QSR May 2023

BURGER KING’S COMEBACK

ness again and for them to believe we were putting their success front and center. We have that plan in place, and though it is early, the steps we took to emphasize their profitability [were important].” Doyle adds, “Restaurants haven’t looked the way they need to” in part because of franchisees’ difficulties. “We need to work cooperatively to improve their cash flow and other things to make their businesses great again. We’ve made a lot of progress in the last several months.” Burger King franchisees’ profitabil ity was up by about 40 percent in the fourth quarter over a year earlier, Kobza says. At the same time, Burger King has a challenging path ahead to get its digital technology up to par with the rest of the indus try. “We have a lot of work to do, but we’re partway through,” Kobza says. Of the $400-million internal initiative, he explains, about $50 million is “just for franchisees to upgrade the tech nology in their restaurants: point-of-sale terminals, screens in the back of the restaurants, cabling—all will get a big push over the next year or so.” It’s a good thing, says Olivier Thierry, chief revenue offi cer for restaurant-tech provider HungerRush. “Burger King is realizing that they have to digitally transform their operations; that’s clear,” he says. “They have to build out a tech stack that brings them into the 21st century.” At Domino’s, Doyle’s challenge with technology was more about ensuring the chain could become a leader in the digital ordering and fulfillment methods that were just becoming avail able, especially mobile apps. Domino’s lunged into the online future with hundreds of new tech employees and a flurry of moves to revolutionize customer convenience in ordering pizza and tracking its delivery, and its success in that arena was prob ably the biggest factor in overtaking Pizza Hut near the end of Doyle’s tenure in 2018. “It was a big revolution, because Domino’s hadn’t taken technology seriously prior to 2009,” says Aaron Nilsson, chief information officer of Jet’s Pizza, a regional chain based in Sterling Heights, Michigan, who was global in-store technol ogy manager for Domino’s for about three years under Doyle. “It was a giant team effort. But the key thing he did is to take technology in-house and recognize it as a strategic thing and make sure the finances were there to make it happen.” WHOPPER RULES It won’t be as easy for Doyle and Kobza to leverage digital tech nology into huge gains at Burger King, Shank says. “They need to make improvements in technology infrastructure, but the wide-open spaces that Domino’s had—that opportunity has been erased for Burger King, because everyone has digital and mobile ordering now.” Yet Burger King enjoys some big advantages over Domino’s back in the day. Chief among them, the Whopper. “The food is great, and it starts with the Whopper,” Doyle says. “It’s a terrific hamburger. And when you get people to try it, or try it again, and it’s well-executed in the restaurants, you’re going to have a customer that will stick with you.” Ultimately, he told investors

in February, “that is how Burger King competes” with McDon ald’s, not to mention Wendy’s and its fresh-meat positioning for hamburgers. Indeed, Curtis has referred to the Whopper as potentially a “multi-billion-dollar brand” on its own. Consequently, Burger King’s new ad campaign emphasizes the Whopper. Its new jingle starts simply, “Whopper Whop per Whopper Whopper.” The first ad put a hip-hop spin on the chain’s classic jingle from the 1970s, “Have it your way,” also changing the tagline to, “You rule.” “Burger King has to try to catch up with McDonald’s loy alty program,” Shank says, “and how they leapfrog it will have to be through some creative investments in innovation—not just in food, but in marketing programs. The Whopper jingle has created the earworm they needed to have.” Kobza says the new advertising “is a smart and thoughtful approach and builds on a lot of our greatest strengths. And it makes sense to our customers.” Notably, Burger King’s new advertising doesn’t rely on “The King,” a rendered form of the chain’s mascot that dominated its marketing for years as the chain kept using it to appeal to its core audience of young males “When you want to come out and say, ‘This is the new Burger King,’ you need a new wrinkle of identity,” Shank says. “They may use a crown somewhere, but it’s going to look different than ‘The King’ we’ve seen in the last decade or so.” And Burger King is likely to take a different approach to its long-favored limited-time offerings, which the chain has used repeatedly over the years to appeal to a young base that’s always looking for something new. “To get trial, [ LTO s ] make all the sense in the world,” Doyle says. But he steadfastly disfavored LTOs at Domino’s because “if you discount on an ongoing basis to keep customers, it’s a bit dangerous. You have to be careful and know why you’re doing it.” Otherwise, on the food front, Burger King has replaced its original new chicken sandwich, which was hand-breaded, with a later version that comes into the restaurant pre-breaded. “It’s easier to prepare,” Kobza says. “It’s doing well.” At the same time, Kobza says, breakfast is “a meaningful daypart,” but Burger King isn’t likely to focus on boosting its breakfast menu—an area where McDonald’s excels—for a while. “Also, our whole beverage platform,” including coffee, is “on the radar. [They’re] a little further out in the calendar,” he says. Shank adds Burger King could take advantage of “a big opportunity to do order-ahead coffee through their drive thrus,” perhaps across a co-branding arrangement with Tim Hortons. “But unlike Starbucks, where food is an afterthought, coffee at Burger King would be about the whole meal. It has to be something consumers would crave every morning,” he says. Committed to a long runway for his major new investment, Doyle notes he’s already satisfied with Burger King’s new tack. “I can’t touch anything for five years,” he says. “And it could certainly go longer than that, if I’m adding value. It’s $30 mil lion. I’m all in.”

Dale Buss is a contributor to QSR and is based in Michigan.

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MAY 2023 | QSR | www.qsrmagazine.com