---
title: "Whopper Detour and Berger & Milkman: what the data says"
description: "Whopper Detour set against Berger and Milkman's study of 6,956 articles: which findings fit, what cannot be concluded, and a scoring sheet to use before launch."
url: "https://staging.khoi.co.uk/en/blog/whopper-detour-doc-qua-berger-milkman"
lang: en-GB
author: "Lê Quốc Khôi"
date: 2026-11-02
updated: 2026-11-02
topics: ["Marketing & sales"]
tags: ["Viral marketing", "Word of mouth", "Burger King", "Geo-conquesting", "Consumer psychology"]
---

# Whopper Detour through Berger and Milkman: what fits, what doesn't

## Key takeaways

- From 4 to 12 December 2018, anyone with the Burger King app within 600 feet (about 183 metres) of most McDonald's restaurants could order a Whopper for one cent, and the app then directed them to the nearest Burger King (Williams, 2018).
- Berger and Milkman analysed 6,956 New York Times articles from 30 August to 30 November 2008. Articles that evoked high-arousal emotions such as awe, anger or anxiety were more likely to make the most-emailed list; sadder ones were less likely (Berger and Milkman, 2012).
- The two sources do not measure the same thing: one covers articles and written test stories, the other is a news brief published a day after launch, with no results. The comparison here is therefore a set of hypotheses.
- A usable method: three people score each factor independently on a five-point scale before launch, then you track both shares and orders.

On 4 December 2018 Burger King invited customers to do something odd: stand within 600 feet of a McDonald's, open the Burger King app and buy a Whopper for one cent. If you run marketing for a chain in Vietnam, the question is whether an idea like this has what it takes to be retold, and what evidence would let you say so.

## How did Whopper Detour work?

The campaign ran from 4 to 12 December 2018. Smartphone users who came within 600 feet of most McDonald's restaurants could order a Whopper for a penny in Burger King's redesigned app. Once the order was placed, the app directed them away from McDonald's and towards the nearest Burger King to collect it (Williams, 2018). Each user could redeem the offer only once during the campaign (Williams, 2018).

The stated aim was to promote the app's order-ahead features (Williams, 2018). Marketing Dive set the campaign against McDonald's report that its app had been downloaded about 60 million times. That figure is quoted by the brief, and I could not check the original.

The brief is dated 5 December 2018, a day after launch. It gives no download count, no order count and no share count (Williams, 2018), and the library holds no other source that reports results. So this post does not say Whopper Detour "went viral". The campaign is only worth setting beside the research on sharing. A short profile sits in the [Burger King case](https://staging.khoi.co.uk/en/case/burger-king-whopper-detour).

## What did Berger and Milkman measure, and on what kind of content?

They took every article that appeared on the New York Times home page between 30 August and 30 November 2008, 6,956 in all, and checked which ones reached the "most e-mailed" list. 20 per cent did (Berger and Milkman, 2012). For 2,566 articles, three independent raters scored awe, anger, anxiety, sadness, surprise, practical usefulness and interest from 1 to 5, with high agreement between raters (Berger and Milkman, 2012). The model also controlled for where an article sat on the home page, its length, its author and the day it appeared, to separate the effect of content from the effect of prominent placement (Berger and Milkman, 2012).

The field results come down to three points:

- More positive articles were more likely to make the list than negative ones (Berger and Milkman, 2012).
- But emotion is not just good or bad. Articles evoking awe, anger or anxiety were more likely to make the list, and articles evoking sadness less likely (Berger and Milkman, 2012). The authors explain this through activation: anger and anxiety are high-activation states that favour action; sadness is low-activation, associated with inaction.
- The results held after controlling for surprise, interest and practical usefulness, all of which were themselves positively linked to making the list (Berger and Milkman, 2012).

On size, one standard deviation more anger raised the odds of making the list by 34 per cent, which the authors equate to 2.9 extra hours as the lead story; for awe the figure was 30 per cent (Berger and Milkman, 2012). I cite these only as an order of magnitude.

