In the battle for breakfast between fast-food restaurants in recent years, Burger King announced their latest initiative to lure customers in. It involves a new subscription service and everyone’s favorite morning beverage – coffee.
It is a subscription service that you can purchase and use via their app where you can get a free small coffee every day for a month, for $5. With this initiative, Burger King is specifically calling out Starbucks. The tagline for the initiative?
“Enjoy BK Café for a month for the price of a large cappuccino from Starbucks.”
Burger King is trying to pull some of those customers away that do drive to their local Starbucks in the mornings, to come to Burger King instead. It’s an obvious play – if they can get customers to physical visit the store and hopefully, they will also buy items from the breakfast menu.
Now you can only get one small cup of black coffee, and there are no refills, but for 17-cents-per-cup, a drive-thru, and no need to get your wallet out (just open your phone’s app) – this does offer a much cheaper (and quicker) way to get your morning cup of joe.
The upsides for Burger King seem numerous:
- Drive more traffic to your locations
- Encourage downloads of your app
- Guaranteed monthly revenue through the subscription service model
- Offer a cheaper alternative to many people’s morning routines
Will this work and will any other fast food chains copy it? Time will tell.