Some brand slogans don't age well. Some work just fine until suddenly, due to circumstances beyond a marketer's control, they...don't.
In such situations, most brands just quietly change up their advertising, hitting a bunch of pause buttons behind the scenes until a cultural moment or crisis blows over.
But KFC's global marketing team has decided to just be up front about the weirdness around its longtime tagline, "It's finger lickin' good."
Calling its own brand promise "the most inappropriate slogan for 2020," the fried chicken chain this week announced it would nix the line from marketing until the Covid-19 pandemic has passed.
But of course, the brand and its agencies—creative shop Mother and PR agency Freuds—had to have a little fun with themselves and get a publicity boost from the decision. They're running a campaign that visually censors the line or features tongue-in-cheek warnings like, "Finger lickin' not currently advised."
I'm struggling a bit to think of a parallel from marketing history here, though Sherwin-Williams' "Cover the World" always comes to mind in terms of taglines that haven't aged well but are still embraced.
The paint brand actually abandoned its creepy world-smothering logo in 1974 amid the rise of environmentalism, but consumers actually missed it, and it was brought back in the 1980s.
A few years ago, I asked design legend Milton Glaser, whom we recently lost, what he thought of the Sherwin-Williams logo. At risk of being off topic on the KFC news, I thought I'd share his response, as it made me smile and miss him even more:
"I love the Sherwin-Williams logo. It is one of the most persistent and memorable surrealist images of our time. The image of paint entirely covering the Earth is as powerful as anything Magritte or Dali ever produced," he said. "Of course, it no longer looks as though it belongs in the design vocabulary of our time, but ultimately that may turn out to be an asset."
David Griner
Creative and Innovation Editor, Adweek
david.griner@adweek.com
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