Preparing to Go National—with Cows
By the early 1990s, as we approached five hundred restaurants across the country, our corporate marketing efforts were still focused toward individual restaurants and markets. We began asking ourselves, “At what point do we go beyond supporting just the Operators and markets and start to position Chick-fil-A as a regional and then a national brand?”
The answer, we decided, was when we had opened restaurants in thirty-five states, and we could see that number by the mid-1990s. We were not yet to the West Coast, but we were heavily invested in Texas and had penetrated deeper into the Southwest. We were also moving into the Midwest and up the East Coast with freestanding restaurants.
As we envisioned regional and national marketing, we knew we would never be able to invest enough money in advertising to create a linear relationship between the investment and chain-wide sales. That would have been a misguided transactional focus. We had to build the brand by creating a unique personality for Chick-fil-A that would help build top-of-mind awareness.
For nineteen years, Chick-fil-A was part of a larger destination, the mall. From a marketing perspective, opening freestanding restaurants presented an entirely new challenge. With the first street store in 1986, the issue of brand awareness and what the brand stood for leapfrogged to the forefront. While remaining sensitive to helping Operators drive sales, we would be investing in the brand with a longer-term perspective. Being part of an organization going through that marketing transition was fun and occasionally challenging for all of us, as we navigated the tension between building short-term sales and building a brand of choice.
Our mall-focused advertising agency had done a good job for us in retail merchandising, creating effective in-store graphics and menu boards. When we moved our marketing efforts outside the restaurants to billboards and radio, however, we suspected the work was not memorable enough. We sought ways to position our advertising to present Chick-fil-A as a destination brand, not just a sandwich. We knew it wasn’t by showing pictures of food. Throughout the history of Chick-fil-A, a picture of the sandwich has never done it justice. It’s a piece of chicken on a bun. There’s no emotional connection there—nothing compelling about that.
I was a teenager in 1967 when McDonald’s introduced one of its first national television campaigns with kids singing, “McDonald’s is our kind of place. It’s such a happy place!” Though a voice-over later in the ad would talk briefly about the food, the primary visual was happy children and their parents. Four years later Needham, Harper & Steers (an agency I interviewed with after grad school) won the account from D’Arcy MacManus with the still-famous tagline, “You deserve a break today.” That line would return in 1981, my first year at Chick-fil-A. And though “two all-beef patties . . .” pitched the best-known fast-food hamburger, the biggest chain in the world was trying to grow its brand around the experience.
When we first put our product on billboards, ours was the only chicken sandwich in the market, and that image still wasn’t compelling. When others introduced chicken sandwiches, a picture of ours didn’t look that much different from theirs. You could put a Chick-fil-A logo on a billboard showing the McDonald’s chicken sandwich, and most people wouldn’t see a difference. I’m not sure any of you would either. We’re pretty sure McDonald’s designed it that way, including the two pickles.
In addition to focusing on the food, our agency in the early 1990s was delivering lines that got lost in the crowd. Who remembers, “Wake up, your biscuits are ready”? Again, they did wonderful work in our mall restaurants, but we were concerned the creativity for brand building wasn’t taking us where we wanted to go. Was it too fast-food conventional?
When we had enough freestanding restaurants in a handful of cities to move more significantly into traditional media advertising, we decided to enter into an aggressive advertising test. We engaged marketing consultant Alf Nucifora in 1993 to help us envision our advertising and creative future, then help us design an appropriate marketing infrastructure. Alf, who had served as president of two major advertising agencies, led us through a three-day marketing meeting where we created the “Market 1999 Model.” We built a simulation for Atlanta that assumed one hundred freestanding restaurants and ten more in malls. Then we projected similar per-capita store penetration in Birmingham, Alabama, and Columbia, South Carolina, and created marketing and advertising strategies for those three cities based on those numbers.
To test our plan and our capacity to pull it off, we actually rolled out two-year marketing and advertising campaigns in those cities—investing as much money in marketing in 1993 as we would if we had the projected market penetration of 1999. So that the Operators wouldn’t have to shoulder a dramatic increase, the company paid for all marketing expenses above 1.5 percent of 1993 sales for those three markets. A few months of experience confirmed we didn’t have the level of creativity we needed to establish Chick-fil-A as a major player in the quick-serve environment.
