Sunday Strategist: Popeyes Knew Exactly What It Was Doing

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- People waited for hours in lines that stretched down the block. The food website Thrillist called it a “tiny miracle” and The New Yorker deemed it “fantastic.” There was no national ad campaign, no celebrity sponsorship, and yet people shared more than 40,000 Instagram posts and hundreds of thousands of tweets. All this for a $3.99 chicken sandwich from Popeyes. 

To understand what’s going on with Popeyes you have to first understand what’s going on with chicken. Chicken is cheaper than beef and theoretically healthier (though not if you fry it, of course). According to the National Chicken Council, the average American eats about 10 pounds more chicken than they did a decade ago. This poultry boon has helped revitalize KFC and turn Chick-fil-A into the third-largest restaurant chain in the U.S., behind only McDonald’s and Starbucks. Last year the average Chick-fil-A restaurant brought in about $4.6 million, more than three times that of the average KFC.

Popeyes is nearly 50 years old but has never had the national presence as big as the top fast-food chains. It has roughly a third fewer stores than KFC, for example. But it does have some truly great fried chicken. In 2017, a California restaurant admitted that the $13 fried chicken entrée it served was actually just take-out that employees had ordered from the Popeyes down the street. Even Anthony Bourdain was a fan.

Thanks to its superior product, the chain has been doing fine in recent years, but Chick-fil-A was beating it at its own game. What did its competition primarily sell? Fried chicken sandwiches. Popeyes needed a sandwich. And it needed a fight.

The Popeyes sandwich soft launched in select locations months ago. It had a brioche bun, a thick layer of pickles, and it came with either mayonnaise or a spicy Cajun sauce. Early customers often tweeted how much better it was than Chick-fil-A. So this week Popeyes publicly unveiled it with a series of tweets that quickly dissolved into a passive-aggressive feud with Chick-fil-A’s Twitter account, which was happy to engage. Wendy’s, which sells several chicken sandwiches, awkwardly tried to get in on the action.

Americans haven’t had a viral food frenzy for a while; the cronut is six years old, the Doritos-Locos taco, seven. Popeyes’ parent company, Restaurant Brands International, also owns Burger King, so in a way they’re also behind the recent Impossible Whopper attention. But soy protein concentrate can only generate so much excitement.

That’s what makes the Popeyes sandwich campaign so smart. The product is cheap, delicious and the accompanying snarky Twitter fight gave people a reason to weigh in with their opinions, all tagged with #popeyessandwich. Popeyes hasn’t revealed this week’s sales figures yet, although given all the ‘Sold Out’ signs posted around the country, Felipe Athayde, Popeyes’ president for the Americas, probably wasn’t exaggerating when he called it “extraordinary.”

Meanwhile, KFC and Chick-fil-A are about to go to war over Chick-fil-A’s new side dish: mac and cheese.

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To contact the editor responsible for this story: Silvia Killingsworth at skillingswo2@bloomberg.net

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