Burger King '85: Herb's The Word

The New Coke fiasco wasn't the only questionable marketing strategy to be deployed by a major corporate brand back in 1985. Kicking off its short-lived run in November that year was Burger King's "Herb" campaign, which doesn't bear quite the same level of timeless notoriety as Coca-Cola's legendary faux pas, but nevertheless remains a ready and gift-wrapped target for any editorial looking to scoff at a naff nostalgic curio. In the 1980s, it wasn't just the soft drinks that were attempting to obliterate each other's market shares by blitzing consumers with incessant advertising. The fast food chains were also waging their own equally cutthroat war, and Herb was one of the more baffling by-products of the culinary combat.

In the US, the burger wars were being fought principally between three restaurants - McDonald's, Burger King and Wendy's (Wendy's, though, does not have as strong an international presence as the other two). McDonald's led the market by such a significant margin that the other two had basically no chance of toppling them, and in their case the battle was more for the privilege of claiming the number two spot. Naturally, a memorable advertising campaign could go a long way, and in 1984 Wendy's had found great success with their "Where's The Beef?" campaign, in which an elderly woman named Clara griped about the small sizes of their competitors' burgers. Burger King hit back the following year with a campaign devised by advertising agency J. Walter Thompson, in which they posed an altogether more imperative question: "Where's The Herb?" They referred not to some kind of secret flavouring in their own burger recipe, but to some guy named Herb. Burger King urgently wanted to know where he was at.

Actually, the more vexing question, to begin with, was not so much where was Herb as who was Herb? As the campaign got underway, he was shrouded in mystery. All we knew about Herb was that he was "different". How different? He was the only man in the entire world who had never eaten a Whopper (supposedly...). Needless to say, Burger King were deeply unhappy with Herb for his fierce non-conformity, and so, as per their advertising, was the rest of America. Where Herb was specifically was immaterial, for he was defined where he wasn't. All that mattered was that he wasn't anywhere within the vicinity of a Burger King restaurant, and the campaign set about creating an aura of mistrust around anybody who could muster neither the interest or the appetite for popular taste.

The early stages of the campaign were all about how much Burger King hated this phantom Herb's guts for the fact that he wasn't filling them with their product. They resented Herb so much that they came up with a promotion specifically structured around shunning him. When ordering a Whopper, customers were encouraged to say "I'm not Herb" to get it for 99 cents - or, if they were named Herb, "I'm not the Herb you're looking for." In one commercial, it played like an inversion on that scene from Spartacus. Meanwhile, Burger King continued to taunt Herb with a series of print ads and sports banners calling him out on his Whopper aversion. The point, obviously, was to build intrigue and to get the name Herb to the forefront of every consumer's consciousness, but in terms of the campaign's internal narrative, in which Burger King is frequented by everybody except for Herb, their obsession with this one dissenter seems frankly sinister. That, I would say, is the campaign's greatest strength at this point. It's like something out of a dystopian nightmare, in which a corporate giant sets their sights on eviscerating an individual for no other reason than that they represent a challenge to their power. The chilling implication is that Herb is the only thing standing between Burger King and world domination. He is an anomaly they cannot afford to ignore because, for as long as he's out there and not gracing their buildings with his enigmatic presence, he's a reminder that resistance is not futile. It's a far cry from the marketing strategies favoured by McDonald's, which traditionally emphasised warmth, sunniness and family togetherness, and that's potentially not such a bad thing.

It was, however, only the beginning. Two months later, Burger King elected to bring closure to the mystery and, during Super Bowl XX, they unveiled Herb's likeness before a viewing public in a much-touted TV spot. Herb, it transpired, was a wet-looking, wet-sounding milquetoast portrayed by one Jon Menick. Burger King had tracked him down, abducted him and subjected him to all manner of torture before he'd cracked, for he was now singing the praises of the corporation that had devoted the last two months to making a pariah of him. Or so it would seem. Now that the public eye was finally on him, Herb revealed that he had just sampled Burger King's signature sandwich and that it was love at first bite. Ah well, kind of an anti-climax, don't you think? I'm not sure how much of a narrative was concocted around Herb's 180 transition, but I do wonder why, if it was really that easy, Burger King had so much trouble courting him in the first place?

By whatever means, Burger King finally had finally vanquished their lone resister and the path to world domination was clear. All that was left was to have Herb flaunt his contrition by visiting Burger King restaurants all across the country. In early 1986, Burger King ran a contest in which Menick (in character as Herb) would visit restaurants in every state, and the first person to spot him on each occasion would be awarded $5,000. Meanwhile, everybody present in the restaurant at the time would be entered into a prize draw for a chance of winning $1 million. Rather than convincing the public of Burger King's unquestionable supremacy, however, it had consumers questioning their credibility. Turns out, the masses weren't really taking to this Herb character, which was a serious blow Burger King, who had already poured millions of dollars into his being.

