Colonel Sanders and the American Dream

by Josh Ozersky

  What was amazing about the weakness and hysteria of such a gesture is that it wasn’t really based on any kind of marketplace reality. An interested observer might well scratch his white goatee over the blanket assertion that Americans are less interested now than in the past in eating fried foods. It’s a documented reality that Americans are fatter, more self-indulgent, and less healthy in their eating habits every year. And yet to listen to the constant refrains of KFC’s senior management, from that day to this, one would think that the country was a macrobiotic nation religiously committed to feeding upon brown rice and vegetable proteins.

  That will be the day! Throughout the country and particularly in the South, KFC’s stronghold, fried chicken is hugely popular. It is fattening; it is unhealthy to a great extent, although less so since KFC abandoned trans fats in 2007. The idea that this would keep Americans of any kind from eating it is patently ridiculous. This fact would not be lost on KFC franchisees, who see the country’s fried-chicken-eating habits at close range and rarely voice their unease about the “on the bone bucket business,” with or without the latest product release, whether it takes the form of Kentucky Grilled Chicken, the Colonel’s Rotisserie Gold, or any of the other fried-chicken alternatives that have been foisted upon an undemanding public over the years.

  What concerned KFC, as it was by then known, may have been more cultural than culinary in nature. It wasn’t just that fried food was unhealthy; it was downmarket. Kentucky Fried Chicken was, it seemed to many, déclassé. Its slogan in the 1960s, “finger-lickin’ good,” was the last thing the company wanted its customers to think of; like all fast foods, it wanted to be liked by everybody. It was liked by millions of Americans; but there was a potential objection to it, so it had to be changed. No attitude could be in greater contrast to that of its founder, who spent his entire life doing things exactly his own way and cajoling the world into seeing it his way.

  Had the Colonel been alive, he would have pointed out the obvious. Yes, nonfried chicken products were doing well; so were hamburgers. So what? Kentucky Fried Chicken was doing better than at any time in its history, by any measure. None of the new products tried out either by Cranor’s administration or his predecessors outsold the Original Recipe chicken; nor had the name Kentucky Fried Chicken failed to attract the hungry in this or any other country under the sun. Despite its unfaltering profitability, the chain was always looked at as a flawed holding in the PepsiCo portfolio; many in senior management didn’t even like the brand as much as its sisters, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell—themselves both wildly successful, idiosyncratic businesses that had found their way into the corporate gullet in the 1980s, mostly as a way to keep the chains’ taps flowing with Pepsi. Kentucky Fried Chicken was just another division to make over in time for the annual report. “We are dramatically changing our menu, our restaurants and the way customers think of us,” said KFC senior marketing vice president Bill McDonald in the press release announcing the name change. “And we wanted our graphics to reflect the new KFC.”15

  It wasn’t a case of simple mismanagement or misjudgment; the problem was systemic. There was no founder to demand things be done his way; there was no single person with the authority that had died with the Colonel. John Cranor III was gone from his job by 1994; the man who replaced him, David Novak, would turn out to be the longest-running and most supportive executive the company had ever had. Even as the horrible, paralyzing franchisee lawsuit was dragging on into its fifth year, Novak was able to persuade the franchisees that he was the longed-for executive who would appreciate and support them at last—the loving corporate parent they had never known, other than those few who supped with the Colonel so many years ago. He even told them that he wouldn’t leave the job until KFC was on the mend, understanding as well as the franchisees just how little invested previous “leaders” had been.

  When I first became president of KFC, I told the franchisees I wasn’t going to leave until we turned the business around. I said it to get them to trust me because they were so used to having corporate guys come in, work for a couple of years, and then move on, so that there was really no sense of continuity, no sense that the president really cared about the company as more than just a stepping stone in his career.16

  Even the Colonel’s family approved of the dynamic young executive. Novak took the extra step of singling out the Original Recipe chicken for praise rather than the usual blame: “There is nothing that matches the original recipe at KFC. People have tried for years to match it, and they haven’t come close. We have over a 50% share in that market, and we should be proud of it.”17 (The suit was settled in 1997, with Pepsi withdrawing its hard-line 1989 contract prior to the spin-off.)

  And yet, during both Novak’s tenure at KFC (1994–1997) and throughout his subsequent years as the head of Tricon and then Yum! Brands, he oversaw the same depressing efforts to distance KFC from its primary product—and by extension, from its customers and, of course, its famous founder. The point of the new-product frenzy wasn’t to make loyal KFC customers happy; they were already happy. That’s why they were loyal customers. It was to attract new customers. But there were built-in limits to this strategy, as the Colonel, for all his ignorance of the QSR business, understood. Inevitably, the new products cannibalize sales of the old ones and then hurt operating standards as teenagers are asked to cook thirty different products competently instead of one superlatively. Thus even Novak, the executive with the most sustained and demonstrated commitment to the business in its history, was driven to approve what, in retrospect, were ludicrous claims.