One morning about that time, Dan Cathy boiled down the issue we were all struggling with: breakthrough creative. He asked David Salyers and advertising manager Greg Ingram, “Why don’t we have better advertising? Nobody is talking about our advertising.” He got no argument from us.
At this stage in Chick-fil-A’s history, marketing was still not on an equal strategic footing with our operational focus. David’s response cut to the chase: “If we want great creative, it’s time to get a top-notch creative agency” (code for, “Show me the money!”).
“You find the agency,” Dan said. “We’ll find the money.”
A Different Kind of Search
Typically a company seeking an advertising agency will distribute a request for proposal (RFP) or even post an RFP on its website, inviting agencies to present portfolios and credentials. Then the company will select a group from those agencies to develop and present a pitch, which can become anything from a low-key meeting around a conference table to a parade with a marching band.
We wanted to avoid a circus atmosphere and focus instead on attributes particularly important to us at Chick-fil-A. So, instead of sending out a blanket RFP, David and Greg began to research advertising agencies across the nation who would potentially fit our culture. Like most marketing professionals, David and Greg maintained a file of creative ideas they liked and a list of agencies whose work they admired. They created a preliminary list of agencies from those files and their own experiences. List in hand, they began asking questions of other marketing leaders, like Sergio Zyman, former chief marketing officer at the Coca-Cola company. “At that point,” Greg recalled, “we were making sure we hadn’t left off our list any agencies we should be considering.”
David and Greg narrowed their list to ten agencies from whom they sought more detailed information and samples of their work, asking them to concentrate their samples on outdoor and radio advertising. From these proposals, they narrowed their list of candidates to three agencies, including the Richards Group in Dallas, Texas.
Here is where we deviated from standard operating procedures in the advertising business. Rather than ask our top three agency candidates to create a generic pitch for Chick-fil-A, we gave them a specific assignment—to develop three-dimensional billboards (relatively new technology at the time) and a series of radio spots, so we could compare apples to apples. Our annual advertising budget was tiny, and we knew it would remain small for years to come, so the agency we selected would have to make a big impression with every creative execution. We had already determined that outdoor advertising gave us the best opportunity we could afford, and that 3-D billboards would help us create the greatest point of difference. We also believed we could make an impact with radio, given strong creative.
We invited them to work with us as if we were already doing business together. “Don’t try to read our minds and figure out what we want,” we said. “Ask questions; do your homework.” And we paid them for their work—not a lot, but enough so they understood that we respected their thinking and we were willing to put some skin in the game. During a period of several weeks, the agencies examined the quick-service restaurant industry, talked with our customers in focus groups and one-on-one, interviewed our best Operators, observed our restaurants from both sides of the counter, and even attended our Operators seminar. We wanted them to have all the information they needed to make their best presentation.
At that point in our relationship, we were not making permanent decisions about the specific direction of our advertising. We were just trying to select an agency—evaluating the talent and their commitment. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, calls it “getting the right people on the bus.” After you get the right people on the bus, then you can decide where to go.
Truett liked to say when we selected Operators, the decision is “for life.” We were seeking the same kind of potential relationship with our new advertising agency. That kind of commitment is rare in the advertising world, where frequent turnover is typical, even at the highest levels of management. Most large agencies are subsidiaries of publicly held companies, so management focuses on short-term profitability, revenue streams from every client, and hours billed. It’s a dog-eat-dog world where people pass continually through agencies in order to get years on their résumé so they can land a better job somewhere else. If somebody stays in a job more than three years, that’s a long time. Each of those personnel changes creates a disadvantage for the client.
I also believe that clients deserve the advertising they get. David and Greg visited our three finalists and sought to evaluate their competence, their character, and the chemistry between the agencies and Chick-fil-A. They wanted to understand who was listening to us and who had their own agenda.
