In its latest brand ‘reset,’ Burger King is owning up to mistakes

“What happened?” begins Burger King’s latest ad, which premiered during Sunday night’s Oscars broadcast on ABC. “There was a time when Burger King used to be king.”

The question has been the center of a yearslong, $700 million effort to revamp Burger King’s image after the brand lost its spot as the No. 2 US burger chain in 2020.

Over the last several years, the brand has been updating its restaurant operations, technology, and appearances, as well as adjusting menu items and changing its packaging, Joel Yashinsky, CMO of Burger King US and Canada, told Marketing Brew. It’s also changed some branding elements, like giving its king mascot the pink slip.

“Many people found the king to be creepy,” Yashinsky said. “So we’re firing the king.”

Extensive conversations with customers and franchisees have provided insights on what Burger King needed to change, from axing the mascot to adding boxes to prevent in-bag burger flattening, he said. Last month, Burger King President Tom Curtis, who recently went viral, posted his phone number on social media and asked people to share feedback on the brand. He’s received more than 20,000 calls and text messages to date, Yashinsky said.

The brand is only halfway through its transformation, Curtis recently told the Wall Street Journal, but there are signs that things are moving in the right direction. During a presentation to investors in February, he said that Burger King ranked No. 6 out of 12 “in overall satisfaction among top US QSR brands” in 2025, per Circana, up from 2020 when the brand ranked 10th.

Yashinsky said Burger King’s evolution will continue to be guided by customer feedback until satisfaction rates are even higher.

“This is not a marketing campaign,” Yashinsky told us. “It’s a brand reset.”

Have it your way

Before making amends, whether with friends, family, or customers, it’s important to acknowledge one’s shortcomings, Yashinsky told us. In the newly premiered 90-second ad created with creative agency BarkleyOKRP, Curtis serves as narrator, pointing out Burger King’s “old restaurants” and “slow service” as shortcomings that customers identified.

Candidly admitting mistakes is a strategy that may sound familiar to those who remember the 2009 “Pizza Turnaround” ad campaign from Domino’s, where Curtis worked for over a decade before joining Burger King in 2021. Domino’s campaign similarly featured negative customer social media posts and focus group footage with a promise to improve; it has since become the top pizza chain in the US beginning in 2017.

Some of the footage in Burger King’s ad came from social posts, and while Yashinsky said the brand did its fair share of social listening, the most useful feedback has come from the direct messages sent to Curtis. He said the brand’s guest relations team has been sorting through those messages and generating insights from that feedback in addition to social posts.

“I’ve had a chance to take some calls on [Curtis’s] behalf in the last week, and it’s invigorating to talk to guests and get their feedback,” Yashinsky said. “This is really a step change in terms of how we want to interact with our guests in a way that goes much deeper than just mentions and discussions and comments that are made on social channels.”

As the revamp continues, Yashinsky said brand leaders are focused on keeping a direct line of communication with customers open—even if not all the feedback is nice…or, in some cases, relevant.

“If this is going to land and be seen as authentic and real, we can’t just do this for two weeks,” he said. “It has to be something we do moving forward on a regular and consistent basis.”