KFC - Yum! Brands
Helping an iconic brand repackage their CSR story… for good.
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CREATIVE DIRECTION • COMMUNICATIONS STRATEGY • DESIGN • COPYWRITING
It’s not often you have the opportunity to help one of the world’s most recognizable brands tell the part of their story that no one knows about. Back in 2021, for Yum! Brands, KFC remained a continued global success. From price point to menu options, people knew what they were getting and generally appreciated it. But a menu alone is not going to create brand loyalists among your consumer base. And an increasingly resonant way to capture brand loyalists is to articulate the positive impact your brand has in the world - beyond your product.
KFC, and Yum! Brands at large, has a long history of exceptional workforce and food insecurity programs that generally went unnoticed by the public.
And while many would argue that PR should never be the core goal of any CSR program (which is a salient point), there’s no harm in sharing your CSR story if that work is inspirational and motivating.
While KFC had dozens of programs dedicated to promoting positive impacts across a number of community issues, the sheer number of program brands and lack of a consistent narrative thread around them held the organization back from telling a cohesive story about their CSR efforts.
I served as creative director on the new business team spearheading the conversation with the KFC brand team.
Our second priority was then simple: help KFC see the value in not being ‘brand first’ in the stories they tell about the work they and the impact they have. Lead with the impact. Lead with the people effected by these incredible programs. Let the work speak for itself and brand awareness will follow. It wasn’t about disassociating the brand with the programs, but instead a simple flip in hierarchy on how you talk about them.
Finally, we decided to be bold and have ‘the talk’ with them about how important it was to carefully manage the Colonel brand image as part of the CSR story. For many people, particularly in the states, the colonel represents a dark chapter in American history, one that’s hard to ignore once it’s present. However it would also smack as inauthentic to just hide the colonel away whenever CSR work was mentioned. So we counseled honest and open dialogue that recognized these difficult topics, while underscoring the progress and future the KFC programs were building towards.
Our first priority in this new business effort was to help KFC understand that a simple campaign wouldn’t be enough to tell the story of such a comprehensive body of CSR work and impact. We needed them to understand the importance of a full audit and consolidation of their CSR program brands. This way, their social impact wouldn’t come across as a scattershot of good intentions, but instead driven by a few overarching principles and areas of impact. This way they could easily tie training programs funded in Kansas together with innovations in training workshops run in Thailand. They are all part of the same principle: KFC feeds people’s potential.
