King Charles III's trip to Germany was his first state visit as King. And one of the media events of the year. Press representatives from all over the world were on hand to cover this historic moment. We used this enormous attention to generate buzz on social media and in the global press with a PR stunt - by involuntarily making the King our brand ambassador. In doing so, we not only claimed the state visit for ourselves, but also dominated the associated coverage and turned the King's trip to Berlin into a huge PR event for Burger King.
From March 29th - 31st, Charles came to Germany - his first state visit as King. This means huge media interest and buzz on social media. The whole world is following this event. As everyone loves our Burger King cardboard crown, it’s one of our most important brand assets and stands for our unconditional claim that every customer is king with us - manifested in our German claim "Mach dein King" (English: "You rule"). The brief was to create engagement with our brand, our crown and our brand values. We decided that Charles III visit in Germany was an ideal occasion to leverage for PR and push our brand message.
During his state visit we made King Charles III our brand ambassador and testimonial. We offered him something he's been waiting for over 50 years: a royal crown. We redesigned our most important brand asset - our Burger King cardboard crown - intricately and in every detail, so that it resembled the real St Edwards crown. While the whole world watched the King's state visit, we handed out our crowns to waiting fans. Thanks to our unique design especially for this occasion, everyone loved to wear our crown which made great visuals for PR and Social Media. The grand finale: the handing over of the crown to the monarch. The moment when the king was offered the crown was captured by press and spread on numerous channels around the world and on social media. Burger King became a dominant part of the coverage and Charles became our brand ambassador.
At Burger King everyone and anyone is a king. It's part of our brand DNA and is reflected in every action we take. In our name, our claim "Mach dein King" (English: "You Rule") and our famous cardboard crown everybody loves to wear. Due to the special design of the crowns especially for this occasion, people wearing the crown offer an entertaining photo and film motif. As a limited edition in an exclusive royal design, they were especially desirable and were practically snatched out of our hands at the event. The highlight for extra PR relevance was of course our attempt to present Charles with one of the crowns. We strategically positioned several members of our team in the crowd to ensure a handover opportunity. In addition to the official press photographers, our team produced film and photo footage of the handover and made it available to the press.
To generate maximum PR value with our campaign, we left nothing to chance. Because one thing was clear: we only had one chance. Our team smuggled our 3,000 crowns onto the closed-off area where the celebrations were to take place. We distributed our royal crowns to the waiting fans in advance, in order to have enough crowns in the audience at the moment of the handover. In addition to the press photographers present, our own team shot additional footage that we could then make available to the media. Then the moment had come: when Charles greeted the fans present, we tried to hand him our redesigned crown. This moment generated tons of press footage that went around the world within 24 hours, involuntarily staging Charles as our brand ambassador in the media and social media.
In the first 24 hours, our stunt generated over 2 billion impressions and earned media value of over 2 million. At the same time, our mentions increased by over 450%.
The campaign was implemented with a very small budget of only 2000€ for 3000 crowns. This way we ensured that we could not only provide Charles but also the royal fans present with our crowns.