In the ‘Quick Service Restaurant’ (QSR) category in Australia, there has been a massive shift in focus towards branded e-commerce channels. E-commerce customers spend more and are more loyal. They are therefore extremely valuable, and the battle in the category is to make sure your brand’s app is on their phone.

There was an established formula to achieve this: bribing customers with a big value deal.

Yet the ‘success’ of this strategy was not what it seemed. While acquisition campaigns that feature a ‘carrot’ (e.g. free food) are initially effective, they are also costly to run, and encourage ‘gaming’ behaviour (ie: claiming freebies on the app, then deleting it.)

They were expensive, and they were ineffective.

So we tried something completely radical.

Behavioural psychology taught us that withholding information from people just makes them more obsessed with obtaining it. It’s known as the ‘Streisand Effect’, named after Barbra Streisand, who famously attempted to suppress photos of her residence for privacy reasons, but inadvertently drew more public attention to it.

We shied away from costly freebies, and towards the magnetism of the unknown and hard to access.

KFC staff love ‘hacking’ the menu to create crazy new products. This inspired us to create a Secret Menu where these products could be bought by customers ‘in the know’, BUT . . . only accessed via the KFC App.

To stay true to the insight behind this idea it was critical that the Secret Menu was actually a secret. This meant:

• Hiding it in plain sight: we buried the secret section of the App behind a KFC-themed hack. To gain access, a user had to pull down and hold the menu page for 11 seconds (a cheeky reference to KFC’s famous 11 herbs and spices). The Secret Menu then revealed itself.

• Promoting it without promoting it: We resisted every instinct to tell everyone. Instead, we waited - spending $0 on media. We left a breadcrumb trail of clues scattered throughout our standard advertising activity. This included: hidden copy in the ‘Edit History’ of Facebook comments, copy buried in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ on our website and eDMs. We also hijacked our existing digital out-of-home posters to include a split-second frame with a clue for eagle-eyed fans.

• Sharing it with our media friends: once a consumer finally cracked the case (a very excited administrator of the Facebook group ‘The Discount Mum’), a follow-up exclusive was organised with The Daily Mail to break the news, followed by mass coverage across some of Australia’s biggest news outlets.

When someone discovers the Secret Menu, they’re motivated to share it on social media, bringing new users into the journey. Thus, creating a self-sustaining, evergreen acquisition platform for the KFC App – all for $0 media budget.

We then sporadically launched new products in the Secret Menu to maintain interest and get people in the habit of using the KFC App, with them constantly coming back to check for new items.