For 50 years the British public has eaten fried chicken by the bucket load. When the first KFC opened in Preston, Lancashire, in 1965 people had a chance to taste the Colonel’s secret recipe chicken and they haven’t looked back. It has since grown into a £1bn brand in the UK and Ireland.
More than 160 million customer transactions were made each year through KFC’s UK restaurants with the average customer visiting a site once a month. This love affair lasted until 2013 when a perfect storm of bad press coupled with a continuing rise in competition from the casual dining segment turned the sales figures on their heads.
Marketing manager Meghan Farren, who had recently joined the Yum! Brands company, realised a drastic change was needed to turn around the company’s fate by altering how the public viewed the brand.
The company was built by Colonel Harland Sanders from a single service station where he began selling fried chicken using his mother’s recipe in Corbin, Kentucky.
In the 1970s, the brand message focused on the Colonel and family values of meal times. In the 1980s there was a shift towards the secret recipe with 11 herbs and spices; then in the 1990s when a number of items were added to the menu the group adopted a marketing model that focused on increasing the return rate of customers.
Every six weeks KFC promoted a new dish or angle with TV-heavy campaigns designed to keep the brand fresh and exciting and make the public keep returning. The rationale was that it was easier to get customers to come back more than once than to attract brand new customers.
Dramatising the product
For 10 years KFC ran 30 ads a year focused on dramatising the product with action and adventure themed campaigns. This resulted in 2% to 3% like-for-like sales growth.
Consecutive sales growth continued until 2013 when same store sales growth began to dip, and for the first time since 2009 KFC could feel the QSR market beginning to fall.
Farren said that the brand faced intense competition from coffee shops, fast-casual restaurants and premium-casual concepts as well as the rest of the QSR sector. This was when it came under fierce media scrutiny with the horse-meat scandal and reports of a kidney in a customer’s chicken as well as rumours about mutant ‘eight-legged chickens’. The result saw KFC rocked by negative media coverage.
Farren said it took a crisis of epic proportions to convince people it was necessary to change their approach. The company has ambitions to become a £1.5bn value brand by 2020 and recognised it had to change to achieve this.
Taking the emotional route
The group took three steps. The first was to remove ‘the spiel’ that Farren said was not reaching people and instead focus on mind science. The theory is to view the mind as an associative processor, where most thoughts are subconscious, taking place beneath the level of awareness.
To reach its customers KFC adopted the philosophy that decisions are felt not made.
Farren described the second step as a “seminal piece of marketing thinking”. KFC’s marketing team realised trying to increase customer frequency of visits was ineffective because consumers were simply not loyal to a single brand. It was deemed better to broaden appeal and drive penetration with new or lapsed customer groups.
“If you are constantly marketing to your regulars they won’t suddenly do new things,” she said. “This was one of the big things that changed our minds: we need to bring in more customers.”
Thirdly, the marketing team switched from rational to emotional advertising to drive long-term growth and brand commitment. The company felt it had been too focused on products and prices.
KFC decided to build the brand message with lapsed and new customers not just those who already visited KFC regularly.
“Everyone loves our chicken but they have no relationship with our brand,” Farren said. “KFC allows people to connect with their real selves and with each other – chicken is down to earth and real.”
To enhance the message the company set out five underlying principles including neuroscience thinking: Anything can be branded and sold; The company must make an emotional rather than rational connection to its customers; Build associations and make connections between the brand and what you want to achieve; Always appeal to new consumers; and Invest in new channels to reach new consumers
To embody the above, KFC scrutinised its restaurants and found they fell short of portraying the authentic, wholesome feel – Farren admitted they looked cheap and fast. The company embarked on a refurb programme to emphasis family values and the communion of eating together, including building open kitchens to remind diners that the food is made fresh on-site and KFC has nothing to hide. The new look sites include communal tables to emphasis family eating and reinforce the connection that the food will “bring everyone together”.
50th birthday message
The family-focused, emotional message was included in its 50th birthday marketing campaign. Created by BBH London, the year-long push spans broadcast, outdoor and digital platforms with the multichannel Families campaign. Quality time together enjoying food is the message. Products and price were removed from the adverts.
One TV ad tells the story of a boy welcomed into a new foster family and shows that, while families may come in different shapes and sizes, what brings them together invariably stays the same. Ferran said the ad caused controversy in house as it was seen as too emotional by some, but the marketing team banked on a positive reaction.
“What was amazing to us was the product news came across much more in the new ads than it did in previous ads that only focused on the product. This one only mentioned it and showed it integrated in people’s lives,” said Farren. The marketing team found people responded well and associated with the brand after the emotional approach was adopted.
Next, it launched new products and formats including rice boxes in Scotland. This was endorsed with an ad campaign to drive sales at lunchtimes, not just dinner, by following people on their lunch breaks to show how much could be done in an hour – including eating chicken.
Farren said the most challenging part of the project was changing the views of people at Yum! Brands who had been in marketing for years and were difficult to convince about taking risks. She said by taking itself out of the simple product space and moving away from advertising simply products and prices, KFC has now created not only a campaign, but a brand message it believes resonates with young and old alike.
