If you missed it, Burger King tweeted, “Women belong in the kitchen,” today in honor of International Women’s Day, along with a message saying that only 20% of chefs are women, and that they were launching a scholarship for female Burger King employees looking to pursue culinary careers. The tweet has since been deleted.
The goal, of course, was to grab attention. Grab attention it did. Obviously, there was a miscalibration, and their attempt at eye-catching-headline-with-positive-substance-beneath missed the mark. People were mad at Burger King today.
But what if it wasn’t a miscalibration?
Last month, pop country singer Morgan Wallen experienced a massive surge in sales and streams. The impetus? Most U.S. radio stations dropping his music and his record label suspending promotion of his album. The impetus for that? A video emerging of Wallen using the n-word.
Perceiving some sort of overreach from “cancel culture,” fans turned the racist incident into a massive financial windfall for the performer. In pop country, it’s evidently great marketing to get hammered, yell the n-word in a quiet neighborhood, and have a video of the incident leaked. Racial slurs are big business, because consequences (which would have been temporary in the first place, obviously) are “canceling” and the backlash to that “canceling” is that you become a folk hero to a sizable portion of America.
So here’s the question: Would it be surprising at all if certain segments of the media went apeshit this week about people being mad at Burger King for what said segments of the media would sum up as “promoting a scholarship for women?” The answer is no. And would it be surprising at all if people perceiving an injustice against Burger King filled up those drive-throughs tomorrow to the point that Burger King ran out of chicken fries? (Do they still serve chicken fries? I haven’t eaten Burger King in forever.) The answer, again, is no.
I’m not saying this was Burger King’s gameplan.
But if it was…
It might work.
EDIT: Evidently it was the UK Burger King. They have Burger King in the UK? Anyway, wanted to post that correction/addition because, I don’t know, it seemed like something I should do. I don’t know how this changes the situation. But let us be clear about it all.