In the many hours they spent with the Richards Group, David and Greg saw no evidence of a short-term culture. In fact, they saw the opposite. Like Truett, Stan Richards hired people for a long-term career, and the people he hired seldom left. The Richards Group was seventeen years old at the time, and the average tenure of its creative group heads was almost nine years. Stan called his agency “The Peaceable Kingdom,” after a famous nineteenth-century painting inspired by Isaiah 11 of the lion and the lamb, the bear and the ox, the leopard and the child lying down together peacefully. “We’ve made it our mission to tear down walls,” Stan said.
David recalled, “The thing that made the difference was the chemistry we felt. All the creative work was good from all the agencies, but the Richards Group stood out in other ways. In the advertising business there can be a lot of arrogance. Not with them. We saw character in Stan Richards. Real integrity. Real devotion to the work. It didn’t seem to be about the money to him—not about the dollar signs. He was all about the work! Also, it was important to us that they were privately held—an independent company like Chick-fil-A. And it was interesting to note that, like Truett, Stan Richards was a guy who would never ‘retire.’”
As part of the discovery process, David wanted to learn from each of the three final candidate agencies what they expected of Chick-fil-A. We didn’t have the leverage of a lot of money, so we needed the leverage of being a great client that our agency would love doing work for. “We know we’ll never be your biggest client,” he told each of them, “but we want to know what we need to do to be your best client.”
The question struck a chord with Stan, and he paused before answering. I think he and his team cared about the question because it reflected the kind of commitment they made to their clients. We would be a great client “by respecting the work,” he said. “By respecting the people who do the work and never deviating from that. That’s not to say that everything we show will be a great idea. We may veer off course and miss on an idea, and you can be quick to point that out. But always be respectful. Make it a relationship between partners working hard together to get the right answer.”
That exchange became an important part of “the story” of the relationship between the two companies. For more than twenty years, Stan and David told it fondly and often. After we determined the Richards Group would be our agency, David made another decision that became woven into the fabric of our story. As our team got to know the Richards Group, we became acquainted with their occasional “stairwell meetings,” which were an important cultural phenomenon there. The company offices filled four floors of a high-rise in Dallas, and Stan didn’t want the geography to isolate people from one another. The center of the building was designed like a four-story atrium with balconies all the way around each floor and stairways installed to connect them. Stan encouraged everyone to avoid using the elevator within the agency, and you could see the result as soon as you stepped inside, as people constantly moved up and down the staircases, stopping to talk or meet at the balcony rail. You could feel an almost pulsating energy in the motion of the place.
Stan also used the stairwell and balconies to hold impromptu meetings of the agency for special announcements or good news.
Unbeknownst to Stan, David worked behind the scenes with an assistant at the Richards Group to call a stairwell meeting. Then he showed up at the building with Chick-fil-A lunch for three hundred people and the good news of an exciting new relationship. To the entire staff in their stairwell, David made the same pledge he had made earlier to Stan: “We may not be your biggest client, but we promise to strive to be your favorite client.”
That’s all we could offer at the time. We felt very small compared with our competitors and our new agency’s other clients. Years later Stan said, “Your promise at that point to be our favorite and best client was absolutely accurate throughout the entire relationship.”
The decision to choose the Richards Group for our business was not based entirely on the creative we saw in their initial pitch. The decisive point for us was, who was going to be working on our account? Stan sat across the table from us and said he would personally see everything—every piece of creative related to Chick-fil-A. That was huge. Here was the founder and CEO of the largest privately held advertising agency in the world, committing to look at every piece of creative before his team presented it to us. He kept that promise. He also promised little turnover on the agency account management and creative team leadership (we worked with the same two creative leaders for more than a decade). It was no surprise to us in 2009 to learn that the Richards Group had been voted “Best Place to Work” in the Dallas–Fort Worth area by Dallas Morning News.
When David Salyers talked about the selection process, he was reminded of a lesson he learned when he joined Chick-fil-A. “I learned to ask whether my career would be about extracting value from my employer or adding value,” he said. “With Stan Richards it seemed to be about the same issue. While some advertising agencies were about extracting value, he was about adding value. And when you continually add value to the business, you will stand out from the crowd and be recognized for that.”
