With sales of $8.5 billion in 2011, Wendy’s just the claimed number 2 spot, moving ahead of Burger King but was well short of McDonald’s $34.2 billion. This second place battle of the pygmies needs to find greater meaning in the market if either ever wants a crack at McDonalds.

My worry for Wendy’s is that its rise will prompt it to confuse activity with accomplishment. Yes, from a marketing perspective, Wendy’s is doing things, but its rise has been relative to Burger King’s inconsistent execution of any strategy.

Most of our battles at Stealing Share when rebranding companies is changing the internal mindset of those companies. Positive news, like Wendy’s received, provides a false sense of security. Fortune favors the bold and, if my past experience has taught me anything, it is that a third place Wendy’s would be strategically more bold than a second place Wendy’s.

Strategically, Wendy’s should set its sights on the white whale: McDonald’s. At the moment, however, it seems to be doing the same as Burger King by marketing product instead of brand. Copy in a recent Wendy’s ads goes: “No matter who you are, Wendy’s will make a Dave’s Hot and Juicy Cheeseburger fresh just for you, so its special, just like you.” Give me a moment while I my eyes stop rolling. Beyond its campy verbiage, it provides no switching trigger for the customer. Does anyone believe they would be refused service when they go to a fast food restaurant? Or that a competitor will not make hamburgers?

McDonald’s has been successful due to its message clarity, consistency and firm brand meaning of “fun.” In fact, that brand promise is represented as an experience rather then product.

Wendy’s is certainly in a good position. Number two is nothing to scoff at. But it will take focus to clear the gap with McDonalds and being able to spot the pivotal brand difference between its brand  and the Mickey-Dee one.

One of the fallacies of mass media marketing has always been that, if the spot or tagline is recalled and even becomes famous, it creates preference. As if awareness was all it took to beat the competition.

However, many of the most recalled advertisements have stolen exactly zero market share.

The most significant example is Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” campaign from the 80s. The tagline, written by advertising legend Cliff Freeman, has entered the cultural vernacular as a stand-in for what is missing, whether it’s discussing a politician’s platform or what’s inside hamburgers.

What people forget is that the “Where’s the Beef?” campaign, while certainly famous, did not steal market share for Wendy’s. It just became an incredibly recalled skit that did very little to create preference. That’s the reason why it didn’t run all that long.

It’s for that reason why I find it peculiar that Wendy’s is going to back to it in a new campaign to unveil its new line of Dave’s Hot ‘N Juicy Cheeseburgers.

Wendy’s must really be getting desperate – as I’ve noted in earlier blogs, the fast food hamburger industry is struggling – because it’s going full-on nostalgia route by also airing TV spots featuring Wendy herself, the daughter of founder Dave Thomas and namesake of the hamburger chain.

I’m all for being aggressive – Wendy’s is promising to spend millions on this effort – and I often feel advertising “back in the day” was more effective than the entertainment-style approach of today’s marketing.

But there was a fundamental reason why “Where’s the Beef?” didn’t work: It said nothing about who customers are when they eat at Wendy’s. The phrase was about the hamburger, not the customer.

This “rebranding,” of sorts, will be money wasted, I promise you, because it’s a fancy, expensive and nostalgic-wrapped version of product advertising that says we have bigger widgets. Which, as smart marketers know, does nothing to create brand preference.

The only way it would work – and I do expect a short-term bump for Wendy’s based on the media buy itself – is if the highest emotional intensities in the market are bigger burgers (something Wendy’s already tried with the Baconater and chains like Hardee’s have also attempted) and nostalgia for wanting to be like Wendy. I’d like to see the market research on that.

The fast-food hamburger industry is in trouble because, in tough economic times, the only leverage you have with customers is brand. It’s the reason why McDonald’s continues to hold its No. 1 position. It is the only one in the market with a brand.

The rest, it seems, are still scrambling for new ideas – even digging one up from 27 years ago.

On a frequent basis, Stealing Share will take a look at various markets for companies who are in position to steal market share. We send information about our process and, as brand strategists, we try to get across in a small amount of information the absolutely imperative effect brand has on a company’s success.

These attempts do not always gain the traction we would hope as many companies keep their own rose colored glasses on because taking a critical and honest look at their brands is not often an easy or comfortable task.

However, we have never had this information returned to us by the company with our unopened envelope hidden inside a new hand-addressed envelope, noting our information as unsolicited. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just trash it?

That returned letter was from Burger King, a brand whose existence in the fast food hamburger chain market has been restricted to second place, and lower than that when looking at the totem pole of overall fast food chains.

We now know why.

Burger King is obviously a company that appears to be so process driven that it takes to the time to mail back an unopened envelope rather than evaluate its contents. It is essentially claiming that it wants it to be known that: “When pursuing the success of our company and the preference of our brand, Burger King will stop at nothing short of ignorance to remain status quo.”

Napoleon once said, “If the art of war were nothing but the art of avoiding risks, glory would become the providence of mediocre minds.” Stealing market share does not involve avoiding risk. It involves being bold, memorable and intensive to your market. One can only surmise from the directness at which Burger King avoided what was so very desperate to its brand’s success that it has found comfort in its stasis.

Perhaps in time, having McDonalds eat its lunch will prompt a departure from mediocrity. In the meantime, if this is the care by which they value its brand, my suggestion to the private equity firm that bought Burger King is to invest elsewhere. Get out when you can.

At Stealing Share, we talk a lot about the importance of creating brand messaging that goes beyond the category tables stakes, or the bare minimum to compete in the category. In most markets, these table stakes are values like price, efficacy, proximity, etc., and they do little to build true brand preference.

I was browsing a few news sites today when I noticed something rather surprising. It was a new category table stake I had not yet considered within the fast-food industry… Size!

The article was for the new 1160-calorie “Meat Monster” burger from Burger King (currently only available in Japan). The burger consists of two hamburgers, a chicken breast fillet, bacon, two slices of cheese, and the standard trimmings nestled between two buns. It got me thinking how flawed a brand strategy is that’s based on sheer size.

Looking deeper into the category, there are competing sandwiches like KFC’s “Double Down” (a sandwich with impromptu buns made of fried chicken), Hardee’s “Monster Thickburger,” (a heart-stopping 1420-calorie burger) or Wendy’s “Baconator” (its name is self explanatory).

When we talk about table stakes, the point we always stress is that, while table stakes might provide some immediate benefits, their lasting effect on the target consumer is short-lived. At the end of the day, “more for less” is the reason why the meat Taco Bell uses is made using very little meat.

Back in 1993, the “Whopper” was all about size and how it was the biggest in the industry. By today’s standards, it is one of the more conservatively sized burgers. Just imagine. If the brand was for people who sacrificed “time” but not “taste”, the opportunity for preference grows substantially. Being a customer with “discerning taste” seems a much more appealing idea than simply being consumers who must consume as much as they possibly can.

Fast-food chains need to take a hard as their brands, understand who their consumer is and what dictates choice, and then take new brand positioning to reflect that. Otherwise, before long an episode of “Man vs. Food” will be any of us at Burger King – and that is without even upgrading to King size.