Three small experiments add the causal piece. Participants read one of two versions of a story, one more emotional than the other, and rated how likely they were to share it on a 1 to 7 scale (Berger and Milkman, 2012):

| Experiment | Participants | Story | Sharing score, less → more emotional version |
|:--|--:|:--|:--|
| 2a, amusement | 49 | Jimmy Dean sausages hire a farmer as spokesperson, or a rabbi | 2.92 → 3.97 |
| 2b, anger | 45 | United Airlines and damaged guitars: "dents" against "smashes" | 3.37 → 5.71 |
| 3, sadness | 47 | A woman with injured hands: a fall down the stairs, or 9/11 | 3.80 → 2.39 |

In all three, the arousal that participants reported mediated the difference (Berger and Milkman, 2012). The samples are small and the measure is stated intention to share, not actual sharing.

## Where does Whopper Detour fit each finding?

The table below is my reading. The left column is what Berger and Milkman measured. The right column is the campaign's mechanics according to Marketing Dive, plus my inference, and none of it was scored by anyone.

> **Figure:** (compare)

```json
{
  "type": "compare",
  "columns": ["Berger and Milkman found", "Whopper Detour, per Marketing Dive and my reading"],
  "rows": [
    { "label": "Surprise, interest", "cells": ["Positively linked to making the list, even after controlling for emotion", "The offer sends customers away from the rival they were standing near. I read that as surprising; nobody scored it"] },
    { "label": "Practical usefulness", "cells": ["Positively linked; they give coupons as an example of useful content", "A Whopper for one cent is real money saved, limited to one redemption per user"] },
    { "label": "High-arousal positive emotion (amusement, awe)", "cells": ["Experiment 2a: participants said they would share a funnier campaign story more", "The brief says \"trolls\", and Burger King's own post says \"yes, you read that right\". I read that as a teasing tone; amusement was not measured"] },
    { "label": "Anger or anxiety", "cells": ["Positively linked to making the list", "Nothing in the brief suggests the campaign aimed at these"] },
    { "label": "Sadness", "cells": ["Negatively linked to making the list", "No sign of it in the brief"] }
  ]
}
```

The first three rows show why the campaign deserves comparison: surprise, real value, a teasing tone. But all three are my inference from the mechanics, and someone else might score "surprise" lower, since deep discounting to win customers is a familiar move. Nor does the brief suggest the campaign targeted anger, the emotion with the largest effect in their field data. If an emotional element is present at all, it is amusement, and the evidence for amusement is one experiment with 49 people reading text. That is the thinnest link in the comparison.

## What can this evidence not tell you?

Four limits, in the order I find them heavy:

1. Different content. The field data are 2008 news articles chosen for emailing. There is no video, and no offer that asks people to do something in the physical world. Experiment 2a gave readers a written account of a campaign, not the campaign itself (Berger and Milkman, 2012).
2. Sharing was not the campaign's goal. Berger and Milkman measured making the list and intention to share (Berger and Milkman, 2012). Whopper Detour aimed at use of the order-ahead app (Williams, 2018). A one-cent offer could pull in app downloads without anyone telling anyone else. With the sources I have, the two mechanisms cannot be separated.
3. No campaign results. No downloads, no shares, no comparison with another period (Williams, 2018). Any comparison stops at hypothesis.
4. Negative emotion and the brand. The authors write that negative emotion may hurt attitudes to a brand and product, while showing that some negative emotions increase sharing (Berger and Milkman, 2012). They did not measure brand effects. The anger result should not be read as advice to make customers angry.

## How should a small Vietnamese chain use this before launching?

Use it as a scoring sheet for ideas, then measure two things after launch. The example below is hypothetical: the chain, the ideas and every number are mine, made up to show the method.

**A hypothetical example.** A three-shop bánh mì chain in Cần Thơ, with an order-ahead app, is choosing between two ideas. A, "Detour Bánh Mì": anyone who opens the app within about 100 metres of a rival's shop can buy a roll for 1,000 dong, and the app directs them to the chain's own shop. B: 50 per cent off during the opening week of the fourth shop.

