KFC’s five-year turnaround: From diagnosis to cure

Sam Peña-Taylor

KFC, the global chicken-focused fast food brand, reversed a drop in sales and footfall in the UK thanks to diagnostic insight work that resulted in a five-year turnaround plan.

 KFC, the chicken-focused quick-service restaurant (QSR), is a venerable brand dating back to the US of the 1930s, but across the Atlantic, in a London conference room in 2016, its stewards in the UK were receiving some bad news. 

“We heard over and over with startling clarity and startling consistency that KFC was an ‘old man’, ‘a fading old man’, ‘a man stuck in the past’, ‘a man too lazy, too tired to change with the times’, ‘a man that can’t be bothered’,” Meghan Farren, CMO of KFC in the UK and Ireland, recounted to the Festival of Marketing (March...

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