This might be a good place to note my role in this crucial selection. I served as counselor and cheerleader for David and Greg, but I intentionally stayed out of the process until they had done their work and were ready to recommend the Richards Group. I never had any second thoughts about this, because I knew David and Greg would be giving daily leadership to this important part of our brand, and they had to live with the results and the relationships, potentially for a long time. In short, I tried to empower them the way Truett empowered me, because I trusted their judgment. How good their judgment was!
From the perspective of the Richards Group, Stan saw something exciting in Chick-fil-A. He had experienced our product in our restaurants many times, and he was intrigued by the possibilities—curious about not only what Chick-fil-A was, but what Chick-fil-A could become. Stan and the Richards Group principal Brad Todd believed Chick-fil-A had built the foundational footing to be a really great brand (we agreed!), and they wanted to be a part of that. Brad had worked previously in brand management at Frito-Lay, so his roots were in building great brands. He and Stan believed—confidently—that the power of the Richards Group team and ours combined would be much greater than the two of us working separately. We were looking for much more than an advertising agency. We needed a brand-building partner that could add value to Chick-fil-A, and we found it in the Richards Group.
It’s possible you saw Stan Richards’s work before you ever tasted your first Chick-fil-A sandwich. Back in 1968, through a client in Dallas, Stan was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to design advertisements for an unconventional Western movie, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Writer William Goldman liked Stan’s ads, and when the production team in Hollywood had trouble designing the movie’s opening title credits, he called Stan and asked him to give it a shot. Stan created the memorable title sequence—a flickering, sepia-toned, silent film reenactment of the Hole in the Wall Gang holding up a train, with credits appearing alongside—for the 1970 Paul Newman–Robert Redford movie, winner of four Academy Awards.
Stan never designed another movie credit sequence, but the Richards Group has produced incredibly creative work for clients like the Home Depot, Orkin, Sotheby’s, Corona, Ram trucks, Fiat, and dozens more. But there is one story that does a better job of introducing the Richards Group than a long list of clients.
If I were to say the words Motel 6, I’m guessing the first thought in your mind would be Tom Bodett or maybe, We’ll leave the light on for you. I know that because research has shown that 95 percent of Americans respond with one of those phrases when the brand is mentioned.
The Motel 6 story is one of powerful brand building with a singularly great idea, and it is one of the reasons we selected the Richards Group as our agency. Motel 6 was nearly bankrupt when the company asked the Richards Group for help. “We started with our branding process,” Stan recalled, “which includes a lot of research. In this case, a lot of qualitative research.”
The Richards Group went into the community and interviewed dozens of people, identified those who had stayed at Motel 6 (without tipping them off as to their client), and invited twelve of those to participate in a panel discussion.
“We were sitting behind the glass watching the interaction,” Stan said, “and our account planner was at the table with these twelve people. He asked where they stayed when they were on the road, and they all said something other than Motel 6. So he went around again, asking where else they stayed, and they did it again. The third time around he began to panic, thinking he might have misrecruited the group, and finally somebody said, ‘Well, if it’s late at night I might stop at Motel 6, and I end up saving enough money to buy a tank of gas.’ Then somebody else at the table said, ‘I do the same thing and save enough to bring a gift home to my grandkids.’”
“The epiphany to us behind the glass,” Stan continued, “is that they didn’t admit to staying at Motel 6 because they didn’t want to appear poor or cheap. But as soon as somebody else talked about it in terms of the money they saved—and we all know frugality is a good thing, while being cheap is not—others spoke up.”
That idea would become the heart of the campaign. But first Stan showed his true colors by recommending that Motel 6 not advertise at all—at least not right away. “That’s a hard thing for an ad agency to say,” he said, “but the product was awful. To watch TV, you had to put in quarters. If you wanted to make a phone call, you had to go down the hall. We knew if we advertised and people came, they would find it woefully deficient, and they would never come back. So we waited until they upgraded the properties regionally before rolling out advertising in the same areas.”
Three decades later, the key aspects of the campaign remain unchanged—a great creative idea on one dominant medium. The campaign was and is almost entirely radio based, very inexpensive compared with other media. The spots change, but the attitude remains the same. They’re always entertaining, always charming, and there’s always a smile in that little piece of communication. For a miniscule budget, the campaign experiences huge recall.
