The Hairy Situation

KFC was feeling the pinch of the economic climate. With big growth targets on the horizon, we couldn’t sit back.

The ‘Simple’ Brief

The brief sounded straightforward: increase sales.

But how could we do this in the current environment? We needed to get noticed and be talked about. We needed to instil FOMO.

Objectives

To meet the business objective of increased sales, we set two KPIs:

1. Increase app downloads – get MORE people onto our app.

2. Increase transactions – to get customers (new and existing) making MORE transactions.

MORE customers, making MORE transactions would lead to MORE sales. So, we needed to give people a damn good reason to do these things.

The reason we focused on app?

E-commerce is the biggest area of growth for QSRs. And research has shown that KFC’s app customers are up to 80% more valuable than non-app users.

Kentucky Fly

How KFC made record sales by encouraging its customers to leave Australia.

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Only 20% of transactions happen on the app. So, we did something radical.

See, there’s a whole world of KFC menu items you can't get in Australia.

So we just started selling them in the Aussie app.

The catch? You couldn’t get them in Australia. So, if you tried to buy one in the app you were given tickets to go pick it up…overseas.

We did this over and over and turned each trip into content to hype up the next app drop.

And you know what? It worked.

Our Target Audience consisted of three groups:

-Net-new customers: people who have never purchased KFC.

-Current KFC customers who haven’t downloaded and transacted via the app.

-Existing KFC app users whose transaction frequency we could supercharge during the campaign.

Our strategy was to tap into Australian consumers’ common desire to travel and explore, in a climate where it feels like an unaffordable luxury. We stepped out of the discounting mayhem and created a brand experience that would offer lifelong memories to customers who found the international menu items in the Aussie KFC app.

But you had to be in it to win it, and to be in it you needed to download the KFC app.

Kentucky Fly launched with the Wafu Cutlet Burger.

We dropped it into the Aussie app and didn’t tell anyone.

We especially didn’t tell anyone the only place you could pick it up from was a KFC in Japan.

Within minutes Lisa found it in the KFC app. And when she tried to buy it she was told the only way to get it was to go to Japan.

Next minute she’s flying Business Class to Japan.

Then we told Australia what went down. We filmed her adventure and turned it into content within 24 hours.

Then we dropped the next product in the app. Josh found this one. And so off he went. We filmed his adventure, turned it around into content. And then dropped more products.

We had a hunch that each trip and its content would create a snowballing amount of customer interest. And it did.

Kentucky Fly was about driving sales via the app, and it blew our objectives out of the spreadsheet!

Over the four-week campaign it delivered:

43% uplift in new app users

1.84 million app transactions

$40 million in app sales

The uplift in transactions driven by the Kentucky Fly menu across new and existing customer segments resulted in a staggering performance and the highest daily sales record since November 2023.