Way to Not Make Friends: KFC Says Franchise Owners Lie
KFC's long-running dispute with its franchisees over the chain's ad campaign has reached the courtroom stage. Recently, KFC unveiled its battle strategy: total denial.
The franchise owners' marketing cooperative has gone to the trouble and expense of suing KFC parent Yum! Brands (YUM) over the brand's dearth of ads featuring the core fried-chicken product in favor of grilled chicken. KFC's take, as expressed by division president Roger Eaton, is the ads aren't favoring grilled chicken. To sum up, the problem is not really happening.
Instead, Eaton told the judge, franchisees simply want to wrest control of the ad campaign from corporate. The grilled vs fried controversy is just a ruse owners cooked up to gain more power.
Oh, come on.
Let's take this from the franchise owners' point of view. One of the prime advantages of being a franchise owner is that you have a ready-made brand that someone else will market for you. All you have to do is pay into the advertising kitty, and your store will be promoted.
Franchisees do not sit up at night lusting to take on some of their franchisor's responsibilities in the relationship. These owners paid a nice fat franchise fee in part to have corporate marketing experts handle ads for them. A restaurant owner would only take the step of trying to control the national ad campaign if they're desperate and feel there's no hope the corporate parent can get the job done.
No franchise owner longs to become a crack advertising executive in their free time. If they're suing to take control of the marketing, it's because what the company is doing isn't working.
And nobody's willing to listen at headquarters and fix it.
KFC has forgotten that franchise owners are the folks standing behind a counter all day trying to sell chicken to customers. If they say the marketing's not working, it isn't. The company's recent sales slump says franchisees are right. Yet the company's position is it is backing franchisees up with appropriate marketing.
This brand will continue to suffer as long as top management clings to this tone-deaf attitude. KFC could have saved a lot of money on legal costs and not faced a threat to its brand control if it saw franchise owners more as partners and included them in shaping the marketing campaign.
Now, franchisees feel backed to the wall, and damage has been done to the corporate-franchise relationship that will be slow to mend. No matter how this lawsuit comes out, KFC is already the loser.
Photo via Flickr user Terry Wha
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