The Richards Group brought that same commitment to creativity for Chick-fil-A. In their proposal to earn the Chick-fil-A account, TRG wrote:
We believe that all our advertising should be endearing. Rewarding. Relevant.
Our aim, when done, is to have the consumer respond:
“I like what you said.”
“I like the way you said it.” “I like you.”
“Let’s do business.”
The foundation for the Cow campaign began to emerge in our discussions with the Richards Group during the selection process and in their research to develop their pitch. At that time, TRG’s team sought to identify what they called “the most persuasive idea,” a concept they utilized with each advertising execution. In the case of Chick-fil-A as a prospective client, they were looking for the single idea around which to build a campaign. The most persuasive idea:
• Capitalizes on the one advantage that no competitor can match.
• Captures the brand character and the culture of Chick-fil-A.
• Is unique to Chick-fil-A.
• Is endearing.
• Is memorable.
Through their research and interviews with Chick-fil-A customers, TRG evaluated several possible ideas: Chick-fil-A has the highest customer satisfaction of any fast-food restaurant, gives customers a tasty alternative to hamburgers, prepares everything fresh in the store daily, and tastes better because of its unique ingredients and seasonings.
Each of these ideas had an “operational excellence” bias, which was logical since Chick-fil-A had built the brand to that point relying almost entirely on operational excellence. Internally, TRG’s team believed in Chick-fil-A as a healthy alternative to fast-food hamburgers. They focused on the freshness of the ingredients and the healthy nature of chicken in addition to the taste of the food. The Chick-fil-A marketing group believed our preparation method and freshness were key to distinguishing us from our competitors. And when the creative team from Richards spent time in our restaurants, they agreed. They were surprised to find that virtually everything we used was fresh, not frozen. So we started locking in on that and ran those types of ads by focus groups. The reaction we repeatedly heard from customers was, “We don’t care how you make it; we just like the way it tastes.” So, despite our bias that operational excellence was our strongest selling point, customers directed us away from that message.
The power of the voice of the customer proved itself time after time. Customers felt a certain ownership of the brand, and they told us what they wanted from it.
A dilemma remained, however: how to convince people who had not tasted Chick-fil-A that our products tasted great. All restaurants claimed that their products tasted better, so consumers harbored skepticism regarding that claim. That’s when Brad Todd suggested a concept that became the single most persuasive idea: Chick-fil-A invented the chicken sandwich. The idea conveyed integrity, authenticity, and originality. It worked at multiple levels to establish Chick-fil-A as the chicken sandwich expert and, at the same time, subtly delivered a message of freshness and quality. Brad, with writer Doug Rucker’s help, then turned the concept into a tagline that delivered the message with a smile:
Chick-fil-A
We Didn’t Invent the Chicken.
Just the Chicken Sandwich.
Customers read the line and told us exactly what we hoped to hear: that if we were the inventor of the chicken sandwich, we must know a lot about it, we must be on the cutting edge, and everything else must be an imitation. And if we invented the chicken sandwich, ours must taste good. They ascribed to us the attributes we wanted under an umbrella concept of a single line, the most persuasive idea.
The Creation of “Eat Mor Chikin”
In their presentation to earn our business, the Richards team presented a dozen billboard ideas, four of them three-dimensional billboards, most of them playing off the “inventor” concept, and not a single product photo. The funniest was a giant 3-D rubber chicken on a forty-eight-foot-wide billboard with the line, “If it’s not Chick-fil-A, it’s a joke.” We decided to make that our first 3-D execution and put it up on the main north-south artery in Dallas, Texas. Initially only the rubber chicken went up. No text or logo. Tens of thousands of people drove past, chuckled, and wondered what was going on. The volume of media chatter rose. Then we added the text and logo, and Dallas loved it so much that area Chick-fil-A Operators had T-shirts printed with the artwork and the line. They sold out. We knew we had a hit.
