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Tom Curtis is the president of Burger King. But the average person had never heard of him.
That changed on February 17, 2026.
That’s the day Burger King went live with a new video on TikTok and Instagram. It features Curtis walking through a Burger King and introducing himself to the camera. Then he shares his phone number and says, “I’d love to hear from as many of you as possible. So give me a call.”
So far, more than 86,000 people have taken him up on it, sharing what they love and hate about the brand. Curtis takes as many of the calls as he can. His team takes the rest, gathering data and tracking what people are saying.
Why do this? Because Curtis believed that Burger King had lost its way. Over the past two decades, the King’s crown became tarnished. The brand began relying heavily on discounts, was overshadowed by the savvy marketing of other fast-food brands like Popeyes and Wendy’s, and began financially spiraling. In 2022, Burger King stores were driving about half the business of an average McDonald’s. Franchisees were furious. Some went bankrupt.
Curtis saw this himself. He used to love Burger King as a consumer, but stopped going after a bad experience. “Then I watched the brand as a non-guest, and I didn’t see any changes in the restaurant,” he says. “So I was never inspired to go back for maybe 15 years.”
And yet, he also saw something else: People still wanted to love Burger King. “The brand had gotten old, tired, irrelevant,” he says. “But there was a latent love and nostalgia around the brand. People wanted to return to it. They just needed a reason.”
Curtis knew how to give them one. He’d spent a career at Domino’s, rising through the ranks to become executive vice president of U.S. operations, and helping lead the pizza brand through its own famous turnaround. Burger King hired him as COO in April 2021, and he became the brand’s president for the U.S. and Canada a few months later. That’s when he began a quiet, steady process of fixing Burger King.
This is what most consumers didn’t see, he says: Although he gave out his phone number in 2026, the actual work of fixing Burger King started five years earlier. The phone-number stunt wasn’t truly the beginning of a conversation; it was the announcement of an improved Burger King, and an invitation for fans to take another look.
Image Credit: Stocki I_Studio | Stock.Adobe.Com
So what happened in the years before that phone number appeared on-screen? Here are four things Curtis did to turn the brand around.
1. Rebuild trust by investing first, asking later.
When a new leader takes over a franchise brand, they usually do the same thing: They go on a tour, speaking with franchisees. Curtis knew exactly what he’d find: Years of declining sales, increased fees, and top-down mandates had created deep mistrust.
This dissatisfaction put Curtis in a bind. He needed to improve Burger King’s product, stores, and marketing. All that takes money. But franchisees were likely in no mood — let alone the financial position — to front the cash.
“Franchisees are with these brands much longer than corporate personnel,” Curtis says. “Most of the franchisees have been here for 10, 20, 30 years. Sometimes their parents and their grandparents were in the business.” Which is to say: They’ve seen many new executives, and many new plans. Curtis needed to do more than just ask for their trust.
So when he launched his “Reclaim the Flame” plan in September 2022, it came with a two-step financial mechanism: Burger King corporate would invest in marketing and restaurant improvements first, before requiring any franchisee investment. Then, once restaurant-
level profitability improved and the plan had been proven, franchisees would be expected to reinvest in their locations.
Burger King began by investing heavily in operations — improving restaurant equipment, accelerating remodel programs, and working with franchisees to improve the actual guest experience. It also had to solve a marketing problem: Because Burger King’s sales had declined for so long, the brand’s advertising fund (which is fueled by franchisee sales) had gotten thinner and quieter. So corporate injected money into the fund to strengthen the brand’s voice again—helping to drive business back into stores, which would then give franchisees the extra money they needed to reinvest in their restaurants.
This created what Curtis calls a virtuous cycle. Better operations led to better customer experiences, which led to increased sales, which provided more resources for further improvements.
The approach required patience and discipline. Although Burger King saw improvements within the first year, it didn’t make any immediate announcements about its plans or turnaround. “I would not have been comfortable going out and talking about Burger King or inviting people to come back to Burger King and promising them a better experience if we hadn’t done the work first,” Curtis says.
That point matters. A lot of brands want to apologize first and improve later. Curtis doesn’t believe that’s enough. “You cannot just say, ‘I’m going to be better,’” he says. “The proof has to be in the pudding.”
Once Burger King addressed its operational issues, it started to look more closely at the product — and asked what might be the biggest question of all: Should it change the Whopper?
2. Innovate without undercutting.
The Whopper has been Burger King’s signature product for almost 70 years. This is great, in a way: It’s known around the world, and many customers have been eating it their whole lives.
But as Curtis thought about refreshing the Burger King menu, he faced a delicate challenge. How do you improve an iconic product without alienating loyal customers?
His approach was methodical and customer-driven. His team explored every possible option, including some very large changes, but they also talked with customers. “Consumers told us loud and clear: ‘Don’t mess with it like that. Don’t change it that much. We love the Whopper,’” he says. “Those conversations lead you to a different place than just the spreadsheet-driven consumer feedback that you get from doing focus groups on specific aspects of the burger.”
