A&W Turns its 'Worst Marketing Fail' Into a New Burger | QSR magazine
A&W Restaurants is releasing a cleverly rebranded 1⁄3 lb. burger to make amends for a decades-old marketing mishap that’s seen renewed interest on social media lately. Just check out this Instagram post.
In the 1980s, A&W tried to compete with the immensely popular McDonald’s Quarter Pounder by offering a bigger, juicier 1⁄3 Pound Burger at the same price. Unfortunately, Americans aren’t so great at math. Confused consumers wrongly assumed that 1⁄4 was bigger than 1⁄3 and the whole experiment went down in history as a huge marketing fail.
The chain—founded in 1919 and the oldest in America—has spent every waking moment since this embarrassing fiasco crunching the numbers, employing a team of top mathematicians and the creative services of ad agency CORNETT in an attempt to bounce back with a burger so big and a message so clear that no one in their right mind would think it’s smaller than a puny Quarter Pounder.
A&W is launching the 3/9 lb. Burger with a dramatic reenactment of the “Eureka!” moment. That video (see above), featuring mascot and math prodigy Rooty the Great Root Bear solving the unsolvable equation in his study, is the centerpiece of a paid media campaign that will run throughout the promotion
