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Catherine Tan Gillespie, Global Chief Marketing Officer, KFC

What are the big success stories for the KFC brand over the last 12 months that have driven your brand strength and growth?

For KFC, we drive growth through a short-term focus on sales overnight and a long-term focus on brand overtime while ensuring everything we do is Relevant, Easy and Distinctive. Across the last 12 months, we鈥檝e driven brand strength and growth in a few ways, starting with how we put people first. We implemented safety protocols, offered financial assistance to restaurant team members, donated meals and worked to reassure customers by offering a small moment of escape with our delicious Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The global campaign to suspend our 64-year-old 鈥淚t鈥檚 Finger Lickin鈥� Good鈥� slogan was one of the biggest success stories for the brand throughout the last 12 months. As the world鈥檚 most famous fried chicken, we continued serving up our food craved by so many, while also boldly pressing pause on a core brand asset in acknowledgement of something everyone in the world was experiencing. Additionally, the evolution of our digital capabilities has been a strong driver of brand strength and growth across the past year. We鈥檝e reimagined how and where guests can enjoy our food and developed new e-commerce channels to enable a Finger Lickin鈥� Good experience for nearly everyone, everywhere.

The global campaign to suspend our 64-year-old 鈥淚t鈥檚 Finger Lickin鈥� Good鈥� slogan was one of the biggest success stories for the brand throughout the last 12 months

Thinking about the customer: we have a hypothesis that consumers once made purchases to signify their economic capital, then later to signify their intellectual capital, and most recently to signal their “ethical capital”. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint? What about your brand do you fix & what do you flex?

We鈥檙e definitely seeing more and more customers care about how we support our more than 800,000 team members and our communities, along with what we鈥檙e doing to look after the planet and serve our food responsibly 鈥� and I鈥檓 proud of the progress we鈥檝e made and will continue to make across all those areas. But the main reasons customers have for buying KFC remains the same: our irresistibly good fried chicken, which people know is made from real chicken and cooked fresh in our restaurants every day.

Increasingly, we see that traditional industry or category conventions are less helpful to understand a brands’ commercial landscape, and that understanding and planning around consumer motivations or desires gives a better sense of the true competition. Does this hypothesis resonate with you and how do you address it from a brand standpoint?

We think a lot about the 鈥榡ob that KFC is doing for our customers鈥� which keeps us focused on a customer-centric view instead of an industry or category view. It also shifts us from just thinking about hunger as a need state and shifts us into more emotive territories. That said, it鈥檚 still helpful to know how we鈥檙e performing against our traditionally defined competitors and category (QSR), especially in terms of market share. While competition is still intense within the traditional category, no one comes close to us on the taste of our fried chicken.

We鈥檙e dedicated to staying relevant for our QSR customers and have support from Yum! Brand鈥檚 internal cultural insights agency in achieving this. The commitment from our parent company, Yum! Brands, to give $100 million to combat inequality and unlock opportunity is a great example of us living our values while staying relevant to evolving customer expectations.

We think a lot about the 鈥榡ob that KFC is doing for our customers鈥� which keeps us focused on a customer-centric view instead of an industry or category view. It also shifts us from just thinking about hunger as a need state and shifts us into more emotive territories

Post-COVID, post Social Justice – the world is starting to settle back to a new normal. How have these events affected your brand strategy?

Our brand strategy remains the same, which is all about being R.E.D. (Relevant, Easy and Distinctive). Our tactics however have shifted as we focus more on e-commerce and evolving the customer experience.

We made the decision a few years ago to unite our brand positioning with our social purpose. Our purpose platform of 鈥淔eeding People鈥檚 Potential鈥� comes to life through our newly launched programs such as KFC Thailand鈥檚 initiative titled 鈥淏ucket Search鈥� designed to help students who have dropped out to rejoin the education system and a mentorship program to equip and support women in Saudi Araba and Egypt.

What are the major disruptors and accelerators of competition and brand growth on your horizon?

Technology is one of the biggest disruptors and accelerators, which brings opportunity and challenges in equal measures. Our digital business grew exponentially across the last year and we see a lot of promise in our continued pursuit of cutting-edge technology and personalized digital experiences.

Additionally, customers鈥� ever-evolving relationship with food could also pose disruption, which is one reason why we stay close to food trends. As a result, we have launched Plant-Based KFC in seven markets around the world for those customers who may not choose chicken today and secured a strategic partnership with Beyond Meat.