Flight of quality / KFC Australia issues an annual brief to its ad agency to improve brand quality perceptions. Kristi Woolrych, the South Pacific CMO of KFC’s parent company, Yum Brands, told Contagious that while KFC had a product that people loved to eat, ‘KFC’s food was considered a guilty pleasure or your secret eat. Our strategy then evolved to create a brand that matched the food.’
KFC’s Degustation campaign is the latest interpretation of this brief by Ogilvy, Sydney, and it aims to show that KFC’s food can elevate even haute cuisine.
It takes a lot of confidence to do something like this in public and to invite the opinions of critics and chefs, but this only further reinforces the faith that KFC has in its product, which in turn bolsters its quality perceptions. In a similar viral stunt, KFC Australia attempted to earn one of its outback restaurants a Michelin Star in 2020, a campaign that improved people’s perceptions of KFC’s quality by an even more impressive 65%. You can read more about this campaign in our Insight & Strategy article, here.
Media sniper / Ogilvy, Sydney, claims that it deliberately targeted critics at fine-dining publications with this campaign because they were the ‘gatekeepers of quality’ who could help change perceptions about the quality of KFC’s food.
A sure way to score PR coverage is to create something that an industry’s specialist journalists cannot ignore. In this instance, coverage in Time Out, Gourmet Traveller or the Good Food Guide was more likely to shift perceptions about KFC’s quality than write-ups in advertising trade publications or newspapers.
The bizarre, funny and exclusive nature of the Degustation restaurant not only improved the likelihood of coverage, it piqued the curiosity of 20,000 ordinary people. KFC achieved similar PR greatness in its 2021 Weddings campaign, an initiative that offered full-service wedding packages to superfans and promoted this new service through glossy ads in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. You can read more about that campaign in our story here.