  For example, PepsiCo was expecting a lot of the public to forget that KFC stood for “Kentucky Fried Chicken.” Or was it? The idea embraced by marketing consultants, then as now, was that young people, the target audience of any fast-food chain, didn’t have any associational baggage about the place. To a young person encountering “KFC” as a latchkey child or bawling toddler, there never was another name. But she or he might someday wonder, what does the “KFC” stand for? The company’s marketing gurus anticipated this question and began a surreptitious process of trying to implant the phrase “Kitchen Fresh Chicken” into the minds of consumers. Naturally, this crude plan didn’t pass unnoticed. Seth Stevenson, the advertising columnist for the popular website Slate, wrote about this plan in 2004, asking, pointedly, “What does KFC stand for?”

  [T]he key in this [campaign] is keeping the brand identity strong, straight through the name transition. That’s what KFC is banking on as they take those three famous letters, stripped of their meaning 13 years ago, and attempt to reinfuse them with a nearly opposite meaning. . . Will consumers follow again as they’re asked to believe in “Kitchen Fresh Chicken”?

  Of course we will, if we hear it enough as it blares from our televisions. Branding is at times a delicate alchemy. And at other times it’s just spending lots of money. (Like when KFC tried to convince us fried chicken was a health food.) You hammer away at us with your insultingly wrongheaded message until our resistance wears down and we throw up our hands and we accede that yes, we suppose this chicken does come from a “kitchen” of sorts and, OK, by some tortured definition it could possibly be referred to as “fresh.” It’s all so finger-lickin’ sad.18

  More doomed still was a similar brainwashing campaign, alluded to in his essay, to convince consumers that they could in fact eat plenty of fried chicken because it was actually healthy. Though it may sound surreal now and did even at the time, it’s a testament to the power of executive self-delusion that this was actually an official campaign undertaken by the company. “With more and more Americans on diets and increasingly health-conscious,” a 2003 press release read, “we thought it was important to get this information to consumers so they can judge for themselves how to make KFC part of their healthy lifestyle.”19

  The commercials were even sillier. In one, a man is seen leaning against a truck, eating a cartoonishly large piece of chicken. “Is that you?” his buddy ask
s. “You look fantastic! What have you been doing?” (Set aside for the moment the fact that no guy would ever say this to another guy.) “Eating chicken,” comes the self-satisfied reply. “The secret’s out!” a peppy voice-over informs us. “One Original Recipe chicken breast has just 11 grams of carbs, and packs 40 grams of protein!” In another, a trim and well-meaning wife reminds her shlubby husband, “Remember how we talked about eating better?” He nods. “Well, it starts here!” she says, whipping out a big bucket of fried chicken! The announcer informs us that KFC chicken has less fat than a Whopper—as if anyone ate five or six Whoppers at a sitting, as the seated slug before us is surely poised to do with his bucket of chicken. (A bucket has twelve pieces in it, which would be lucky to get through three quarters of football.)

  As bad as these commercials were, the rock bottom of the campaign came buried in the language of the press release itself, which was held up to ridicule in Slate. “In a particularly brilliant maneuver, KFC’s press release further suggests that you can make its chicken even more healthy by removing the skin.”20 The company, whose whole existence was based on fried chicken and the eleven secret herbs and spices that lay impressed upon its skin, suggested taking the skin off.

  Taking the skin off!

  If the Colonel hadn’t been dead, this surely would have killed him. It was as if McDonald’s had suggested throwing the burger away and eating the lettuce and tomato between two slices of bread. No, it was worse than that, because McDonald’s had rarely boasted of the distinctive flavor of its burger or for that matter of its taste at all. The ad agency “creatives” who had been put in charge of boosting sales were doing everything in their power to redefine the brand short of replacing Colonel Sanders—and how far off could that be? Reaction was, as always, negative. For the thousandth time, the company was told, as it had been by the Colonel, Pete Harman, the franchisees, the public, and everybody else, that the problem wasn’t the marketing or the slogan or who their latest rival was or that the food was fried rather than grilled. The problem was one of bad faith. It was easy for people outside of KFC’s corporate culture to sense that those inside that culture were apologizing for the product rather than promoting it.

  There were certain realities KFC needed to face. Some people would never eat the chicken because they thought it was nasty and fattening, and the people who did eat it loved it to the tune of $5.3 billion a year in the United States alone. It would never be as cheap as the food at Taco Bell or as easy to make as the frozen pies at Pizza Hut. In any case, the brand anxiety, which continues to vex the chain, only makes it look bad. “If KFC wants me to buy their fried chicken,” wrote Rob Walker in Slate in response to the healthy-chicken fiasco, “the company should try to convince me that its product is actually worthy of the name. Maybe they considered that idea at some point—and decided that selling the stuff as health food just seemed more credible.”21 Ouch!

  More temperate, and more bluntly true, was the sentiment expressed a couple of years later in Advertising Age, the widely read trade paper considered the industry bible.

