“Don’t mess with the fries!” It’s a customer mantra turned operational gospel at KFC, and it says everything about how the world’s biggest chicken chain is linking employee experience to customer experience and then linking both to better customer outcomes – from fryer to franchise to frontline. Turns out a soggy chip is more than just a missed detail. In Australia, it was a symptom of a broken loop between staff experience, operational rigour, and what ultimately landed in the customer’s hands. And it’s exactly the kind of problem that spurred the world’s most famous chicken brand to roll out an ambitious global transformation play that first began as a pilot project in 2020. The critical challenge was how to accelerate standardised customer and employee listening across an international, multi-location QSR or food service brand, hardwiring the connection between team member engagement and customer loyalty – while building an experience engine where one fuels the other. At the heart of the play is KFC Listens – a cross-XM initiative built on Qualtrics tech that’s rapidly evolving from post-meal survey fodder into a frontline tool for driving growth. Already live in 70 per cent of KFC restaurants worldwide, it’s reengineering everything from fry cycle protocols in Australia to forgotten condiments in India – all while quietly proving that engaged employees don’t just drive customer satisfaction; they also drive revenue. Welcome to the age of operational empathy…
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Federal budget gets tick for cost-of-living emphasis, but tech, business, retail sectors rue missed opportunities
Industry pundits across the tech, business, retail and services sectors have offered up a mixed bag of opinion on the Federal Budget released last night, applauding the emphasis on cost-of-living relief but criticising the Government for the lack of foresight on further technological advancement and adoption as well as better small business support.
Accor’s ALL Loyalty program surpasses 100 million members, 1 in 3 rooms booked by cardholders
Accor’s global loyalty and rewards program, ALL, has reached a significant milestone, amassing 100 million members worldwide. This achievement marks a doubling of its membership over the past five years, with an additional 11 million members joining in 2024 alone.
Striving for talkability: Singing struts and Sky the Scissor lift take centre stage as Stokes majority-owned Coates bets on bold brand campaign – and jingle – to build new value proposition
Talkability and top-of-funnel brand awareness of its more-than-hire solutions mix is the ambition for Stokes family majority-owned construction company, Coates, with a new integrated campaign and creative idea, ‘Why don’t you just Coates it?’. To do this, the business is adopting what marketing leader, Sheridan Jones admits is a polarising fresh jingle and cast of animated characters to try and land the message. Four years after first debuting a new brand strategy that’s yet to gain the differentiation and brand shift sought for in market, bold creative is the best way of asserting what the 140-year-old, $1.1bn a year business can do for customers today, she tells Mi3.
KFC Australia introduces Kwench beverage range in Wollongong trial
KFC has brought its new Kwench beverage range to Australia, launching with a trial in Wollongong. The new offering includes ten beverages across four distinct categories: Lemonades, Boba Refreshers, Krunch Shakes, and Iced Koffee Krunch.
Microsoft Advertising’s Nicole Prior to helm IAB’s Executive Technology Council
IAB Australia has appointed Nicole Prior, Head of Media and Adtech Solutions APAC at Microsoft Advertising, as the Chair of the the Executive Technology Council (ETC). She succeeds Adele Wieser, Managing Director of Index Exchange, who has completed her two-year term as Chair.
Intuit QuickBooks confronts negative reviews head-on in new campaign from R/GA
Intuit QuickBooks has partnered with R/GA Australia to launch a new campaign that challenges outdated perceptions of its products. Titled ‘QuickBooks Re-Review’, the works seeks to address past negative reviews and demonstrate improvements in the software.
Australian Bananas launches campaign to energise active lifestyles via Thinkerbell
Australian Bananas has released a new campaign promoting bananas as a source of energy for active lifestyles. Developed by Thinkerbell, the initiative includes retail outdoor, online, and social media components, with a focus on turning supermarket aisles and digital feeds yellow.
