Colonel Sanders Has a Case of Pink Eye

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.

Less than a month before the launch of “Buckets for the Cure,” the company had rolled out a hyper-masculine national advertising campaign to promote “Double Down,” its enormously successful fast food adventure ride.

Clearly, this was a product launch targeted squarely at men — or more accurately, manly men. You can watch a sample of the company’s testosterone-heavy advertising here.

The Double Down story did not carry a message of compassion, charity, health or concern for others. Rather, it was for men to “unthink” their way into a fatty stack of meat and cheese. It was about being man enough to take a dietary thrill ride.

In this brand context, it made absolutely no sense for KFC to launch a softer, woman-focused campaign to fight breast cancer. They were in the middle of a competing campaign that was using all available media platforms to communicate an aggressive male-centric message — a completely contrary story.

At that moment in its corporate story, KFC was working at cross purposes with itself and with its partners.  The KFC brand had no resonance to the cause, no alignment with the issue. The message sequencing was misguided and everyone involved should have been more strategic.

It’s certainly debatable if KFC could ever have created an appropriate brand environment in which to launch Buckets for the Cure.

But what I do know is that the health-be-damned setting from which they did announce it was a communications failure.
-Matthew DiGirolamo, Cause Catalysts
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