So instead of dramatic reinvention, Curtis focused on “nuanced changes to elevate how we treat the Whopper and how we serve the Whopper.” The improvements included a pillowy, glazed bun that helps sesame seeds stay on uniformly, creamier mayonnaise, and premium packaging that, in his words, wraps “this iconic product in a tuxedo instead of a leisure suit.”
The changes were subtle but meaningful. “You could almost call those unremarkable changes,” he says. But together, they preserved what customers loved about the Whopper while improving the experience.
That same principle also guided Curtis’s thinking about Burger King’s broader brand voice. For years, Burger King’s marketing had oriented around what he calls the “creepy King” — a guy with an oversized king mask, doing weird and attention-getting things. The marketing was buzzy. It got people talking. But Curtis asked: Is that actually good for us?
“Burger King’s always been very interesting,” he says. “But I could introduce you to a lot of extremely interesting people that you probably don’t want to have an entire meal with. You’ve got to, at the same time, be a brand that people want to be around.”
That, too, became part of the turnaround: not just to make Burger King attention-grabbing, but to make it feel more genuine, appealing, and human.
Image Credit: Courtesy of Burger King
3. Become the face of accountability.
As Curtis and his team began to see success, they neared a major decision. How were they going to tell their turnaround story?
Burger King’s advertising agency and CMO Joel Yashinsky felt strongly: Curtis himself should face the public, tell everyone that the brand had changed, and invite feedback.
This had precedent. In 2009, when Domino’s Pizza made major changes, it launched a campaign often remembered as “Sorry We Suck.” The brand admitted that its pizza quality had suffered, and that people didn’t like it — and then essentially said: We hear you, and here’s how we’ve improved.
Curtis saw that campaign firsthand while working at Domino’s. Still, when he was asked to do something similar at Burger King, he hesitated.
“My first, second, third, and maybe fourth answer was absolutely not,” he says. “I’ve lived a life of anonymity and it’s been a happy life.” He also knew “how fickle social media can be,” and worried that his personality might not come through accurately in short-form content.
But his agency and CMO kept pushing. Then they made an argument he couldn’t ignore.
“They said that if you are the leader of this brand and you speak passionately about it with us, why wouldn’t you be willing to share your point of view and how much you care about the brand with the public?” he says. “If the buck stops here with me and if I really am accountable to what goes on here, then I should be able to stand up and say that.”
This shaped the way he now thinks about executive visibility. He doesn’t think he should be the face of Burger King or appear in traditional advertising to brag about the company. But he does think executives can play a different role: the face of accountability.
“There’s a role for the leader to acknowledge that the buck stops here and that there’s a real human being that feels accountable to what every person feels when they go visit a Burger King,” he says.
To Curtis, that accountability is personal. “It hurts when I get a call and somebody’s been mistreated, or they got a bad product when they’ve spent their time and their money to come to our brand and given us their trust,” he says. “And it makes my day when somebody tells me about a special experience that they had with their family.”
That is the role he now sees for himself: not as the face of brand promotion, but as a reminder that real people are behind the brand—and that those people are listening.
4. Make customers your strategic intelligence.
This brings us back to February 2026, when Curtis gave out his phone number and 86,000 (and counting!) calls came in.
To handle the volume, Burger King had assembled a team months in advance. “We have people who will engage with every guest,” he says. If a customer strongly wants to talk directly to Curtis, they’re placed in a queue for him to call back. If the issue is specialized (say, a complaint about the digital experience), then a relevant senior leader may return the call.
This is what makes the campaign more than a stunt. Burger King is not just collecting anecdotes; it is routing and categorizing feedback, analyzing patterns, and turning them into action. Curtis says the company is using AI and spreadsheets to sort through the 86,000-plus data points. But he’s also careful to say that data alone is not enough.
“We have to prioritize the human interaction and listening to people and the emotion in their voice and the things that they’re passionate about directly,” he says.
That combination of human contact and structured analysis has produced practical insights. For example, Burger King learned that customers still love its Original Chicken Sandwich. They want better french fries. They see inconsistency in hospitality from one restaurant to another. And the company is also collecting highly specific details about individual locations, as well as broader lessons that can shape future products and brand decisions.
“We are learning data points that we can use for brand actions,” Curtis says, including “new products that we should launch, products we should elevate, or products we should protect.”
Just as importantly, many of the calls are not complaints at all. Curtis says a surprising number come from customers who simply want to share a good experience — a great meal in eastern Maryland, a memorable visit in Paducah, Kentucky, a moment that reminded someone of childhood. He passes that praise back to store teams directly.
“A culture of praise will go a lot farther than a culture of criticism,” he says.
And all this, Curtis hopes, will continue to accelerate the virtuous cycle that began five years ago. Burger King invested in the company, saw a return, and then asked franchisees to invest more in their locations. As they did, profits rose, which allowed for more reinvestment. Now consumers are being invited to speak up, and their insights are being used to improve the brand, which should fuel even more consumer praise and feedback.
And if you have thoughts about it, Curtis would probably like to hear from you too. His number is 305-874-0520.
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