‘Clients in on it, boatloads of cash, complex, opaque corporate structures’: Principal media arbitrage trading spreads to TV, out of home, audio as holdco’s, retail media pile in; ex-IPG, GroupM, Omnicom execs on fixes
Media agency holding company CEOs are openly acknowledging the importance of arbitrage-based principal trading to their business models – and it’s spreading rapidly out of digital display into TV, audio, digital out of home, connected TVs and beyond. Former UM Global Chief Media Officer Joshua Lowcock, who left the IPG-owned media agency network last year to head up media at US group Quad, is bleak on the distorting market effects of holding companies buying media for themselves and on-selling to advertiser clients with handsome mark-ups – often in ‘bundled’ products which blend a small quota of quality inventory with the tonnage more in low value, low quality ad placements. “Both agencies and clients have built themselves a prison that they can’t get out of,” says Lowcock.And agencies resisting principal models are increasingly disadvantaged – they risk being dragged into “financial engineering” too. Per Lowcock, “somewhere in the myriad of complexity of a holding company, I can tell you it’s occurring and a large armoured vehicle with boatloads of cash is pulling up somewhere and unloading it into a holding company … well, it’s probably more electronically transferred.”Should anyone care that agencies are finding ways to make money that procurement-driven clients are in effect incentivising by refusing to pay fees for service – especially if the media bought and on-sold arguably does the job?”It’s not doing the job because clients are not getting the media that they should be getting to drive the ultimate business performance,” Lowcock argues. “They’re getting the media that drives the agency’s bottom line,” per Lowcock. He describes it as a nutritionist advising a diet of “junk food”, with clients at risk of morbid obesity.Indy shop Media by Mother, headed by former GroupM exec Dave Gaines, says he doesn’t do principal media deals or arbitrage but “it’s surprisingly hard to get people to align on business success outcomes” versus the short-term allure of trading off not paying media agency fees for the hidden costs in mark-ups and tech and data fees typically wrapped into principal media agreements. Moreover, Gaines says retail media is making the situation worse with retailers becoming media owners and seeking their own preferential deals. While traditional media owners complain about principal media trading eating their margin and agency mark-ups making them appear expensive, Gaines says the truth is, “a lot of the big TV networks don’t like to have to deal directly with clients. They’re happy to offload a lot of this media inventory because then they haven’t got to worry about selling it”.Either way, few owners will complain publicly for fear of retribution, i.e. being cut out of group spend, per Nick Manning, non-executive chairman of Media Marketing Compliance and adviser to peak US advertiser body the ANA. Manning sees principal media’s rise leading holdcos to becoming just the same as the walled gardens whose business models they are trying to emulate.”They’re all building AI tools that will do creative production, media distribution and analytics together in one in one box. It will be a black box, and clients won’t be able to tell a lot about what’s going on in there, but it will be an arbitrage-led model.”Quad’s Lowcock says he’s happy to tell any finance, procurement, marketing, legal and internal auditing department “all the answers” as to what goes on and how to fix it – and does just that in this podcast.
‘If you’re not building mental availability in B2B, you’ll miss the 81% buying the first brand that springs to mind’; Adobe and ex-Salesforce marketing chiefs align on dangers of qualified lead reliance, AI or otherwise
According to Adobe APJ VP marketing, Duncan Egan, AI in martech is finally giving B2B marketers the tools to do what B2C marketers have been striving to do for years: Personalisation at scale, creatively and to context, not just stilted linear journeys. The rise of agentic AI to take on burdensome tasks in the marketing supply chain will further free up marketers to find efficiencies that allow them to finally think about what and why they’re pursuing a campaign, not just executing it, he claims. But even as B2B vendor ServiceNow doubles down on its own Adobe martech investments and identifies dozens of new category entry points through AI, its global CMO, Colin Fleming, says it’s not enough to just tailor an interaction to realise demand, or rely on what he calls “FOG, or ‘fact deficient, obfuscating generalities'”. Without concerted brand building, B2B marketers will keep short-changing themselves on the strategic standing they should have in organisations given the hefty 70 per cent of GDP comes from B2B transactions today, he says. If you’re not building mental availability in B2B, you’ll miss out on the 81 per cent of people buying the first brand that springs to mind, Fleming warns.