Published on

February 25, 2024

How KFC made product marketing fun again

By
Ewan Patel
Co-founder & CSO

3

min read

Product marketing can get a bit of a bad rep. It's easy to be lazy - talk about the features, make sure they get remembered, call it a day.

But it's that middle bit that most product marketing gets stuck on. When you're competing for attention, and you're focusing on a product that, in all honesty, isn't that revolutionary - how do you get people to remember you. That was KFC's challenge.

Our burger is tall. Like, really tall. How do we get people to remember that fact as a point of differentiation?

Their answer is one of the funniest, most memorable pieces of product marketing we can remember.

In this ad, KFC really did just one thing, but they did it particularly well:

Turn the feature into an insight

There isn't a consumer insight in this ad. Nor a cultural insight, or anything else as fancy. The insight is as simple as:

Most of our burgers are wider than they are tall. But not this one. We need to do something different to fit it into regular media formats.

And the entire creative campaign, across all media, works to this insight. From the TV spot to the accompanying OOH. KFC's jokey, fun, daring brand tone makes all this possible, and the campaign's existence is a bit of a testament to their brand's consistency.

We love this campaign for its simplicity - so there's not much to dive into beyond that!

This is the Briefly Breakdown, a weekly series where we take a look at the strategy behind the latest and greatest work in the industry. Check back here for more insights to come.