KFC SatoSugu

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 has looked for cultural opportunities beyond the mainstream, and has tapped into more niche communities.

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.

Fanbases can be a real lightning rod for brand to attract brand love, but how and when you talk to them is super important as to not come off try-hard.

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.

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.