Popeyes Chicken Sandwich wouldn’t have blown up the way it did if not for the PR and earned media surrounding this tweet. This is what made Popeyes a top player in the chicken sandwich market.

On top of this, listening to the public led to the insight and strategy that pushed us toward this creative move.

This tweet and the media coverage surrounding it introduced Popeyes to a greatly expanded audience and forever changed Popeyes business.

Our challenge was to come up with an idea to launch Popeyes’ first-ever Chicken Sandwich in a loud, competitive category dominated by Chick-fil-A, who owned more than 50% of the chicken sandwich market despite being closed on Sundays.

As the sandwich slowly rolled out across the country through a series of market tests, the response had been very favorable, with many people tweeting that Popeyes Chicken Sandwich beat the competition.

Our objective was to gain as much market share as we could. We needed to generate and sustain organic hype to encourage trial and convert eaters into believers.

Popeyes was still the underdog, though, and gaining any market share was going to be tough. So we had to be smart and create a cultural moment.

The buzz was okay when the sandwich went nationwide on August 12. But the sandwich wasn’t a viral hit—yet.

Chick-fil-A invented the chicken sandwich and dominated the market. But our social listening showed that many Americans were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the brand’s donations to anti-LGBTQ groups and were hungry for a tastier, “homophobia-free” alternative.

We’d also spent the last year perfecting our brand voice and building an engaged following, particularly among Black Twitter (Black Twitter describes the network of mostly African American Twitter users who tend to be more active on the platform. They are highly creative content creators and responsible for starting many social trends).

So we knew the right tweet could unleash an army to fight for Popeyes.

So when Chick-fil-A tweeted, “Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the [heart emoji] for the original,” we pounced.

We quickly responded with a perfectly on-brand, “...y’all good?”

To launch the sandwich through PR and social—where much of the initial hype around the sandwich was growing—we kept our strategy simple: let our food (and fans) do all the talking.

We were also trying to take Popeyes from a niche brand to a one with mass appeal. Our target market was all fast-food lovers, with a significant boost from this tweet’s core target Black Twitter, along with LGBTQ people and allies.

This audience was ready for us to hit Chick-fil-A, but we had to stay true to Popeyes with a response that was friendly on the surface, but still called them out. This pushed our fans to jump in for us and say everything our lawyers wouldn’t let us.

As the tweet went viral, our PR partner distributed a screen capture of the tweet and other general sandwich assets.

The August 19 tweet itself was the first point of PR.

Executing this seems simple enough. But writing it and getting client—and legal—approval in a matter of minutes only happened because we had a communication system in place specifically designed for real-time reaction posts.

This tweet scaled to 84,500 retweets, 318,400 likes, 5,000 comments and countless news mentions. Black Twitter made memes, talk show hosts joked and lines wrapped the block.

Celebrities started clamoring for the sandwich. Many posted on social media (without getting paid) about going to Popeyes themselves and facing long lines and sellouts. So we worked with our PR partner to get them all sandwiches.

Over the course of eight days, as the sandwich sold out around the country, our PR partner and social media team kept the news media and general public informed and excited about Popeyes Chicken Sandwich.

With no paid media, this tweet earned 8 billion impressions worth $87 million (Cision). All major American media covered it positively and in depth—often multiple times.

Popeyes Chicken Sandwich went from getting 4,000 tweets to 140,000 each day (Crimson Hexagon + Brandwatch), became Google’s #1 search, trended #1 on Twitter twice and added more Twitter followers in a week than the last 2.5 years (Forbes).

Store traffic skyrocketed 256% and stayed high, hitting +300% for the sandwich’s return and eventually stabilizing months later at 40% higher than before (Forbes and Sense360).

Popeyes saw the largest QSR market share increase ever tracked by analytics firm Sense360, sold its 10-week supply of Chicken Sandwiches in eight days (internal data) and had its best quarter ever with sales up 42% (CNN). Restaurant Business Editor Jonathan Maze tweeted they “could find no other restaurant chain that can even come close” to these results.