For KFC social, understanding the audience and how you can speak to them and their interests is key when building brand love. The ML social team set out to look for cultural opportunities beyond the mainstream, especially for real-time engagements. We have used subcultures to identify interest points within our target audiences to create seamless ways-in to culture.
The goal is to only show up when it makes sense for the brand, and show up in a way that feels genuine, because we believe how you talk to these subcultural audiences is important.
Breaking into Trending Moments, the KFC Breakup
On Aug 3rd popular manga show Jujutsu Kaisen released their 5th episode (or arc). The KFC social team saw within social conversation tracking that fans were discussing a major breakup scene in the episode that had occurred in front of a KFC. The team quickly ideated and tweeted with language that showed an insider understanding of the show by using the fan made couple name.
Playing Inside Baseball
For the when, we used their real time social monitoring practices that helps pinpoint important cultural intersections between brands and fanbases as cultural conversation is bubbles up. This allows us to find opportunities for KFC to speak to fans in real time as part of the conversation.
For the how, understanding fandoms terminology, history, etc. is important in these moments which is why we used the fanmade couple name to show the understanding of the moment.
Highest reaching post in KFC account history
The results spoke for themselves with the tweet performing 7,612,166 impressions (the highest reaching post in KFC account history). The moment also drove a spike in conversion 242% higher than average daily conversation. This was the highest spike in KFC brand mentions in the past year. Fans created content based on the tweet, the brand received free earned media, #kfcbreakup was a trending hashtag on X, and people even made Spotify playlists from the moment.
