How KFC became Marketing Week’s Brand of the Year

The fast food brand was chosen by a public vote and a panel of senior marketing leaders, who described its marketing strategy as ‘bold and brave’ in the face of the pandemic.

At the Festival of Marketing this week, Marketing Week Editor Russell Parsons sat down with two of KFCs key marketing decision-makers – General Manager for UK&I, Paula MacKenzie and CMO, Jack Hinchcliffe, to discuss the path that led KFC to receive the Brand of the Year award. Together, they discussed the decision to pull the brand’s famous slogan ‘Finger Lickin’ Good’ at the height of the Covid-19 crisis, to the importance of a creative culture in achieving business success.

KFC CMO Jack Hinchcliffe and General Manager UK&I Paula MacKenzie at Festival of Marketing 2021

Image: Festival of Marketing. KFC CMO Jack Hinchcliffe and General Manager UK&I Paula MacKenzie.

“Fading old man”

The journey to reinventing a legacy business like KFC to the once-more iconic brand we see today began several years ago, and well before the pandemic. Hinchcliffe reveals that, five years previously, KFC undertook huge diagnostic research that delved deep into customer perception of the brand. The results were far from comforting, mirroring prior CMO Meghan Farren’s fears that KFC had become the “fading old man” of the fast food sector.

“We asked consumers to describe KFC as a person,” Hinchcliffe recalls, “and one of the most visceral images that was conjured through that was an old man… maybe he used to be a musician, and he was cool when he was younger, but now he lives by himself, alone. Although it is genuinely amusing, at the time it was heartbreaking.

“… What we were able to diagnose off the back of it was that we had a relevance challenge. We actually went into the research believing that we had a communications issue… but it was a much broader challenge than purely comms.”

As a result, the team at KFC needed to transform in more ways than one. Not only did they need to change their advertising and communications strategy, but they also had to recreate the brand from the bottom up. This included “every facet” of the company’s Photo Editing Services branding, down to the interior design of its restaurants and the products offered on its menu.

Consistency and commitment

In the years since that disappointing revelation, KFC has been working hard on reimagining its image and its consumer proposition. Sometimes this has meant taking risks with its content, like developing a tongue-in-cheek tone of voice, or nearly crossing the NSFW line with campaigns such as the memorable ‘FCK’ bucket ad in the wake of the brand’s 2018 distribution crisis.

“There’s a huge amount to be said for consistency and commitment. The reason that we have been able to deliver the scale of transformation that we have is because we’ve been incredibly steadfast in our commitment to the strategy. Naturally, every year we refresh and there will be elements that we need to evolve… but on the whole, that diagnosis stays true and [has] lasted us for five years.”

On the topic of KFC’s carefully crafted, bold tone of voice, Parsons asks the pair how the brand is able to gauge what it can feasibly get away with, from a marketing perspective.

“The first thing I’d say is, we don’t always get it entirely right,” Hinchcliffe admits, ”So we learn from doing as much as we learn from guidelines and restrictions. Then we’re just really conscious that all of our agency partners and everyone within the organisation has real clarity about who we are, and is empowered to make the right judgements on that.”

MacKenzie, meanwhile, outlines a list of three key questions that she always asks herself about anything from pieces of creative, to any other proposition presented to her.