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For 30 years, KFC has served crispy fried chicken by the bucketload to Chinese customers with an increasing big appetite for western food and the financial means to satiate their cravings.
On Thursday, the country's biggest fast-food brand rolled out what some might fittingly call a "finger lickin' good" deal: its own limited edition smartphone. However, few seem to be answering the call.
Yum China Holding Inc (or Yum China) has joined hands with Huawei, the world's third-largest smartphone maker, to release a KFC-branded Android phone commemorating the 30th anniversary of both companies' existence in China.
KFC opened its first outlet in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1987, becoming the first of a deluge of western fast-food chains that would mushroom in a China that was cautiously opening its borders to foreign businesses.
The same year, Huawei was established in Shenzhen Industrial Park in the country's south, launching operations with a capital of just 21,000 yuan (3,000 US dollars ) and a little over a dozen of employees.
Johnson Huang, General Manager of KFC China, introduces the special edition KFC phone at a Huawei product launch event on Friday July 7, 2017 in Shanghai.
The phone is a special version of Huawei Enjoy 7 Plus model, and is available in one color – very red as one might expect.
The casing is etched with the image of Colonel Sanders on the back, along with the year KFC gained footstep in the market that would later become parent company Yum! Brand, Inc's biggest until it spun off its operations in the country in late 2016.
The model features a 5.5-inch, 720p display and a 12 MP rear camera. It is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 425 processor backed by 3GB of RAM with 32GB of built-in storage, which can be expanded up to 128BG thanks to a microSD card slot under the hood.
The phone also boasts a fingerprint sensor on the back, although it's neither waterproof nor grease-resistant.
Not a first
The unusual team-up, the news of which was indigestible to some tech commentators, is not without precedent, either in China or abroad.
Japanese franchise Hello Kitty got its own limited-edition of sickeningly-cute handsets after partnering with HTC in 2013, and Samsung a year earlier. Marvel superheroes Iron man and Batman both ventured in the tech field, featuring on customized Samsung phones.
The South Korean tech behemoth also released Pirates of the Caribbean-themed devices in June this year.
In 2015, a "Pepsi phone" made a splash on the Chinese market, but the concept did not go down very well with customers in the country, who did not swallow back their brutally honest opinions and flooded the blogosphere with refreshing quips.
A date to remember: 1987 was the year KFC opened its first outlet in China.
Thirty and thriving
The recent partnership represents KFC's latest foray to keep up with a changing China.
The country's continual evolution, whether of its people's tastes or technological state, has been the constant that dictates the fast food chain's marketing strategies.
KFC is looking to stay relevant to contemporary times, all the while staying true to the nostalgic image through which the older generation sees the fast-food chain that gave the Chinese their first bite of western food.
After 30 years of business in China, KFC has reached the levels of maturity allowing it to understand what whets the appetite of its customers, but is still youthful enough to tap its way to the hearts and e-wallets of mobile-obsessed millennials.
The new handset comes with a pre-installed KFC application, which first debuted in 2015, and 100,000 free “K Dollars” – an in-app digital currency.
The company is also introducing K-music application, a digitized jukebox that allows customers to customize a playlist and blast songs of their choice through the speakers of any of KFC's 5,000-plus outlets around the country.
KFC's online presence and digital strategy have at once benefitted from and capitalized on China's intimate attachment to electronic devices, which has popularized mobile payments and e-transactions and pushed the country into a transition to a cashless society.
In the second fiscal quarter of 2017, mobile payments exceeded 40 percent of Yum China's sales, while delivery accounted for 13 percent of its sales during the same period.
Yum China owns KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell in the country.
KFC smartphone: Colonel Sanders is calling.
The technology craze that has swept across the country opened marketing doors for the fast food chain, which has scrambled to make use of China's newest obsessions: robots and artificial intelligence (AI).
Late last year, KFC unveiled its first "smart restaurant" in Beijing which makes use of face-recognition technology to suggest items from the menu based on the customer's age, gender and the mood they were in when ordering.
The same year, the company partnered with Chinese digital agency Trio Isobar to lift the curtains on Dumi, a robot waiter that takes orders using voice-recognition technology at a store in Shanghai.
The two also collaborated to release Onmyoji, a mobile game styled after Pokemon Go, whose geolocation features encourage players in eight Chinese cities to explore the "outside world" by leaving their houses to … KFC restaurants.
Ups and downs and more downs
When KFC opened its first branch in the country, China, which had been craving for western-style food concoctions, was yet to take to a new diet.
But the US brand had its advantage as fried chicken was not an alien concept to Chinese people's taste buds – as opposed to pizzas and burgers – allowing KFC to become a new favorite in its new market.
Its presence gained momentum thanks to a glocalization strategy, according to which KFC adapted to local flavors, and included a variety of items such as pork chops with rice, porridge and youtiao (Chinese oil sticks) to its menu in the country.
Yet the journey was not without speed bumps, as the company was embroiled in food safety scandals and hit hard by the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and sporadic bird flu outbreaks.
In 2012, KFC found itself in boiling hot waters after being accused of using chicken that were pumped with outrageous amounts of antibiotics, a crisis that sent the sales of the company in a freefall, which swiftly dropped 40 percent.
A year later, a CCTV report found that ice cubes in certain KFC eateries contained bacteria 12 times higher than water samples taken from toilets bowls, dealing another blow to the fast-food chain as it was catching its breath.
One year on, in 2014, an exposé about one of KFC's suppliers using tainted and expired meat tarnished yet again its image.
KFC has over 5,000 outlets in China.
Despite the repeated crises, KFC remains a juggernaut in the food and beverage sector in China, with Colonel Sanders luring hungry customers with a lip-smacking chicken leg in one hand and as of Thursday a bright red device in the other – although by the looks of it, colonel's call on the KFC phone is going unanswered.
By 2:30 p.m. local time, of the 5,000 units on sale exclusively in China, only 63 were snatched, according to figures on Huawei's official account on online retailing platform T-mall.
(CGTN)