The next 3-D execution came in Atlanta. Two cars appeared to be driving through a billboard, and the headline promoted the double drive-thru at the adjacent restaurant. It wasn’t right on message with the “inventor” idea, but with great visibility from Interstate 75, it, too, generated conversation. Operator Jason Bilotti, whose restaurant was underneath the sign, remembers seeing customers standing in the parking lot taking pictures of the board. Then, almost as if responding to Dan Cathy’s earlier concern that nobody was talking about our advertising, the president of the Coca-Cola Company sent Dan a note congratulating him on the double drive-thru sign. Another city was buzzing about a single Chick-fil-A board.
What followed was a series of executions that led to the creation of the Chick-fil-A Cows. The Richards Group created a standard, two-dimensional board with a photo of a Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich and the line, “Don’t Have a Cow!” About the same time, David Ring, the Richard Group’s art director for Chick-fil-A, watched a crew on a catwalk with a ladder painting a billboard, and he began to wonder if the catwalk might somehow be used in conjunction with a three-dimensional presentation. That led to the 3-D execution of an empty ladder on the catwalk, an almost completed painting of a Chick-fil-A sandwich, and the hand-scrawled message on the board in black paint, “Boss, got hungry, back soon.” A few weeks later David was on site when workers were taking down the rubber chicken from where it had debuted in Dallas.
Thinking about Don’t Have a Cow, David realized cows wouldn’t want you to “have a cow.” Since Chick-fil-A doesn’t serve beef, David surmised cows would be interested in what’s going on there. And cows might find their own way up to that catwalk where the men had been working, and even find their paintbrush and use their ladder. (Creative types make these mental leaps!)
“You put all those things together,” David recalled, “a cow, the ladder, a paintbrush, Don’t Have a Cow, and it all leads to one thing. I don’t know if anything else would have fit the bill.”
David was at his desk early one morning, drawing, when all the pieces came together. He sketched a billboard with two cows on the catwalk, one sitting on the back of the other, painting Eat Mor Chickin, almost exactly as you’ve seen it a million times. “It struck me as kind of funny,” David said, “but I wasn’t sure what to do with it or where it fit into the campaign, which focused on the line, We Didn’t Invent the Chicken, Just the Chicken Sandwich.” David walked over and showed the sketch to Stan, who agreed that it “seemed to contain the seed of a big idea.” Stan, too, was concerned that the idea and the line did not follow the current campaign. “But sometimes,” Stan said, “if it’s a strong enough idea, you adapt.”
TRG’s creative team was not scheduled to present ideas to Chick-fil-A, but they were so excited about this one, they called and told us they were sending some ideas overnight for us to look at. They explained that one of the lines didn’t precisely follow strategy, but they wanted us to see it anyway. The next morning Greg Ingram received the package and, while I was out of my office, he laid six billboard executions facedown on my desk. I returned later and turned them up one by one.
Each of the lines followed the established strategy and played off the “inventor” idea. Then I turned over the drawing of the cows painting Eat Mor Chickin, and I almost fell out of my chair laughing. Greg heard me and came in, and we knew instantly that we would have to try this one. It was too good. We had no idea that morning that the Cows would become a bigger strategy idea, propelling a campaign to places we never imagined. Later we would realize it was on point, a creative innovation from the chicken sandwich innovator. A nonburger message in a burger world.
The Cow Font
Stan Richards was absolutely committed to creating masterful typography, refusing to allow this dying art to be overlooked at his agency. In his book The Peaceable Kingdom, Stan recalled his experience at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he learned “how to create a letter form, starting with pencil, and eventually, after an excruciatingly detailed process, finishing it with a crow quill pen. Everything had to be done by hand, and everything had to be perfect.” Stan’s commitment to lettering was particularly important to the Cow campaign, which relied so heavily on the “look” of the words.
“The Cow type, when you think about it, is the dominant visual,” said David Ring, who created the first Eat Mor Chickin board. “So the same care that would go into hiring an illustrator or a photographer has to go into creating each headline. When the Cows misspell words, they try to be as phonetic as possible, but then they have to pay a lot of attention to how they space the letters. The letters within each word need to be a little closer together than usual, and the spaces between words a little wider than usual so people can read them as they drive past. Then, of course, Cows can’t paint letters much better than a three-year-old, so they’re not going to be consistent with their spacing.”
