Dear KFC, Thank you for demonstrating the principle that customer input exists to guide, not to decide, with your Kentucky Fried Turkey Xmas ad.
“We saw you. We heard you. And we ignored you. We're sticking with chicken” is brilliant on its own. But it's also a brilliant manifestation of the old adage that strategy is as much about defining what you're not (“Via Negativa”), as it is about defining what you want to be or become.
Right, I better get this over with... Henry Ford and his blasted faster horse.
1) There's no evidence he ever actually said it. 2) Even if he did say it, he could / should have focused on the need clearly expressed (faster), rather than the idea articulated (a faster horse). 3) If he had been more empathetic and listened to others, including his customers, history might remember him more sympathetically.
OK, now that I've got that off my chest, I can get back to thanking you KFC, for not taking what your customers have told you at face value, for not responding with “well if the people want turkey, we should give them turkey”.
As my wonderful therapist keeps reminding me, “it's not the thing, it's how you respond to the thing”. And the same goes for customer input, feedback and frankly all customer research.
Just because a customer – or indeed lots of customers - says something, and it happens to be true, which it almost certainly is, that absolutely does not mean you should do it. Customer research, done well, should be used to inform, to inspire and to guide.
Andrew Lang (Scottish poet, novelist and literary critic) had it broadly straight way back when (before 1912 anyway) when he said “He use statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than for illumination”.
In the past I've heard people seduced into saying things like “The research has told us to do X…” or worse “It's not up to us, we must let the research decide”. Well, with a few limited use cases, Stuffing Stacker stuff that! To my mind that's simply an abdication of responsibility and a pure & simple exercise in arse covering.
It's poor practice. But with so many enticingly priced (aka cheap) so-called self-serve research tools becoming available which promise to “make the decision for you” (or similar) I genuinely fear for the future. I fear that an algorithm would have recommended that you launch KFT.
It wouldn't have been wrong, per se. But it wouldn't have been as right, as impactful and as, actually customer-centric, as “We ignored you”. You clearly know who you're talking to, and how they would respond to being ignored, extremely well, KFC. Chapeau.
And thankfully, for you and us, you've clearly got some brilliant creative thinking humans at the helm who had the vision and the contrariness to not accept face value and to turn an observation (“some customers are suggesting turkey”) into an insight (“we can humorously reinforce our brand by explicitly ignoring them”).
Either way, thank you for reinforcing that being customer-centric (which is vital) is not the same as being blindly customer-fed (which is a disaster) and for giving me a laugh at the same time.
And for reminding me that Nessun Dorma is possibly the most versatile tune (can I call it that?!) of all time. Or maybe it's just the memory structures formed in middle of the summer of 1990 doing their thing again.
Thanks again Ned