has to be monetizable you know even if um even if you haven't got like a direct business but building followers for the sake of followers and the vanity of it i'm not a huge fan of um and so i don't i would explain to your investors that if your audience is aligned with your business it is only upside yeah i think that's really well said if those two things are aligned then you're in alignment yeah there's an interesting tension where if you personally do something bad get too political whatever it might be yeah you can see this for example people at alex carp and peter seal you know with palantir and stuff like you know they'll go on record and say x y and z and it can tank the share price or bring up the share price obviously yeah elon i mean it's a very obvious example of this right like more into politics he's getting the more people are just revolting against having teslas and stuff so you can see the downside of it yeah i mean the people you've referenced there are like some of the most famous and successful entrepreneurs in the history of the world ever and probably will ever be i would say for your ordinary person i would just say try not to do too many inflammatory things i mean it's not like if you're in your first business don't be posting about politics all the fucking time because what's the point like your mission is not to as elon musk's been so basically what you know he wants to get rid of the woke virus like that's a pretty big you know existential mission that he's on personally like your mission might be to get your agency clients yeah so like don't think bigger than you are use it for what it's worth don't over complicate things yeah it's so true and i would actually say as well practice just not having a fucking opinion on everything that will make you feel much better nice or if you do have an opinion on something make it in your area of expertise around what your business is there you go okay everyone's telling me to focus on one thing but every new opportunity looks amazing how do you know which doors to close this is i mean classic adhd vibes this is just my life i would say that the rule i came up with um last year and i'm trying to keep it in place as much as possible is that someone will tell me a new idea and i'll become completely fucking obsessed with it and i will like think about it non-stop etc but i've set myself the rule now that i have to be as excited about it a month later to continue the conversation and if i'm as excited a month later then i might think it's worth investing in advising supporting collaborating with whatever the thing was um but a good example is last year or the year before while running my businesses and being really busy and all the rest of it i very nearly launched a paddle brand and it's because i love paddle so much that um i was like okay i kind of know i have access to lots of capital or I know how like land works from previous businesses I've been involved in.

14:54I could build a fucking huge online community on paddle. I was like, I have all the pieces. And then suddenly after days and days and days of this work, looking at land in London, et cetera, I was like, what are you fucking doing? Just play paddle. You love paddle. You don't have to business-ify everything. Oh, it's a shame. I wish you had that paddle brand. I'd have bought my shoes from you. Yeah, yeah, well. um so i would just say like the the key is you you don't want to do too many things like you you actually want to be very focused on one or two things until you become successful enough and even still like i find now being involved in a variety of different companies often more stressful than just being involved in one more all in i can give an interesting example potentially from heights um i so rather than going like Metra and all the different opportunities that come my way and how I say no to those.

15:50With Heights, I'm pretty certain that we are more successful growing more than most of the brands that I see in a lot of places, especially in a lot of retail. Brands that seem to be everywhere and have great brand presence. I think they're a lot smaller than us from what I can ascertain. And the reason is we took a strategic decision from the get-go to do nothing other than direct to consumer until it became excruciatingly clear that that channel had basically completely saturated for us and so we've got no amazon no retail no affiliates no other website in the world sells heights there's like literally nothing other than you have to come to our website and you have to get a subscription to our products.

16:44The thing is, for years, that stuff's not working. It's not all working. But the focus on knowing that the best business we can make is a simple business and the one that we understand and we back our own quality and everything else. So the confidence of knowing that your product's good enough to work out how to solve this problem means that the strategy of saying no to everything other than the way that you want to do it and the way that you want to build it best actually means I think we've got a bigger business now than most of the ones I see everywhere else. When I go into retail and I see a lot of the other brands, I don't think they're doing as well as us.

