Covert Cows and Chick-fil-A by Steve Robinson

Author:Steve Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2019-04-12T16:00:00+00:00

SIX

Brand Journey

Preparing to Go National—with Cows

By the early 1990s, as we approached five hundred restaurants across the country, our corporate marketing efforts were still focused toward individual restaurants and markets. We began asking ourselves, “At what point do we go beyond supporting just the Operators and markets and start to position Chick-fil-A as a regional and then a national brand?”

The answer, we decided, was when we had opened restaurants in thirty-five states, and we could see that number by the mid-1990s. We were not yet to the West Coast, but we were heavily invested in Texas and had penetrated deeper into the Southwest. We were also moving into the Midwest and up the East Coast with freestanding restaurants.

As we envisioned regional and national marketing, we knew we would never be able to invest enough money in advertising to create a linear relationship between the investment and chain-wide sales. That would have been a misguided transactional focus. We had to build the brand by creating a unique personality for Chick-fil-A that would help build top-of-mind awareness.

For nineteen years, Chick-fil-A was part of a larger destination, the mall. From a marketing perspective, opening freestanding restaurants presented an entirely new challenge. With the first street store in 1986, the issue of brand awareness and what the brand stood for leapfrogged to the forefront. While remaining sensitive to helping Operators drive sales, we would be investing in the brand with a longer-term perspective. Being part of an organization going through that marketing transition was fun and occasionally challenging for all of us, as we navigated the tension between building short-term sales and building a brand of choice.

Our mall-focused advertising agency had done a good job for us in retail merchandising, creating effective in-store graphics and menu boards. When we moved our marketing efforts outside the restaurants to billboards and radio, however, we suspected the work was not memorable enough. We sought ways to position our advertising to present Chick-fil-A as a destination brand, not just a sandwich. We knew it wasn’t by showing pictures of food. Throughout the history of Chick-fil-A, a picture of the sandwich has never done it justice. It’s a piece of chicken on a bun. There’s no emotional connection there—nothing compelling about that.

I was a teenager in 1967 when McDonald’s introduced one of its first national television campaigns with kids singing, “McDonald’s is our kind of place. It’s such a happy place!” Though a voice-over later in the ad would talk briefly about the food, the primary visual was happy children and their parents. Four years later Needham, Harper & Steers (an agency I interviewed with after grad school) won the account from D’Arcy MacManus with the still-famous tagline, “You deserve a break today.” That line would return in 1981, my first year at Chick-fil-A. And though “two all-beef patties . . .” pitched the best-known fast-food hamburger, the biggest chain in the world was trying to grow its brand around the experience.

When we first put our product on billboards, ours was the only chicken sandwich in the market, and that image still wasn’t compelling.

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