*supercollider

McDonald’s and Burger King both target the youth market, but Burger King has definitely been the edgier of the two over the years, led by Crispin Porter’s attention-grabbing and award-winning creative.

Subservient Chicken, the XBox 360 games, Whopper Freakout, and bringing back the King as a creepy and ubiquitous mascot have all positioned Burger King clearly away from McDonalds.

Now Burger King is taking a further step into becoming a fully-fledged lifestyle marketing brand alongside the usual suspects like Red Bull, Mountain Dew, Scion and Nike by launching an art initiative called Burger King Studio, a project originating out of Mess Marketing in Chicago.

Gallery space

Although the description of the initiative as a “collaboration between Burger King Corporation and cutting edge artists and desginers” sounds unlikely, Burger King Studio is an actual gallery space in Chicago, and the online presence is based around a blog covering all the activity in that space, including a launch exhibition and screen-printing workshop.

Cool I guess, but I’m a bit uncomfortable about having the art focus around Burger King messaging and branding. It twists and stretches the cool-by-association goal into something a bit less appealing. As a point of comparison, you’d never see Scion’s A/V label releasing albums about cars, it’s totally missing the point.

Brands like Converse and Red Bull can get away with it because their products have become icons over time. Burger King and their agencies are working hard try to and make The King into a modern icon, but until that point is reached trying to force the iconization seems, well, forced. However I suppose if they can pull this off credibly, it will definitely help them get where they want to go.

Custom art x American Apparel t-shirts

The studio space also has inherently niche reach, and so for the second part of Burger King Studio, BK has worked with the gallery artists to create a series of limited edition t-shirts, and best of all, a tool to allow you to customize your own using a variety of graphic assets.

The tool is very slick and the partnership with American Apparel to produce the shirts is a brilliant choice, lending a huge amount of extra cred to the end result. And it all fits nicely under the “Have it your way” umbrella.

Only knock on the implementation is I think they would’ve been smarter to go with less BK specific icons in order to attract more usage and more spread of the t-shirts tool.

The balance between BK specific icons and generic icons should’ve been 20/80, not the other way around. As much as BK would like this to be the case, their brand is not Harley Davidson and I think it’s unlikely teens are willing to pay to be walking billboards for them yet.

Instead they should be thinking first and foremost what their audience actually wants, and I’m thinking BK branding would be pretty far down the list. So fulfill the audience wants first, and then slip a few BK branding elements in there to hope people mix them in. Overdoing it comes off a bit like the brand talking to itself.

BK Studio: Yay or Nay?

Although I have reservations about the degree of prominence of the BK branding in all of this, I like the initiative and think it fits in well with Burger King’s push to be seen as the edgy/trendy alternative to McDonald’s.

I think to see real results they’ll need to stick with this over time — that’s how Red Bull got to where they are. It’s a long-term commitment to brand-building, and people in this space remember the brands that do hit and runs rather than meaningfully contributing to the scene, if they notice you at all. So it’ll be interesting to see if BK commits and sticks with this brand-building programme at a time when other brands are pairing down and focusing on direct sales drivers.

It’s also interesting to see yet another brand get involved in the arts space. It’s looking more and more that brands will increasingly become modern patrons for artists and musicians, and I think that shaped correctly this trend could be a win-win for everybody involved, tied into the overarching trend of marketing by doing good things.

UPDATE: Have made a couple of tweaks in the post body to clarify that Burger King Studio was created by Mess Marketing out of Chicago, not CP+B.

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art, collaboration, differentiation, marketing, mass customization