Dive Brief:
- On Oct. 17, KFC offered fried chicken-scented "seasoned tickets" for $75 on ticket marketplace StubHub, according to a press release. A total of 500 tickets entitling holders to order 48 Kentucky Fried Wings every week for 10 weeks sold out in under two hours, MediaPost reported.
- Buyers will receive a package in the mail and can redeem the offers on KFC.com between Nov. 7 and Jan. 15. The wings can be either picked up or delivered in areas where delivery is currently offered.
- The seasoned tickets offer follows last week's introduction of Kentucky Fried Wings in some KFC restaurants. The wings are also available for home delivery through Grubhub or Seamless, but not at the pricing of the seasoned tickets.
Dive Insight:
KFC's smells-like-chicken seasoned tickets — the latest in a long line of marketing stunts from the brand — are intended to help the chain promote its new online delivery platform at KFC.com and its new Fried Wings menu item. The promotion is timed to coincide with a period when football fans are home watching NFL games. Per KFC, wings are a popular snack choice during football season, with Americans projected to consume more than 1.38 billion chicken wings during the Super Bowl this year, according to a National Chicken Council forecast cited by KFC.
Working with StubHub for the promotion makes redeeming the offer convenient for consumers and could help KFC get in front of potential new customers as the platform is widely used to purchase tickets for sporting and music events. It also gives KFC a way to deliver a tangible — and scented — product to consumers via the mail, which could help it make a bigger impression than a digital-only offer.
KFC also recently launched an ad campaign for its new Fried Wings featuring actor Sean Astin as Colonel Rudy, and the actor also appears in ads supporting the StubHub promotion.
Marketing stunts are increasingly the name of the game in the QSR space, with KFC at the helm. Last month, for instance, KFC released a video game dating simulator starring a "dateable," young Colonel Sanders. In April, a social media campaign featured a computer-generated version of Sanders, who took over the brand's Instagram account to flaunt his lifestyle and parody influencers.
Burger King has similarly been toying with variations for its mascot, such as a campaign last winter that noted, "a king always outranks a colonel." Not to be outdone, KFC introduced the world to what had been missing: a RoboCop version of Colonel Sanders who threatened people with fried chicken.