The first billboard with the Cows spelled chickin with a c in the middle, but today, it is spelled chikin. So where did the c go?
When the Cows came inside Chick-fil-A restaurants in 1996 with their message of self-preservation, they obviously couldn’t bring a forty-eight-foot-wide billboard into restaurants. They had to carry sandwich boards, which are vertical. When they painted Eat Mor Chickin on the vertical sign, that extra c forced them to squeeze the word chickin onto the board. They were clever enough to realize that if they dropped that middle c, they could make the remaining letters a little bigger and easier to read. Besides all that, Cows can’t spell! The middle c never came back.
The Cows’ Public Debut
The world was coming to Atlanta in 1996 for the Olympic Games, and we wanted them to know about Chick-fil-A. So in 1995, we signed a two-year lease on a billboard between the airport and downtown, on the right as you head into the city, and gave the Cows their world debut. For now it would be the only board we had in Atlanta with the new Cow creative. Greg Ingram remembers coming to work in a down mood one morning that week. The telephone rang, and the guy told Greg, “Hey, I’m sitting in traffic on the interstate trying to get to work, and I’m looking at the funniest billboard I’ve ever seen! You’ve totally made my day. I just wanted to tell you.” Our first Eat Mor Chikin board had led to our first call, and it made Greg’s day. And that was just the beginning. The media buzz was immediate and intense.
Then a week or so after the first board went up, Truett called and asked me to come to his office. Now, Truett almost never called me to his office, so I was thinking, Oh, boy, this might not be good.
When I got there, another man was in the office, and Truett introduced him to me as the executive director of the Georgia Cattlemen’s Association. (What might be on his mind?) Truett was a member of the association; he raised black Angus cattle on the 260-acre farm.
We all sat down, and Truett turned to me and said, “Steve, he’s concerned about our new billboard, me being a member of the Georgia Cattlemen’s Association . . . what should we tell him?”
I’d known Truett long enough to know that he hadn’t “given away” his position on this, and he had no intention of telling me to take it down. The ad wasn’t even a campaign yet—just a single board—but it had already struck a chord.
So I said to Truett’s guest, “Well, really, it’s just a joke. Cows can’t spell, and they’re concerned about their own preservation. I can’t help that. The reality is that even though Truett raises cattle, his livelihood is the chicken business. My job is to help him sell a lot of it. And those renegade cows happen to be right up our alley, so all I can tell you is, based on the way people are responding to them, it looks like they might be around for a while.”
Then Truett looked at him with a little smirk that he might have been trying to politely hide and said, “Well, yeah, I think Steve’s probably right.”
We both knew we were onto something big.
Expanding the Cows’ Reach
We were so excited about the Cows and Eat Mor Chikin that we wanted to get them up in more markets immediately. I went to Jimmy Collins and said, “We’ve finally broken through with something that’s going to have legs, if you’ll pardon the pun. But we need to get it up in more markets to get a true sense of its potential.”
At the time, our top twenty markets represented two-thirds of sales throughout the chain, and all of them had at least one freestanding restaurant. Jimmy understood our strategy was about building the brand by creating word of mouth, not telling folks where to turn. To get that many boards up, the company would have to subsidize the markets four hundred thousand dollars above their 1.5 percent (of sales) media contribution. That would give us enough to pay for fabrication of the Cows and keep them up for ninety days. If the markets’ Operators liked the results, they would be asked to keep the Cows’ messages up for at least two years if we made this investment. Jimmy didn’t hesitate. He gave his full support.
Soon after we installed a 3-D board in Chattanooga, some teenagers stole the set of Cows. Local media turned it into a funny news story, then CNN picked it up and went international with it. Don Perry, Chick-fil-A vice president for public relations, put out a press release saying we would not press charges if the Cows were returned safely. They were, and we wound up getting more media coverage than we ever could have imagined. Many years later, I was playing golf with a friend in Florida, and one of his buddies confessed to knowing one of the two teenagers who “stole” the Cows. I gave him a high five, a free Chick-fil-A sandwich card, and a huge thank you. “He helped launch our campaign!” I said.
