Thanks to the big success of Whopper, Burger King takes the lead in the South Korean QSR market. Its regional sales are greater than rivals like McDonald’s, KFC, and Popeye’s.

But when it comes to the chicken sandwich category, BK is the underdog. According to the brand’s internal data in 2022, only 5% of BK’s total sales were from chicken sandwiches.

To lift the sales of the chicken sandwich category, BK launched a new crispy fried chicken sandwich in 2023 - Chicken King. Our new hero has the following 2 objectives.

First, to become a flagship chicken sandwich menu of BK.

Secondly, to grow BK’s entire chicken sandwich portfolio.

Our idea started from South Korean mainstream fashion trends.

Koreans love to wear fluffy fleece jackets in winter, and we found that its fabric really looks like fried chicken, especially when the color is brown or orange.

This visual duality allowed us a new way of creating an association of chicken sandwiches.

Fashion & chicken sandwich. That combination was never been before in Korea.

Eventually, "Chicken King Fashion Week", the first fashion event from Burger King launched.

To make Chicken King famous, we had a problem to solve;

WHEN KOREANS THINK OF BURGER KING, THEY ONLY THINK ABOUT THE WHOPPER. NOT THE CHICKEN SANDWICH.

Our top priority was to let Koreans know widely that "BK also has a chicken sandwich category".

However, South Korea is a harsh battlefield with 683 fried chicken franchises. That means that if you want to introduce a new fried chicken sandwich, you compete with all the others and their ads. Then we found that one of the fashion items that Koreans love the most resembles fried chicken. That were fluffy fleece jackets.

By leveraging the visual duality between brown fleece fashion and fried chicken, we wanted to make Koreans think of Chicken King as a crispy chicken sandwich as often as possible. Of course, none of our rivals have come up with this idea yet.

Our execution is all about the journey to own the brown fleece fashion as our talking points and touchpoints as well. We literally did a (fried chicken) fashion campaign by leveraging the visual duality of fleece jackets and Chicken King.

The first step was the online film. In the film, we demonstrated brown fleece fashion as "Fried Chicken Fashion" and announced "Chicken King Fashion Week".

A Fashion week needs a runway stage. We set up a photo wall in our restaurant and invited people and influencers by offering up to 100 free Chicken Kings for those who visit with fried chicken fashion.

All prints and banners also should be like photographs of a fashion brand. We created like with fashion models and fried chicken fashions.

The campaign went viral from the first day of launch.

As BK created the campaign like fashion brands, several fashion magazines like Esquire and Cosmopolitan gave a spotlight.

Plus, our Instagram post was selected as today's post on Korea's largest community web 'DCinside' where has 252 million monthly visitors.

- 310M+ media impressions

- 150M+ KRW earned media

- 700K+ Chicken Kings sold in a month

- 20% Sales lift vs. Pre-Launch

But Most of all, Chicken King succeed to become BK's permanent menu in Korea.