After repurchasing a number of its franchised restaurants across the global estate, Burger King wanted to offer a more consistent, improved customer experience and command a higher market share. It needed to emphasise the quality credentials of its products to show the value of its more premium price point.

With a new brand strategy that would take Burger King from good to legendary, our team stepped in to activate it. We helped translate its core purposes and beliefs into consistent behaviours that everyone, from crew members to support staff, could embody on Burger King’s quest for greatness.

First we created a three-year people and culture performance roadmap, through a series of leadership mapping and prioritisation workshops. This helped Burger King to both define its short-term priorities and understand its long-term performance goals. All had clear KPIs tied to metrics such as the number of applicants for each role, the mood on the internal culture dashboard and the brand’s NPS rating.

Together with key stakeholders, we considered how purpose-driven and inclusive the proposed culture activation activities were. We also looked at how they could be replicated globally and help to energise and differentiate Burger King’s operations.

We then moved to activate this ambition through a creative approach in tune with the brand’s relaxed and playful identity. We gathered 160 key people from across a selection of restaurants, including managers and support staff, to a mass scrawl. Its goal was to capture rich insights from across Burger King to help the brand define the new behaviours everyone should adopt.

The session utilised comic strips and role play to bring to life three key parts of the brand’s behaviour model – individual expression (open mindedness), big tastes (being committed) and challenging the norm (acting purposefully).

Our work was instrumental in giving Burger King’s HR and leadership teams more direction and clarity. Everyone could focus on truly shifting areas of the business from good to legendary, rather than ineffectively tackling too much at once.

Following our behaviour hackathon, Burger King received glowing attendance reports and staff quickly adopted the new framework to offer a more consistent and positive customer experience. Across just one of the key tracking markets, Burger King’s UK restaurants reported incredibly strong performance in 2021. Revenues increased by 68% to £211.7m, like-for-like sales increased by 46% and it recorded a £33.4m operating profit for the year.