I've read conflicting accounts as to how the campaign was initially received, and at what point the air ran out of its tires. Some sources suggest that the original phase of the campaign was very successful and that people were genuinely hooked by the initial hype, but were ultimately disappointed when Herb's identity was revealed, feeling that the "reality" of his character fell somehow short of the mystery. Others suggest that people found the campaign weird and confusing from the start, and that by the time that Herb was revealed, the public was already sick of hearing about him. Wikipedia, in typically questionable Wikipedia fashion, states that it, "confused people who tried to follow the promotion because they did not know what Herb looked like." Now personally, I was way too young, and way too non-American to have any first-hand memories of this campaign, but from the outset it does seem to me like it was split into two distinct halves. There was the initial half, where Burger King was supposedly searching for Herb, and the onus was on the public to come forth, confirm that they were not Herb, and get their 99c Whopper. Only in the second half does it seem like the onus on the viewer to find Herb in the flesh, and that was after his identity had been revealed. I'm also going to assume that those cardboard standees with Herb's likeness were distributed to Burger Kings all across the country?

As to that infamous second phase, I can see why it might have sounded promising on paper. It was like a real-life Where's Waldo, two years before Waldo (or Wally, as he was originally called in his native Blighty) even existed. A live event happening all around you that, in theory, should have made every visit to Burger King seem magical and ripe with possibility. In practice, I suspect that most people probably figured that their chances of being in the right place at the right time were too minuscule to even bother with, particularly for such a paltry cash prize. The contest failed to drum up much enthusiasm, Burger King's stock dropped by 40%, and what's more, they were headed for a major PR nightmare when Herb arrived in Bessemer, Alabama and was spotted by 15-year-old Jason Hallman, who was denied the prize money on account of his age. Burger King were enforcing a 16+ age restriction on the contest, reportedly as a measure to discourage children from playing hooky and spending all day on the Herb hunt, and opted to give the money instead to Hallman's 16-year-old friend, who was with him at the time. Ouch. Hallman's parents raised a complaint with state senator Mac Parsons, the result being that the matter was formally investigated and Burger King were ultimately condemned by the Alabama senate, who concluded that Burger King had not made the restriction clear in its promotion and that their actions consequently amounted to consumer fraud. Now, I do see a clear "16 and older to enter" disclaimer in the above commercial (assuming that it wasn't added after the negative publicity the company garnered from this incident), but again, I think it's another aspect of the contest that probably wasn't well thought-out. It wasn't like a prize draw or a scratch card, where you could be sure to only distribute the items in question among adult customers - if a kid spotted Herb inside a restaurant, then you could bet that they weren't going to hold back on account of there being an age restriction. Giving the money to the kid's older friend also strikes me as rather a callous move on the part of Burger King. I wonder if they were still friends after that? (Likewise, I suspect the contest wasn't much fun for Burger King patrons who may have borne a passing resemblance to Menick - unless they wanted to create a bit of mayhem by trolling those who might have mistaken them for Herb.)

Once the contest had run its course, Burger King were officially done with Herb and eager to put this whole unwieldy business behind them. This was no skin off Menick's nose, for he was already moving up in the world, and went on to enjoy a fairly prolific career playing bit parts in various films and TV shows - among other places, you can spot him in the 80s Twilight Zone episode "The World Next Door" and the 1992 movie Forever Young. Burger King, though, were left with such a sour aftertaste that they never did business with J. Walter Thompson again.

The real problem with the "Herb" campaign, I think, aside from the awkwardly-implemented contest, is that, as noted, it was a campaign of two distinct phases, and those two phases really don't feel as though they belong in the same campaign. The early ads were spooky, grim and ominous, but perhaps that's what made them interesting. When Herb showed his face and immediately reversed his position on the Whopper, we were plucked right out of that dystopian universe where Burger King sought to crush the rights of individuals, and the tone switched to something altogether more upbeat and would-be screwball. As for Herb himself, I think it's fair to say that he had way more character when he was a non-character, and I can't help but wonder how much more mileage this campaign might have had if they had never left Phase I and allowed Herb to stay a phantom for the full duration. This, obviously, would have been contrary to Burger King's objective, which was to create a human mascot for their brand (in a similar vein to Wendy's Clara), but in giving him a face and a persona (albeit not much of a persona), it seems to me that Burger King missed the really obvious subtext implicit in those early ads, which is that "Herb" referred less to an individual character we could expect to meet down the line than to something more abstract and uncomfortable. He was an anti-mascot, rather than a mascot - a blank space, haunting precisely because just about anybody could be projected into it. The implicit narrative was that you, potentially, were Herb. You were the person who was derided, distrusted and shut out of the action because you weren't bowing to the temptations of the King. When you informed that cashier that "I'm not Herb" or "I'm not the Herb you're looking for", it was as much a means of reasserting your own identity and your belonging as a B.K. consumer as it was of claiming a cut-price Whopper. Herb represented the self-willed exile, and you were encouraged to not be Herb. In the end, I don't think it mattered too much who played Herb or how he was characterised. Just to make Herb into an actual, tangible person and to have him develop an instantaneous passion for the Whopper kind of flew in the face of everything he signified. The "Herb" story is fascinating, because it's a case of a corporation not getting the meaning of their own campaign.

So negative were NBC's memories of Herb that in 2007 they voted his heavily-publicised reveal in 1986 as the second worst Super Bowl commercial of all-time. What took the top spot? Well, what do you think?