
What's going with fast food restaurants' marketing?
Something going on recently that is big.
And fatty.
And salt-laden.
What you see pictured above is KFC's
Double Down Sandwich. Which features, "two thick and juicy boneless white
meat chicken filets (Original Recipe or Grilled), two pieces of bacon,
two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and Colonel's
Sauce."
For the Original recipe sandwich here's the nutritional breakdown:
Calories: 540
Fat: 32 g
Sodium: 1,380 mg
An odd thing? I got those figures from KFC's own site, and they were sitting right below the sandwiches' promotion. Odd, because if you wanted to find out the nutritional information on any other menu item, you'd click on a button and it would download (every single time) a PDF nutritional fact sheet of all their menu items. Not what I'd call convenient. Now, maybe this is just because it's a new item. Or maybe their playing up just how big and calorific this sandwich is. The latter seems to make sense in light of their
TV ad campaign.
But this is only one player in the "Yes, Bigger, More" fast food sandwich category. There's
Wendy's
Triple with Everything and Cheese (1700 mg sodium, 960 calories, 26 gms
of fat) and the
Burger King Stacker Quad (1770 sodium, 1020 calories, 69
gms of fat).
According to Melanie Warner, who used to cover the food industry
for
The New York Times, "The biggest achievement of the Double Down, though, is the way it's
succeeded in getting attention."
Attention, which, of course, moves more sandwiches, soft drinks, buckets of chicken, etc. when families putter over to the Colonel's.
The ironic thing is, for those of us who remember that far back, KFC used to be named
Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I've always assumed the name change came because the chain didn't want the word "fried" associated with their products and achieve a healthier perspective by the consumer (it was also around the time they introduced grilled items and salads that were made of lettuce, and not macaroni or potatoes).
So is this officially a marketing concept? Lure the dads and lads in with their hankering for the big honking menu offering, then give them something to bring back for the wives and wee ones back at home?
If it works and the numbers go up, then yes, it works.
(Photo by
Mike
Saechang)