Write each idea in two sentences. Three colleagues score each factor from 1 to 5 independently, without discussing, the way Berger and Milkman scored their articles (Berger and Milkman, 2012). Then average.

| Factor (scale 1–5) | A: Detour Bánh Mì | B: 50% off opening week |
|:--|--:|--:|
| Surprise | 4.3 | 1.7 |
| Interest | 3.7 | 2.3 |
| Practical usefulness | 4.7 | 4.0 |
| Amusement (high arousal, positive) | 3.3 | 1.3 |
| Anger or anxiety | 1.0 | 1.0 |

The scores are invented. How to read them: A beats B on surprise and amusement, two factors tied to sharing in the study, while the practical value of the two is close.

The sheet says nothing about money. Suppose a roll costs 12,000 dong to make and 2,000 rolls are redeemed at 1,000 dong: the subsidy is 2,000 × 11,000 = 22 million dong. It also does not tell you whether targeting a rival's shop and using customers' locations raises issues under comparative-advertising or personal-data rules. This post does not cover Vietnamese law, so ask a lawyer.

After launch, track two things, because the research speaks to only the first: shares or mentions of the campaign, and new customers' orders through the app. Many shares and few orders mean a fun idea that does not sell. Many orders and few shares suggest the price offer may be working alone.

## Going deeper: what I read and what I did not

I read Berger and Milkman's paper in full (Journal of Marketing Research, 2012, vol. 49, no. 2, pp. 192–205) from a public PDF found online, not from the publisher's site, and converted automatically. Some table cells came out garbled, so I used only figures from the running text and the summary figure, and I did not recompute anything.

Williams's Marketing Dive brief draws on Burger King's announcement. I read the brief, not the announcement, and its McDonald's figure is the author's citation of another source.

The library's framework page on the [four drivers of viral video](https://staging.khoi.co.uk/en/framework/viral-video-drivers) lists emotional appeal, storytelling, simplicity and relatability, and shareability, and gives Berger and Milkman and Krowinska and colleagues (2023) as its origin (Krowinska et al., 2023). I have not read the Krowinska book. In Berger and Milkman's paper I did not find storytelling, simplicity, relatability or shareability measured as separate factors. The list may come from the book, but I have not checked, so I cannot say. This post takes only what Berger and Milkman measured, which is why the table above does not use the four-driver list.

Finally, a newspaper's emailing list in 2008 is not the channel you are running on, and I have no data showing the results carry over. The study gives a hypothesis worth testing on your own channel, not a rule.

## Frequently asked questions

### Did Whopper Detour actually go viral?

The sources I used cannot say. The Marketing Dive brief went up on 5 December 2018, a day after the campaign began, and describes the mechanics only: no app downloads, no orders, no share counts (Williams, 2018). Answering the question needs Burger King's own results or an independent study, and this library holds neither.

### Do Berger and Milkman's findings apply to video?

Their field data are New York Times articles, not video. In the experiments, participants read short written accounts of an advertising campaign, a customer-service episode and a news story (Berger and Milkman, 2012). The opening lists ads and videos as examples of online content, but none of the studies I read contains video data. Carrying the findings over to video is an inference, so test it on your own channel.

### Does angry content get shared more?

In the Times data, angrier articles were more likely to reach the most-emailed list, and an experiment with a story about an airline pointed the same way (Berger and Milkman, 2012). The authors themselves note that negative emotion can hurt attitudes to a brand, citing a 1987 study, and they did not measure that (Berger and Milkman, 2012). More sharing is not the same as a better-liked brand.

### Do I really need three raters for a small campaign?

No, but it is cheap. Berger and Milkman used three independent raters per dimension and found high reliability, meaning different people tend to see the same emotion in the same content (Berger and Milkman, 2012). My suggestion, which is not from the paper: if three colleagues are two or more points apart on a five-point scale, the idea is not yet clear enough to run.

## References

- Berger, J. and Milkman, K.L. (2012) ‘What makes online content viral?’, *Journal of Marketing Research*, 49(2), pp. 192–205. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.10.0353
- Krowinska, A. et al. (2023) *Digital content marketing: creating value in practice*. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003346500
- Williams, R. (2018) *Burger King trolls McDonald's with geolocation stunt*. Marketing Dive. Available at: https://www.marketingdive.com/news/burger-king-trolls-mcdonalds-with-geolocation-stunt/543658/ (Accessed: 2 November 2026).

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