Stop us if you’ve heard this one before.
A CEO walks into a camera frame, picks up his company’s flagship product, and takes the most unconvincing bite in the history of corporate marketing—the internet notices. The internet always notices. Within 48 hours, McDonald’s CEO Chris Kempczinski’s awkward nibble of the new Big Arch burger had become a meme, a cautionary tale, and — perhaps most painfully — a gift to every competitor with a social media account. Burger King posted a video of their CEO eating a Whopper like a human person who has eaten food before. Wendy’s U.S. President enjoyed a Baconator on LinkedIn. A&W jumped in.
The pile-on was swift, gleeful, and entirely avoidable. But here’s what made it sting: nobody had to explain why it was funny. Everyone just… knew. Instinctively. Immediately. That’s how fast inauthenticity registers.
The Question That Started a Food Fight
One moment. One tiny, hesitant bite. Suddenly, the whole internet started asking the same question: if he won’t eat it, why should anyone else?
It’s a fair question for a burger. It’s a devastating one for a brand. Because the product wasn’t the problem, the Big Arch is by all accounts a perfectly fine hamburger. The problem was the disconnect between what the company asked the public to believe and what its CEO was visibly, unmistakably communicating through his body language in real time. No amount of marketing spend closes that gap. The camera already caught it. Once people see the gap, they can’t unsee it; every subsequent message is filtered through that moment of doubt.
This Isn’t Just a Fast Food Problem
That question follows school leaders into every community meeting, every open house, every enrollment campaign they’ve ever put their name on.
Are you eating what you’re putting on the griddle?
Your community — parents, prospective families, staff — has the same finely tuned radar the internet turned on Kempczinski. They are constantly measuring the gap between what your communications promise and what their experience confirms. They notice when the warmth in your newsletter doesn’t match the tone at the front desk. They notice when your strategic plan talks about belonging, but your hallways tell a different story. A beautiful website doesn’t survive a rude front office interaction. A compelling enrollment campaign falls apart the moment a new family arrives and finds something different from what was advertised. The gap doesn’t have to be enormous to be damaging. It just has to exist.
Your Language Is Already Answering the Question
Kempczinski didn’t just take a bad bite. He called his burger a “product.” One word: clinical, distant, and transactional. It reframed everything. This wasn’t a leader proud of what his company makes; this was an executive managing an asset.
School leaders do this too, often without realizing it. We use “Strategic Plan Speak” when we should be using “Community Speak.” Every time we choose a clinical term over a human one, we take a small, hesitant bite, a subtle signal about how leadership actually perceives the people they serve.
As Jefferson City Schools Superintendent Dr. Donna McMullan says, the test for leadership decisions is simple: “Every decision we make has to come back to one question — is this what’s best for students?” When that question drives both culture and communication, the message and the experience tend to align naturally.
HOW DOES YOUR DISTRICT SOUND?
☐ Learners → Students / Kids
Are they data points or children?
☐ Stakeholders → Families / Neighbors
Are they investors or a community?
☐ Human Capital → Teachers / Staff
Are they interchangeable assets or people?
☐ Instructional Delivery → Teaching
Is it a logistical process or a finely honed craft?
☐ Touchpoints → Conversations / Meetings
Is it a metric or a relationship?
☐ Yield / Capture Rate → New Families
Are they a percentage or a person?
It’s not just families who notice. Every custodian, food service worker, para, office staffer, and classroom teacher is listening to how leadership talks about the work and about them.
When official communications sound polished and strategic, but the budget process, staff meetings, and all-staff emails tell a different story, they feel the gap more acutely than anyone. They’ve been in the building long enough to know the difference between a district that talks about its “human capital” and one that actually loves its people.
So here’s the question your language is already answering, whether you’ve asked it or not: when you talk about your schools, your families, your staff, does it sound like someone who’d take a confident bite? Or someone managing a product?
The Most Expensive Marketing Mistake You Can Make
Here’s what nobody puts in the enrollment marketing postmortem: the cost of a family that chose you for the wrong reasons.
When your marketing overpromises and your reality underdelivers, you don’t just lose that family — you lose them loudly. Word of mouth is the most powerful enrollment tool a school district has, and it works in both directions with equal efficiency. A family who felt misled doesn’t quietly disenroll. They talked with the three families they referred. They become the reason the next campaign has to work twice as hard just to break even on trust.
Enrollment marketing built on an honest foundation does something that no clever tagline can: it attracts families who are genuinely a good fit, sets accurate expectations, and turns new families into advocates. That’s not idealism. It’s math.
The math, by the way, is brutal: replacing a family mid-enrollment or a staff member who quietly stopped believing costs exponentially more than the culture work that might have prevented it.
The Burger King Move Nobody’s Talking About
Everyone clowned on McDonald’s. Fair. But the more instructive story is what happened next.
Burger King’s CEO didn’t call a crisis communications firm. He didn’t issue a statement. He didn’t over-explain, apologize, or pivot. He just ate a burger — confidently, like someone who’d done it before and would do it again. Thirty seconds. No script. It said everything a press release never could. Burger King’s own spokesperson later confirmed what everyone already sensed: “We believe leadership should genuinely enjoy and stand behind the food we serve.” Imagine a school district saying that out loud about their own community experience. Imagine meaning it. That’s the whole playbook: when your message and your reality are the same, you don’t demonstrate authenticity. You just have it. The goal isn’t to seem genuine. It’s actually to be genuine.
The Uncomfortable Work Nobody Wants to Do
Closing the gap between message and reality requires something most leaders actively avoid, not because they’re out of touch, but because it takes courage to be seen as something other than the leader you present to the world.
✔️ Read your school website at 11 p.m., the way a nervous first-time parent would.
✔️ Send an email to the front office and clock how long it takes to hear back — and pay attention to what the response actually sounds like.
✔️ Show up to your own open house without your employee badge and see who talks to you, and how.
✔️ Walk the hallways during passing time and ask yourself whether what you see matches what your enrollment brochure promises.
This is less a communications exercise than an honesty exercise. It surfaces things that no marketing campaign can fix; only culture can. Start with a communications audit. Secret-shop your own district. Ask a new family six months in what surprised them, good and bad. The gap between your message and their answer is your actual marketing problem. And it’s also your roadmap. What you find might be uncomfortable. That’s not an indictment; that’s a starting point.
When’s the last time you took a confident bite of what you’re serving?
Not a rehearsed bite. Not a bite for the camera. The kind where you already know it’s good, because you’ve been in the kitchen, you’ve tasted it yourself, and you’d put it in front of anyone without flinching.
Because your families already know the answer. And so does your staff.
The only question is whether you do.
