Church's launches reimaging campaign, 'irreverent' TV spots

Nation's Restaurant News, May 1, 2000 by Gregg Cebrzynski

ATLANTA -- Church's Chicken launched a reimaging campaign that includes a redesigned logo and packaging and a new restaurant design scheduled to be tested later this year.

The 1,500-unit chain even restored the apostrophe to its name as part of the campaign.

"It's really a soup-to-nuts reimaging," said chief marketing officer Brad Haley. "In addition to the logo, packaging and restaurant redesign, we've redesigned the uniforms, redesigned the Web site. And the benefit of doing it all at once is that it can be completely integrated."

New TV spots from Cliff Freeman & Partners of New York are supporting the program and get "progressively more irreverent" as the campaign progresses, Haley said.

Church's last undertook a reimaging program eight years ago, and "it's basically time to start -- if not past the time to start -- the process," he said. "It's just good business. In our industry, because it's such a highly competitive one, these types of projects tend to generate a bottom-line return."

Systemwide sales for Church's, a division of AFC Enterprises Inc., were $814 million in 1999. Same-store sales increased 1.1 percent for the year.

"A lot of what we're doing should drive that number higher in the future," Haley said. "We obviously would like to have that number higher, but by the same token, we're rolling over many years of same-store sales increases in the 3- to 5-percent range."

The new logo has a rounder shape than that of its predecessor, with a dark blue replacing the softer tone of the old one and contrasting with the familiar yellow and red colors. The star is bigger in the new logo, which also includes the words "Since 1952," the founding date of the chain. The name "Church's" is slanted instead of running straight across the logo and now has an apostrophe, which had been missing in the old logo.

"It was taken out because it made a more symmetrical design," Haley said. "We put it in because it was always there in the beginning, an it should be there."

Church's new TV ads, created by Cliff Freeman & Partners of New York, will air as spot buys in all 55 of the chain's media-supported markets. The ads are "something that's never been done in the fast-food industry," Haley said. "It's not the happy, feel good, smiley people stuff."

The ads show family members doing outrageous things to avoid the bad meals they get at home so that they can chow down on Church's made-from-scratch chicken. In a spot titled "Bad Son," a boy pops a cigarette into his mouth and flicks a lighter, taunting his dad and knowing he'll be sent to his room without dinner. In "Grandpa" the title character shows up naked in the family dining room and smiles when he's ordered to leave.

Each spot carries the tag, "Maybe it's your cooking," which Haley said could become a popular expression among consumers in the way "Where's the beef?" took hold. Cliff Freeman created that tag for Wendy's during the 1980s.

Church's is the second-largest quick-serve chicken chain in the United States based on number of units, but its $15 million in annual ad spending is dwarfed by the $168 million category leader KFC spends. Yet the edgy advertising that Cliff Freeman is known for "really gets noticed far beyond what you'd expect from the media expenditures," Haley said.

The reimaging campaign targets heavy users of the chicken category, Church's traditional target market.

Marketing strategist Al Ries of Roswell, Ga., said Church's reimaged logo is the third such move by a major quick-serve operator -- Pizza Hut and Burger King are the other two -- in what seems to be the latest fad in the quick-serve segment.

"I think there is going through the fast-food business today the notion that we have to bring our visual logotype and visual images up to date," he said. "It's a victory for the art designers and artists and not necessarily for the customer. Assuming that you're not appealing to a different kind of customer, how can a new look help you a lot? A change in strategy is really behind the most successful changes."

Redesigning logos also can send confusing brand messages to consumers, Pies said. They might see the new one in advertising, but the restaurant they visit might retain the old one if the operator balks at the cost of making the change.

"One of the things about branding is the need for consistency," he said. "Figure out what you want to stand for and be consistent in the way you stand for it. I'm not saying that minor changes from time to time, like cleaning up graphics, isn't a good idea, but radical changes that the customer notices I would be against."

As part of its reimaging, Church's is working on prototypes of new restaurants. "We'll be putting them into extensive testing later in the year," Haley said.

Costs of the building redesign have not been determined, according to Haley, who declined to reveal in which markets the new design will be tested.