  The fast-food chain formerly known as Kentucky Fried Chicken seems to have tried everything. It’s changed its name to initials, then back to words, then back to initials. It’s leaned on cheap marketing stunts such as moving the secret recipe, taking Colonel Sanders to the U.N. and, most recently, launching the 500-calorie Double Down sandwich, which replaces bread with chicken breasts. . . . the moves also contributed to a lack of consistent brand positioning and a distraction from KFC’s flagship product—both of which have hurt the chain and allowed competitors to creep in and carve out share.22

  The writer had a point but erred in thinking that the only challenge to KFC was in getting properly on message. There was no way to get on message because the message itself was hopelessly conflicted. And the reason it was conflicted was that Yum!, like PepsiCo, R. J. Reynolds, and Heublein, wanted the product to be something it wasn’t. The proof of this was the way Novak, for all his expressed faith in fried chicken as the Colonel made it, had fallen into the same quagmire as all his less idealistic predecessors. There was no question that he cared deeply about the company’s traditions, about the people who operated the stores, and he felt committed to it to an extent unprecedented in the company’s history. Under Novak’s leadership, the company would veer back and forth between tradition and new products, between seeing KFC as a great success—which it surely was by any imaginable measure—and seeing it as a faltering problem child that wouldn’t go away no matter how many slogans and new products were thrown at it. Yum! meant to honor the Colonel—even going so far as to change his image yet again, his white jacket now replaced with an apron, as a reminder to the world that he was a cook first and a colonel second. Two years later, all that KFC promoters could talk about was its new Kentucky Grilled Chicken, the most successful new product since Extra Crispy, and one that, they hoped, would keep KFC from being such a drag on the bottom line. The response to the Grilled Chicken was warm and resulted in rising sales. But KFC, which was now sold in tripartite storefronts that also offered tacos and pizza, saw sales drop over the next few years as a recession settled in.

  It wasn’t hard to understand. Not everybody was a KFC customer. Even the young and indigent, upon whom the chain traditionally depended for its life roots, had more choices, many of which were cheaper and easier to consume than Kentucky Fried Chicken in any of its forms. KFC would invariably cost more than either of its Yum! sister brands. It would never seem really young, hip, or healthy. This was demonstrated when in 2006 a scandal erupted over secret footage exposed by PETA, the animal rights organization, that captured unspeakable cruelties being inflicted on chickens at plants that supplied KFC. KFC fought back strongly, pointing out that it had some of the strongest animal welfare guidelines in the business, that it had an advisory committee that included Dr. Temple Grandin, the nation’s leading authority on humane animal treatment, and so on. But there wasn’t really any need; the sort of people who paid close attention to PETA or animal rights in general weren’t KFC customers to begin with. Still, there was that potential KFC customer, the one who wasn’t already contributing to the billions in sales the chain boasted, and it was that customer who received all of KFC’s attention and all of KFC’s concern.

  While understandable from a business point of view, this position was very un-Sandersian. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as KFC returned to being called now and again, would always be, no matter how many millions were expended on marketing and advertising, essentially a specialty product, the inescapable product of its origin at a particular time in a particular place by a particular person. For all its twenty-first-century hypercompetitive, ultrarationalized, globally expansive power, it was at the end of the day a product justly represented by an old man who believed in himself, his pressure cooker, and his recipe for fried chicken.

  In the three decades since Harland Sanders, also known as the Colonel, passed away, his image has become more common and less meaningful. In 2006, as part of another image revamp—the one in which the Colonel got an apron—KFC commissioned what it claimed to be the largest mosaic ever built, an 87,500-square-foot Colonel Sanders logo in Area 51 of the Nevada desert, so large that it could, it was claimed, be easily visible from space. The purpose was not to signify to passing extraterrestrials where they might find a good meal, though certainly that was a side benefit. The point was to underscore the vastness and universality of the Colonel’s image, to pay homage not so much to him as to the icon he had become. There was something philosophically revealing about the whole experiment: it was a testament to the gigantism of the whole enterprise and how far it drifted from the reality of any one human being. The mosaic was impossible to discern on the ground; it made sense only from ten thousand feet up. In this way it was the perfect image for what had happened to the Colonel, his fame, and sales of his chicken, all of which grew much larger and meant much less than anyone could have predicted.

  Yet thi
s transition could only have happened after his death. The youthful public, polled in 2010, was woefully ignorant in thinking that Colonel Sanders was not a real person. Had he not been, the contrast between his identity and his image, his violent temper and hot-blooded fits of anger, and the cool, dispassionate, and reckless way he and the company he founded were treated by the corporations for so many years would not be so poignant. The Colonel, whose ambition knew no bounds and whose stubborn, ineradicable sense of self survived even his own apotheosis, did in fact live the American Dream. He transcended his own limitations and the conditions of his birth. But in retrospect, it was his greatest triumph, and his best legacy, that he didn’t transcend them completely. He continues to represent a very real time, place, product, and person, and his icon is hollow without the man behind it.