The hamburger wars

THE

HAMBURGER

WARS

Name: Barbara Blokker

Course: Integrated Communication

Date: 2005-01-26

Problem Statement

Is competitive advertising a good way to present your advertising of your product to the public?

Diagnosis of the problem

The problem is that the companies compete with each other through advertising and in the advertising they tend to criticize their competitors. Comparative advertising.

When they start advertising in this way the start a chain reaction.

The first company makes the first advertisement which criticizes the second company and they will react on this with a lawsuit. The third company will profit from this with their own advertising and lawsuits. And this results in bad advertising and a lot of lawsuits.

If you look at this case you see that Burger king started with a comparative advertising. Burger King compared their hamburger with the hamburger from Mc Donalds. Mc Donalds reacted with a lawsuit. This gives Mc Donalds and Burger King free publicity witch resulted in Wendy's reacting with their own lawsuit.

04-02366 Donald W. Douglas and David R. Davis who ...

Français : Un MacDonald's, un KFC et un Pizza Hut...

English: Fast food in Yambol, Bulgaria Бълга�...

Although this war of words give the companies free publicity it also creates negative publicity. The lawsuits also generates bad publicity and will reverse the effect the advertising had in the first place. The lawsuits creates costs which results in a higher selling price for the costumer. The costumer will not appreciate this and will buy less hamburgers (in this case). Which result in less profit for the company.

In this case the companies in the end profited from the advertising war. But as I said in the last paragraph this is not always the case. The three companies showed an increase in sales after everything was over. People say that bad press is better than no press at all.

After this case you can ask your self the question whether the companies had planned...