The Brainwave Bucket is a newly created piece of technology designed for an out-of-home activation and brand experience which was held in-store. Customers and the general public were invited to try the experience, engage with the technology and through this interaction delivered the brand and campaign message.

KFC is the original leader of fried chicken in Hong Kong. But the brand is losing traction and is in danger of not being top of mind when people think of and crave fried chicken. To remain the leader of the fried chicken market, we needed to reinstate our position as the Original Fried Chicken by giving new meaning local relevance to our globally famous line “It’s Finger Lickin’ Good” – and give Hong Kongers a novel reason to choose us over our fiercest fried chicken rivals, McDonald’s and Jollibee.

Key objectives

- Find a new culturally relevant and insightful way for customers to identify with KFC

- Amplify the role KFC can play in people’s lives

- Make KFC to be the fast food of choice for people around Hong Kong

- Create positive conversation in the media about the brand

Hong Kong is a city of overthinkers. However, scientific studies prove that comfort food reduces stress. And so we saw this as an opportunity to give Hong Kongers even more of a reason to get stuck into their favorite comfort food, KFC. But not only did we want to communicate this new insightful message of “Don’t Overthink, Just Indulge”, we put our fried chicken where our mouth is and created a tech device, called The Brainwave Bucket, and activation which leveraged modern brain monitoring technology to prove to people that KFC really can soothe their mind. And in doing so, created a compelling story for people and news outlets to identify with, engage with and share.

Hong Kong is the most stressed city in East Asia and one of the most stressed cities in the world. And one of the main triggers of stress amongst our core demographic of 15-40 year-olds is overthinking. People overthink anything and everything, from big life decisions, to what to have for lunch.

However, scientific studies prove that comfort food reduces stress. And as the leader of fried chicken in Hong Kong, KFC is the ultimate original comfort food. Thus KFC has the secret recipe to momentarily ease people's overthinking and the stresses of everyday life.

The Brainwave Bucket combined modern brain activity tracking technology with KFC’s most famous retail asset, the bucket, creating a unique and ridiculous brain tracking device to get people talking. And then we turned it into an activation where people were challenged to sit in a large bucket designed enclosure, try on the device and experience the mind-comforting effects of our tasty fried chicken.

We first launched the device on social in a teaser and launch phases mimicking other tech launches. After which, we introduced people to the activation and experience – promoting it via social, media publication and in-store posters. The activation was installed for a week in October 2022 at KFC Hong Kong’s Flagship store in Causeway Bay, where both journalists and customers were welcomed to try.

The campaign worked as intended and along with widespread coverage, we also saw tangible increase in sales and footfall to stores around the same period. With just HKD250,000 production budget the results we saw were…

Sales Increases:

Flagship Store sales increase of +7.76% (vs the previous month)

Flagship Store transaction (ticket count) increase of +11.68% (vs the previous month)

Media Coverage:

213 news outlets wrote and shared articles about the Brainwave Bucket

Providing 4.8 BILLION Potential Impressions

And a PR value of HK$78 MILLION

100% of articles delivered a positive sentiment

100% of articles articulated and amplified our key message