• Situation

Experimental youths are on a constant quest to indulge their tastebuds and find their favourite food experiences – always seeking the next best thing.

• Brief

Get young people obsessed with KFC's taste again by creating a trial campaign that demonstrates our taste credentials in a way that the youth would enjoy.

• Objectives

Drive consumer choice and preference by 5% by getting young people to engage with our brand on social media and stores in a tangible way, thus driving brand desire and cultural relevance by allowing people to experience KFC's iconic taste like never before.

To create talkability about the power of our unique 11 herbs and spices in a very competitive and overcrowded market, we changed up our menu in a way that nobody saw coming, challenging ourselves to show that our secret recipe can make anything taste finger lickin’ good.

We opened our doors online and in-store for customers to suggest their favourite foods that we could coat in our 11 herbs and spices, combining the food and KFC’s iconic taste to create the next best thing. We Kentucky Fried everything from household classics like Brussels sprouts and grapes to birthday cake. We even fried classic South African specialities like biltong, mopani worms and milk tart. By letting people experience the classic recipe in surprising ways, we aimed to keep KFC the number one brand of choice, while transforming the entire industry's notion of what a fast-food chain can be.

KFC's classic recipe is timeless but is at risk of losing the interest of the youth compared with trendy, Instagram-worthy food options. To keep KFC culturally relevant, and exciting, the brand needs continuous innovation to stay compelling.

Over the years we’ve had some strange and interesting requests like this one; "Please can you help add some flavour to my Auntie’s broccoli??!!!”. This sparked us to think about what other foods our audience loved and we could make taste even better.

The Make it KFC campaign took an iconic brand like KFC and boldly extended its famous taste to places it has never gone before through an immersive experiential activation, through an entirely new and original way to leverage KFC's flavour profile as a way to drive desire across foods demonstrated breakthrough creative thinking.

KFC sparked a national conversation with #MakeItKFC, where fans suggested unlikely foods to be given the KFC treatment. This led to us to changing ours stores into live experiential spaces, with KFC kitchens transformed to fry up fan-selected items like broccoli and birthday cake, and even competing dishes like cheeseburgers from competitor brands.

KFC ran a series of online polls to identify fan favourites and then invited customers to bring anything the wanted to add our secret recipe to. Even the packaging was customised, with boxes bearing playful inscriptions like “I used to be a pizza” and “I used to be sushi”.

The creative, participatory execution allowed KFC to showcase the versatility of its iconic taste while engaging fans in a unique and memorable way.

After the campaign, KFC returned to its regular menu but left a lasting impression on consumers nationwide, reinforcing its iconic taste.

This experimental platform allowed KFC to tangibly demonstrate its flavour and drive brand obsession. It generated widespread media coverage, social conversation, and cemented KFC's taste credentials as second to none in South African culture.

We created talkability about the power of the 11 herbs and spices, keeping KFC as the number one brand choice in a very competitive market. “When we launched this first-of-its-kind taste test we were amazed by the positive reactions, that astounding response has helped us stay the number one brand of choice”, Mukundi Munzhelele KFC South Africa Senior Marketing Manager.

In the end, we delivered on our strategic brand needs while creating extraordinary levels of business impact with a return on investment of 25:1 and achieved 100% positive tonality in online publications and broadcasts.

The best part, of course, is that while showing the power of our iconic taste, we even managed to KFC the competition.