The McDonalds’ ‘Good to Know Campaign’ was a strategic move in order to retaliate against the lash back of the quality of their products. This was relatively successful; however, the response to KFC’s release of ‘The Whole Chicken’ for the same matter has been somewhat different and has seen outrage by some online.
The video was initially designed to convey to consumers of where their chickens are sourced from and to emphasise the quality of their fast food, a strategy similarly approached by competitors such as McDonalds. However, the video portrays a rebellious hen strutting around to music without any indicators of this. As a result, the video attracted a huge amount of positive and negative media attention.
There have been some positive views of this video, where the energetic chicken has attracted much amusement to online users. A Facebook user commented that he found the video ‘hilarious’ but then questioned ‘does that make me sick?’. It could be argued whether this type of video content make us inhumane, because we are giving chickens human characteristics whilst we are also portraying them as our food. We can question ourselves this: is this really appropriate as marketing in the form of entertainment on social media platforms, or are people overreacting to a light-hearted video?
The video of the strutting chicken has sparked comments that ‘This advert makes us consider the animal we are eating’ (YouTube) and in fact draws away from the fact KFC is attempting to advertise their high-quality meat. The video is actually associating the food we eat with the animal itself, inducing guilt and distaste toward consumption of the products. Furthermore, the advert could be seen as ‘distasteful and disrespectful to the animal’ because it is directly associating chickens as food, which some viewers find disturbing because the video visually highlights that the products used are from chickens. This backlash can also be emphasised by the fact that consumers don’t want to be thinking of what they are eating, after a user even commented that he wants ‘to be a vegetarian’ after watching the video which was a completely unintended response through the creation of the advert.
Based on the evidence, here at APT Marketing we can conclude that this campaign is a failed attempt to convey a straightforward message, and instead it shows a darker message that has sparked outrage on social media, leading to a lot of backlash that may be difficult to recover from. The approach to create a fun advert appealed to some, but overall it just created complicated problems for KFC. We can learn from this to not convey messages that speak indirectly of an offensive matter, and only advertise the product we are selling.