KFC -STRUGGLE WITH THE NIGERIAN FOOD CULTURE
KFC is an American fast-food brand that serves millions of Americans daily. It is a household name in the fast-food industry. Their menu is mostly made of chicken with different sides, depending on what customers want.
In the year 2010, KFC decided to venture into the Nigerian market — sounds like a great idea, looking at the population of the country (over 180 million people), and the GDP of the country was growing at the time — it made perfect sense that KFC would want to enter into the Nigerian market. However, there was a slight problem -the menu. KFCs menu was fully made up of American foods which are not so bad but they are unafrican. They looked cool for the first few weeks but the consumers got tired real fast because they could not culturally associate with KFC’s menu.
The rule of thumb for when a brand wants to expand beyond its original market si to study the market it is going to, understand their culture and adapt their products and values to the local culture of the market they are looking to expand into.
It took KFC a number of years for them to understand that they need to include local meals on their menu for them to be able to hit it big with the locals. 3 years later, KFC introduced Nigerian foods into their menu and they started experiencing a major upturn in their sales.
AMA defines marketing as the activity of, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings. This definition only holds sway if a brand is not going outside of the culture of a geographical area they plan to operate in. If they do that, then there is no communication -communication gets completed when there is feedback from the receiver to the sender.
Kerin and Hartley also posited that though brands are focused on assessing and satisfying consumer needs -key people, groups, and forces outside of the organization influence its marketing activity. If KFC had learnt of this theory, they probably won’t have served an American menu to a Nigerian audience thereby cutting loss and ramping up profits in the first 3 years of their venture into the Nigerian market.
