KFC is famous the world over for the Original Recipe of 11 herbs and spices that make its delicious chicken coating. We’re also furiously proud of our chicken gravy in the UK. Whilst the Brits may not be famous for cooking up ‘haute cuisine’, they love their gravy, preferably slathering every inch of their Sunday roast dinner. However, our social listening ears told us that not everyone agrees that gravy should be served with their favourite fried chicken meals.

In the UK, Christmas is a time of giving, spending time with family and food swimming in gravy! To tap into this heart-warming sentiment, at this time of year we unleash a, frankly, amazing product – the KFC Gravy Burger. This indulgent burger features an Original Recipe Chicken Fillet topped with a golden hash cup, our trademarked ‘Gravynnaise’, cheese and, of course, lashings of gravy to pour over it. Oh, heaven!

We unleashed our Gravy Burger, and ran a campaign that got the UK to truly embrace the gravy. We split our legions of UK gravy fans into fourteen geographical regions and got them to compete against each other to see who could consume the most gravy before Christmas.

In addition to being crowned the most gravy-loving part of the UK, the winning region had limited-edition KFC ‘Gribs’ sent to their local restaurants. These full-frontal ‘gravy-bibs’ allowed our winning customers to get seriously stuck-in to the deliciously gravy-soaked chicken goodness and throw caution to the wind about how they ate it.

We understood that this gravy ‘yay’ or ‘nay’ tension existed: you either love gravy with fried chicken or you don’t. So, we embraced the knowledge that our celebration of the golden liquid ruffles a few feathers and focussed our campaign strategy on targeting those KFC guests that love our gravy!

2month campaign over the Christmas period in November and December 2021, targeting the entire UK.

• Consistent cross-channel plan to drive fame through AV, OOH, Social, Digital, Radio and PPC – ensuring the whole of the UK was awash with gravy!

• Through November the PR push began with both nationwide merchandise supported by digital and CRM as well as localised restaurant activations.

• One-to-one customer engagement competition runs through the whole two-month campaign updating the 3.7m known customers with the ‘State of the Gravy Nation’.

• Through the latter half of the campaign delivery aggregators enabled us to increase the reach of our gravy message through social and CRM.

• Additional push of spend through digital and owned channels towards the end of the campaign to drive the ‘time-limited’ nature of this product and the need to be part of this culture phenomenon.

The results we achieved were amazing…

1. Increase in burger meal sales across the campaign period +34%

2. Increase in visitation across the campaign period +5%

3. Increase in pots of gravy sold across the campaign period (vs annual average) +40%

4. Unique open rates jumped up to 26% over December, compared to the usual benchmark of 18%. This means approx. 735,000 people engaged with our emails each week the campaign was live.

5. Net sentiment - 12% positive, 2% negative

6. Earned reach - 913k

7. Earned impressions - 7M

8. Oh, and the Northwest of England was proudly crowned as the region that consumes the most gravy!