17:20And some I know for a fact aren't, but I think the brand perception of them is much larger. Steve Jobs, who took over Apple again, he actually brought down the distribution from third parties and made it much more pure. Totally, because at the end of the day, it's not a good signal if you're just on the shelf the whole time. A good signal is selling out all the time. So, I mean, there's a to and fro of this, like there's a right time for it. But it's a good example of like how to say no, like until I can prove that that is that we've exhausted the, you know, squeeze the lemon as much as possible in this space.

17:51It's an easy one to say no, because I still think we've got more to go on direct to consumer on our website. So that's just a good framing to think about. When you do say no, the power that it gives you is enormous because then even when I'm trying to work out, for example, how to grow on social, which is basically the main job if you're doing direct-to-consumer, I still have to work out which of these 500 ambassadors that are coming my way who are customers of ours, which 10 do I have budget to pick this year? That's still saying no to 490, but still having to spend a lot of time thinking. But that's just when trying to do one channel really well.

18:29Now multiply that with which retail stores do you want? What location? You know, there's just decisions, decisions, decisions. So if you want to build a great business that lasts, I think it's a really, really healthy experiment to see how much you can say no to and how much you can focus. So obviously I know Heights really well. I've been a Heights customer for a long time. How do you think now about product development? Because I feel like the crazy success that Heights has had has probably come through market awareness, but also probably bundling products. yeah battling products a really good way to raise revenue or aov average order value from your customers but again simplicity of what is skus which i think is stock keeping units is the official is that what that means yeah do you know what i learned this last night after five years because everyone just said i worked in e-commerce yeah everyone just says skus and it's one of those things i'm always like i need to google this at some point and i finally did last night so i'm really happy to tell you it means stock keeping units makes sense so technically we've got three skus yes the amount of times i told e-commerce brands over the years just like have limited skews yeah without knowing what it meant yeah and that's the thing right that that is actually a key to success it's the same thing same answer when this person says everyone's telling me to focus on one thing we had one product in the market for three and a half years so we're in our fifth year now.

19:51But for three and a half years, one product in the market means you really get to focus on like one thing doing one thing well. And if you're distracted with lots of other things, it can be really difficult to understand who you're creating products for and how you can help them. So I think that's been really, really good. Obviously, the other side with heights was when I saw all the other supplement companies are out there, the world doesn't need more supplement companies. In fact, the world doesn't need more companies full stop. So you have to have a really good reason why you're doing your thing, right?

20:18And for us, when we saw everyone else going broad as in here's a hundred supplements you can take from our website we were like let's just go deep get rid of all of those things what is like the one super product that we could make that combines as much as possible into one product and how do we do that in vitamins which is what vitals is how do we do that with minerals which is what our magnesium is how do we do it with bacteria which is the probiotic so like we think across different categories broad categories rather than being like also buy your, you know, vitamin D here and your K2 here and your calcium here.

20:51It's like, no, no, there's plenty of companies that do that. No one needs that. When everyone else goes broad, we're going to go deep. And I think that simplicity is really important. I think it was the CEO of Netscape who said there are two ways to make money in business, bundling and unbundling. That's funny. Which we've seen in so many industries. I mean, cable became everything. and then now you had niche you know uh services and now things are being bundled again it's very interesting i mean it's it is if you watch business over time it is what happens it's so true and you have like you know the like you said cable and then like there's a netflix you have to play netflix and disney and amazon yeah even within that you've got to then get paramount like the individual channel i can't remember but the high street was basically bundling and unbundling as well yeah you've got stores that ended up being everything stores and then now they're well they don't exist anymore but now things are much more niche and that's a wrap well ladies and gents thanks for tuning in as always uh it's nice to have you here next week we have philip bellamont who is the founder of zilch they are a unicorn they're sort of a buy now pay later company that turned really into an advertising company it's an awesome episode he's an awesome guy as is Chris.

22:09So tune in next week to see us all. Make sure that you subscribe on YouTube and do what you need to do on the audio channels. Press buttons. Press follow and subscribe on the audio channels. See you next week. See you next time.