Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) is the world’s second-largest restaurant chain after McDonald’s, with almost 20,000 locations globally, and are infamous for their finger lickin’ good fast food.

Method

The brand used humour and a sincere apology to own the issue. To do this, the brand turned to printed newspapers to apologise. KFC developed a full-page ad containing the brand’s response to be published in the Metro and The Sun newspapers. Cleverly, the infamous KFC logo was manipulated to read FCK, similar to the common curse word, with the accompanying text reading: “We’re sorry. A chicken restaurant without chicken. It’s not ideal. Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out of their way to find out we were closed. And endless thanks to our KFC team members and our franchise partners for working tirelessly to improve the situation. It’s been a hell of a week, but we’re making progress, and every day more and more fresh chicken is being delivered to our restaurants. Thank you for bearing with us.”

The results

• The temporary rebrand sparked conversation all over the world with the play on words going viral on online news publications, TV, social media and more. After appearing only once in two national newspapers, the apology was shared to 219,138,216 through social, and reached 796,709,795 with editorial coverage. The campaign achieved great success winning a Yellow Pencil award in the PR category in the 2018 D&AD awards for its reactive response during a tumultuous time for the brand.

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