Was Your Father A Thief?

One of my favorite word of mouth campaigns: BBNT is a fast food chain with a handful of stores in Melbourne, Australia. To encourage young people to try their burgers, the company ran a campaign that’s based on bad pick-up lines. The staff was instructed that if anyone came in and said “Was your father a thief?” they were to respond “No, why?” then if the customer replied “Well, who stole the stars and put them in your eyes?” they were to give him or her a free cheeseburger. Twenty people around Melbourne were told about the promotion and pretty soon the word got out. “What was really exciting about it was that people had to be a little bit brave,” says Nick Cummins at Sputnik Agency that ran the promotion. “Some people came in and chickened out half way fearing their friends were having a joke on them, especially when the staff answered ‘No, why?’” But soon the campaign got so popular and so many free burgers were being handed out that the bad pickup line had to be changed to “Are you from Jamaica?” (Answer: “Cause Jamaican me crazy.”) With only word of mouth, the campaign drove lots of young people to sample the burgers and positioned BBNT as a fun and irreverent brand.