Conventional wisdom dictates that a brand’s mobile app experience should be as frictionless as possible to maintain customer loyalty. Instead, we decided to push the boundaries of behavioural psychology to make the KFC App LESS intuitive by increasing the number of touch-points and making it hard to find our best products. Our gamble paid off because that just made everyone love it more, resulting in increased customer engagement, downloads, and most importantly, sales. Proving that the best customer journey isn’t always the smoothest one.

To secure the stability of its customer base and future growth, KFC needed to drive up acquisitions and usage for its own app.

There is an established formula used by QSRs to recruit app users: bribe them with a big value deal.

Yet we quickly realised 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, and encourage ‘gaming’ behaviour (ie: claiming freebies on the app, then deleting it.) As everyone uses this playbook, it invariably leads to a ‘race to the bottom’.

This isn’t just expensive, it’s ineffective. Just 23% of users keep an app within the first three days after download, meaning most app acquisition campaigns never generate a positive ROI.

Our challenge was to get consumers to download and keep the KFC App, without falling into this trap.

Instead of making the app customer journey more frictionless, we went against every UX principle and chose to make it harder. We hid a Secret Menu deep within the KFC App, featuring never-before-seen creations invented by KFC crew members.

Then we told no one about it.

Instead of launching with a big campaign, we waited for people to discover it on their own. Making it hard to access actually made people more obsessed with finding and sharing it.

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.

Additionally, but crucially, we gave people a reason to keep coming back by regularly launching new Secret Menu products without warning, to maintain interest and get people in the habit of checking the KFC App.

KFC targets anyone who eats food, meaning every demographic. For this campaign, we needed to acquire new app users and re-engage existing and lapsed users – without resorting to expensive ad campaigns or discounts.

Behavioural psychology dictates 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.

So instead of “optimising” our app the traditional way, we did something radical by deliberately making it harder to find and order our best items.

Despite conventional wisdom, we knew that adding friction to the ordering process would actually motivate our customers to care more about the KFC App, not less. Allowing us to take advantage of their engagement to promote the app for us.

We discovered that KFC staff love ‘hacking’ the menu to invent crazy new products. So we hid their creations in a Secret Menu on the KFC App.

To access it, users had to find a hidden Colonel Sanders icon. If they held the screen for 11 seconds, he'd reveal the Secret Menu (a cheeky reference to KFC’s 11 herbs and spices).

We resisted every instinct to tell everyone about it. Instead, we just waited - spending $0 on media promoting the KFC App.

It all paid off when someone finally cracked it and shared their discovery online. The news spread like wildfire, resulting in mass coverage across Australia’s biggest news outlets.

We then regularly updated the Secret Menu without warning, reigniting the conversation and keeping the KFC App on newsfeeds and front pages everywhere. This strategy helped attract new users and re-engage existing users all year round.

Our goal was to acquire and retain KFC App users with a radical new UX strategy that disrupted traditional methods entirely. It’s fair to say that our gamble paid off:

Awareness

We achieved 473 pieces of coverage and 460+ million impressions – with more generated organically every time we update the menu.

Acquisition

We increased average daily KFC App downloads during the campaign period by 14%, and on the day the Secret Menu story broke, the daily download rate increased by 111%.

Retention & Business Value

When compared to users who did not engage with the Secret Menu, those who did had:

A 61% retention rate sustained over the campaign period (whereas non-Secret Menu users only showed a retention rate of 44%)

A 77% increase in aggregated lifetime spend - that is, they spent 77% more money than non-Secret Menu users on average.