By Will Novosedlik
In this series, we ask top industry execs and marketers across the country about their biggest fears and concerns. What are the things of marketing nightmares? This week, we catch up with KFC Canada’s CMO Katherine Bond-Debicki about the biggest problems she faces.
Bond-Debicki has worked in various marketing roles at KFC Canada (a Yum! Brands Subsidiary), starting as a brand manager in the U.K. and Ireland, then in Canada as marketing manager, senior marketing manager, marketing director and finally CMO in 2020.
So, what’s keeping you up at night?
Two things: economic uncertainty and balancing heritage with the need to modernize.
I think there’s a really interesting compound effect off the back of the pandemic and the extended uncertainty that we, our customers and our team members, have lived through over the last five years. And the other thing that I reflect on is how to modernize a really powerful heritage brand in a hyper-competitive category without losing the richness of our legacy.
It’s hyper competitive all right. The fried chicken category has gotten very, very busy in the last ten years. It’s like the battle of the batters out there.
We look at Canada as one of the more hyper competitive marketplaces in the world. You have the traditional global chains, like McDonald’s. We also have some very local powerhouses in Tim Hortons, which adds a unique dynamic to the Canadian QSR category. And then over the last 10 years, we’ve seen this rapid growth and proliferation, both of fried chicken specialists, but also independent chains really picking up steam. So when you look at the category through the global lens, it’s absolutely a hyper competitive category. And KFC is the number one fried chicken operator, and when you’re the biggest, everyone is nipping at your heels.
You’re the biggest in terms of revenue, volume and/or locations?
We’re the number one fried chicken specialist in Canada in terms of transaction and footfall. And that’s absolutely something we want to protect. But our goal isn’t just to protect our share, it’s to grow share as well in a hyper competitive category. So when you think about our challenge, it’s how do we leverage the powerful equity and legacy of our brand? Taste is a big part of that. We still lead in best-tasting fried chicken scores. It’s an absolutely critical piece of our growth plan. But how do you respond to changing trends in the environment and changing consumer behavior while keeping that distinctive KFC taste alive?
Then there’s our restaurant footprint. How do we modernize our economic model and where we’re available to Canadians? How do we meet Canadians where they are today, where they live? Especially when you look at the younger cohorts, because historically we’ve been a rural-suburban brand, and now we’re having to penetrate urban environments. We see such power and strength in our rural-suburban business, but we need to figure out how we connect our restaurants to the heart of urban communities today. You have newer entrants like Popeye’s, Wingstop, Church’s Texas Chicken who all started in urban and are now trying to scale in rural-suburban. So we’re on opposing trajectories, and that introduces interesting opportunities for us in leveraging our strengths, but then also growing out of our areas of opportunity.
What are the challenges that you face as a brand in trying to increase your urban footprint?
The first challenge is how do we take a model that was built for rural and suburban footprints and fit them in a fit-for-purpose urban environment? Everything we make is restaurant-prepared, which means we have a back-of-house restaurant system, which requires more space than our main competitors. Then it goes beyond that strategically – how do we really put consumer at the heart of our plan? How do we evolve the restaurant experience to be right for that urban demographic, which has different needs than a lot of our rural suburban customer? How do you deliver convenience in that new environment? How do we ensure our menu has evolved to formats that are typically bought by that urban consumer? So there’s some big foundational questions around making our restaurant model work in an urban environment in a way that puts the urban consumer at the heart of our brand’s modernization.
You talk about heritage. A few years back when people started going down the path of healthy eating, the brand was in a bit of a crisis because it represented all the ways you shouldn’t eat anymore. How did it overcome that, aside from changing from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC?
There was a period of time where the messaging around fast food as an industry was really heavy weighted towards nutritional health and wellness. And I would say that hasn’t gone away. The need to offer balanced meals, and the need to offer choice to consumers, is an ongoing necessity and part of our plans. I do think what we’ve seen is an evolution away from health and wellness as the dominant message to consumers wanting to have nutritionally balanced items without sacrificing taste. We deliver incredible taste. And our focus is how do we ensure we always do that. So we have products like our original recipe tenders that are a hundred calories per tender. We have sides that can complement a meal. We also have a plant-based sandwich to allow people more flexibility when they come to our restaurants.
The product development kitchen must be awfully busy constantly having to adapt to changing tastes.
Product is a huge part of not just our business and how we operate today, but of our future. When you think about QSR as a category, people want accessibility of meal options and convenience. Those are mainstays. But as we think about… providing those moments of exploration or relief from their day-to-day, it’s also about bringing a sense of adventure to our menus. So when you think about work on our twister wraps or our sandwich range, we are absolutely food-forward and focused on innovation.
What does the customer profile look like? Does it lean more heavily towards any particular demographic? And how do you deal with the generational transition that happens every 15 to 20 years?
There’s so many ways you can analyze the consumer, generational groupings being one of them. I absolutely think one of our key challenges and opportunities is to recruit that next generation of consumers into the brand. And our product, which we’ve talked about, is a huge part of that. We want to keep our iconic recipe alive, but we want put it in formats that really meet the needs of our younger consumers, which typically means “boneless.” And when you think about our brand, our legacy is being built off chicken on the bone. So there’s a need for us to manage that transition. And we don’t ever plan on losing chicken on the bone. It’s our crown jewel. But we need to ensure we evolve beyond that to maximize penetration. So definitely an opportunity that we’re looking at is how we diversify our generational cohorts. You see that through the lens of our product, our communications, and even our restaurants where we’re looking at where our physical assets need to be to be available to the majority of Canadians.
The other thing that bedevils marketers is the complexity of the media landscape. How are you dealing with that?
I think what’s really important for us as we think about how we activate across all of the channel mixes, is really understanding the consumer journey. And getting deliberate around what messaging is the most effective at which point of their journey. These days delivering content that’s relevant to the channel and where the consumer is in those moments is what sets apart really effective media and creative strategy. We have some tools that help us do that. We now have data that allows us to get a lot more targeted, a lot more insightful about how we reach people and where we invest our money. It often feels like the options are endless. But we can leverage data to make the smartest investment decisions.