So much criticism has already been heaped on KFC for its “Buckets for the Cure” cause marketing partnership with Susan G. Komen.
Various accusations of “pinkwashing” have come from cancer researchers, nutritional experts and other cause marketing analysts and there is no need to rehash them all here.
Yet as a communications strategist, I feel compelled to comment on an issue that I haven’t yet seen raised.
From my perspective, what helped the campaign rise to the level of absurdity was the terrible timing of KFC’s corporate communications.
Simply put, I’ve never seen a company’s brand message so poorly planned, managed and sequenced.
At its best, a cause marketing campaign is a story about a group of ordinary characters (a corporation, a charity, often a celebrity) who find their purpose motives aligned in some important way and decide to do something extraordinary together.
However, when it seems like one of the characters shouldn’t be in the story — when they appear out of nowhere or out of sequence — the whole narrative feels forced, inauthentic and inappropriate.
KFC became one of those characters.
