Insight
KFC is a well-known food brand in Malaysia, but it was struggling to position itself as a delicious option for lunch and dinner. Most often while considering options of places to eat at during for lunch and dinner, people would choose restaurants over KFC. With McDonald’s Lunch becoming a big hit with the audiences, KFC needed to break away from the ‘snack’ image and ensure higher off-take of its lunch and dinner treats.
Strategy
Malaysians love their food, and they love eating out. Most Malaysian professionals drive out for their daily lunch and dinner. But that has its downside as well. During lunch and dinner times, while everyone is on the road, traffic becomes the biggest obstacle.
Waiting at a traffic block, being hungry is one of the most worrisome things about eating in Malaysia. Interestingly enough, most Malaysian drivers use Waze (4.5m+ users in Malaysia), an app-based smart GPS navigator to guide them to their destination ‘traffic free’. But given the volume of traffic that emerges on the streets, there is only so much it can do on its own.
Stuck in jams people get hungry, and they often take a pit stop before heading, this provided the best opportunity for KFC to step-in.
Malaysians needed a way to get to their food, fast. UM would use Waze to calm the growling stomachs of Malaysians in the right context, at the right time with Malaysia’s first GPS and location-based advertising.
Execution
KFC became the first food chain to partner with Waze to provide ‘fast’ food to Malaysians.
Within 3km of any KFC outlet, the agency could detect any Waze user stationary for more than one minute, and serve him a KFC Lunch/Dinner Treat message, highlighting the fact that ‘your destination is probably far, but food at the KFC store is just a few hundred metres away’.
The user could easily click on the message and navigate to the nearest KFC outlet, to satisfy their hunger, fast. The simple execution was strategically targeted to drivers near the KFC outlets, and time targeted for lunch and dinner which generally witnesses high traffic movements. By coupling this with appealing visuals of food available within metres, the impulse was created to drive to KFC instead of spending time being stuck in traffic. Thus KFC managed to help Malaysians beat traffic with a simple technology and bring them closer to their food, fast.
Results
People lapped up the KFC lunch and dinner treats promo with high enthusiasm. More than 9,000 clicks were recorded on the pins within a period of 10 days. More than 3,000 navigations were made from within Waze, resulting in a whopping 11,000+ footfall to KFC outlets. A total of 400,000+ drivers were exposed to the brand message, making it one of the most visible campaigns on the streets of Malaysia. The campaign resulted in incremental sales of RM 500,000 ($152,747) in just 10 days.