Burger King, Miami, Florida: Zahra Nurani, Vice President of Marketing Communications at Burger King North America

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Zahra Nurani, vice president of marketing communications at Burger King North America, is a leader who drives brand evolution by keeping Guest needs at the center of all decisions. She has always believed in a people-first mentality and her team is always her top priority, with a focus on refining team structures, agency ecosystems, and the marketing communications approach. Nurani’s entire career has been dedicated to marketing in the restaurant industry. She first started at Yum! Brands where she supported digital marketing and business analytics on behalf of Pizza Hut. After three years, Nurani joined Brinker International where she was able to support all areas of brand marketing during her nearly decade-long tenure, leaning into marketing strategy, innovation strategy and marketing communications. During her time at Brinker, Nurani led the rebranding of Chili’s Grill & Bar with a focus on connecting marketing and advertising to the in-restaurant experience and operations. This included a significant menu reduction with a focus on improved quality and core equities, which led to nearly 40% improvement in preference and 40% drop in Guest complaints.

Since joining BK parent company Restaurant Brands International as head of marketing strategy in 2020, Nurani’s work has been focused on refreshing the brand’s image and reassessing their marketing processes and strategies.

As she moved into her current BK role in 2021, she began by resetting the foundation, shifting the internal mindset on the role of marketing through deeper connection and accountability to the Guest experience in restaurant, operational initiatives, and restructuring of her team to support a new way of working. These changes have all been in service of her goal: increase relevancy and bring burning love for BK into the forefront of consumers’ minds.

These efforts culminated in October 2022 when Nurani led the launch of the brand’s new positioning via its “You Rule” campaign, which she describes as an amplification of “Have It Your Way.” This tagline evolution was a way to execute on the brand’s commitment to celebrate today’s Guests as royalty.

A key component of the updated brand positioning was reinstating the Whopper as the brand’s flagship product and a brand in its own right. Using a combination of market research, franchisee collaboration and a belief in the power of nostalgia, she looked to the brand’s rich cultural roots to create a fresh take on the 1970s jingle that introduced the original tagline. The resulting jingle ended up being a viral sensation and popular meme as social media users sang and remixed the catchy tune.

The jingle initially took off during the NFL season, due to strategic media buys in partnership with our media agency. Football fans began noticing the musical campaign and turning to social media to react. This resulted in more than 1B+ organic social impressions, with many remixing the jingle or creating their own spin on the tune. Jingle content even helped BK break its own organic content records and generated thousands of pieces of user-generated content. To continue to leverage this success, the song was uploaded to Spotify, resulting in 2M+ streams.

Overall, the campaign had a massive impact that not only generated buzz, but contributed to a 5% increase in comparable sales. In comparison to competitors, Burger King had the #1 share of voice in the NFL among restaurant brands.

While “Whopper, Whopper” has been a huge win for the “You Rule” campaign, Nurani has not stopped there. To create cohesion throughout the Guest experience, she tasked her team with collaborating across the organization to infuse “You Rule” into operational trainings, in-restaurant signage, Team Member greetings and the iconic paper crowns. This infusion of “You Rule” across the business has clearly defined the goal of the campaign – to center the Guest as royalty every time they visit a Burger King restaurant.

It’s no question that the “Whopper, Whopper” jingle had a significant impact on social media, but the tune was solidified as a true cultural moment when it was featured on Vulture’s “Into It” podcast during the “culture-geist” segment (35:40). During the segment, the campaign was lauded as an “elementary yet musically impressive earworm” and host Sam Sanders was entertained by humorous TikTok content generated by its users leveraging and remixing the jingle. Additionally, notable coverage included TODAY, The Washington Post and Slate Magazine contributing to the 1.5B+ overwhelmingly positive earned media impressions focused on consumer response to the success of the campaign. Wanting to learn more about how the concept came to be, QSR Magazine sat down with Nurani to uncover more about the “perfect storm” leading up to “Whopper, Whopper” and tease how “You Rule” might royally delight BK Guests next. The brand’s compelling “Whopper, Whopper” momentum is also detailed in the sizzle reel.