In spring 2022, Swedish fast food chain MAX Burgers was about to launch their biggest news for many years – the Grand Chicken Menu. A brand-new menu with a brand-new chicken patty (a whole juicy fillet, carefully fried to crispy perfection).

A fantastic product innovation, but a fantastically difficult communication challenge. In the burger category, new burgers are being launched every month and there was already a countless number of chicken burgers available among the fast-food chains (including our own current products).

So, with the primary objective to increase sales of Max’s chicken products, our task was not “only” to break through and get attention for an, on paper, relatively generic product. We also needed to transform the chicken burger from the obligatory alternative product it was perceived as, to an interesting, attractive, and self-evident hero product that more people wanted to choose.

Max Burgers’ new chicken range had the potential to make Max the go-to place for fast food chicken products in Sweden. But while Swedes love chicken, chicken burgers were considered dry, boring and tasteless – everything that the new Grand Chicken was not. Hence, we needed to challenge these attitudes on a broad scale, targeting basically the whole population.

To transform the perception of the chicken burger from a forgotten tasteless meat alternative to the proud and confident hero burger that our new Grand Chicken was, we focused on two things. The first was to signal how crispy, juicy, and tasty our new Grand Chicken was by highlighting its golden, almost luminescent, fried skin. The second thing was to use the campaign and its creative and media planning approach to portray our new products in a big and bombastic way.

During the week of the launch, the campaign went live in a bunch of TVC’s, showing people reacting to the actual campaign in other medias like print, online, big bus ads – and of course, large outdoor ads.

So, we built the campaign in the “real outdoors” to match the ones shown in the tv advert.

We used large billboards in Sweden’s biggest cities to show off our new menu, and then had digital billboards in many different formats nearby react to the big news on the large billboards.

Simply, we made different outdoor formats in both OOH and DOOH interact with each other, creating a really big integrated outdoor experience all over Sweden’s three largest cities during two weeks after the launch.

The campaign “Swedish Chicken like you’ve never seen it before” was a huge sales success and beat all previous records for new product launches. The campaign reached more than 90% of the population which lead to:

• An all-time high ad awareness (+36%),

• an all-time high brand linkage (+12%),

• a purchase intention of 49%,

• 40% now answering “Max Burgers” to the question of what burger chain serves the best chicken burgers (+90%),

• a 5% increase in average spend at Max Burgers, and

• a 2% growth in market shares.

But most importantly, after years of stable chicken sales, Max Burgers’ sales of chicken products increased by 62% in only five months. Thanks to our big (and slightly meta) campaign, every third meal sold at Max is now a chicken meal.