Later we conducted our annual research to find out what people had seen and what they remembered from Chick-fil-A advertising. At the time, we had about thirty billboards around Atlanta, all of them showing food, and we had the one Eat Mor Chikin billboard. The research showed the single Cow billboard was more memorable than all the other boards combined. It had 80 percent recall! People remembered the characters that made them laugh, and because of the iconic nature of the Cows, they remembered Chick-fil-A.
The Eat Mor Chikin board, even though we had one board up in each of twenty markets, was still a single outdoor execution, just like the rubber chicken and the double drive-thru. We began to wonder if the Eat Mor Chikin moment might have the potential for becoming a movement. David Salyers, Greg Ingram, and I met with Stan Richards and Brad Todd and talked about the possibility of the Cows becoming a campaign. “What a great way to take friendly potshots at the burger guys,” we said, “almost without people knowing we’re doing it.” Using the Cows would also allow us to get away from the food industry’s preoccupation with food photography. Stan asked us to give his group three months to develop ideas for a campaign built around the Cows.
Not everybody found the Cows funny. Over the years, both Truett and I would receive letters from teachers complaining about the Cows misspelling words, and I responded with a standard letter: “We’re sorry, but Cows can’t spell. It’s just a joke. Maybe you could use it as an object lesson to help kids learn the right way to spell. Thanks for what you do!”
The Power and Responsibility of an Icon
How many times have you experienced this: you’re watching television and see a commercial you really like, but someone asks you two minutes later who the advertisement was for, and you can’t remember?
With an icon, that doesn’t happen. As soon as you see a duck, a gecko, a pink toy bunny—or a Cow—you know the sponsor. We never told, or even expected, the Richards Group to create an icon for Chick-fil-A, but when we discovered they had, we latched onto it.
We approached the Cows’ celebrity status with the perspective of a talent agent. A celebrity has to be in the limelight all the time to remain relevant. An actor from twenty years ago isn’t as interesting as one from a movie you saw last week. For this campaign to work, we had to use the Cows everywhere, not just on a billboard and an occasional television spot. The Cows had to become so fully integrated in their campaign of self-preservation that it was not surprising to see them fall out of the rafters at the Chick-fil-A Bowl. It was not surprising that a Cow would stick his sign in your face on a CBS or ESPN broadcast. If they didn’t show up everywhere, from the top of the marketing pyramid to the bottom, they would not be an icon. They had to be relentless.
Many valuable, iconic campaigns have been abandoned, to the detriment of their owners. Tony the Tiger and the Pillsbury Dough Boy were both cast aside only to be resurrected years later. Even the Green Giant, named by Ad Age the third-most recognizable ad icon of the twentieth century,7 left television for years. He was brought back in late 2016 with a backstory explaining that he had been away creating new, healthier products. That’s the power of an icon.
The marketing department and Chick-fil-A Operators worked like Hollywood agents to keep the Cows out front, “booking” them for appearances at local events or on media. Why else would a child, teenager or adult want their photo taken with a Cow? Cows have to be cool. They need their icon status to create opportunities to propagate their message and their humor. We invested in the Cows to make them a personality, then we leveraged their celebrity status to take us from where we were to where we wanted to be. A lot of marketing departments at a lot of companies around the country would love to have an icon with the personality and star power of the Chick-fil-A Cows. We were blessed and we knew it.
We also stayed in our lane with regard to the creative aspect of the campaign. In twenty years working with the Richards Group, neither I nor anyone else in the Chick-fil-A marketing department suggested a punch line for an ad. That was the Richards Group creative team’s job, and they were much better at it than we were. Plus, we didn’t want to create a strategic struggle on whose idea was better. If we thought an idea they presented didn’t work or could be improved, we asked them to try again.
Three Great Advertising Lessons
In my opinion, three virtues apply to any advertising that is truly brand building.
The first is engaging. It can’t be missed. It grabs your attention. Immediately, one knows that’s X, Y, or Z’s brand. I know that’s Chick-fil-A. Or, I know that it’s Aflac. That’s engaging!
Then it’s endearing. People grow to love the advertising to the degree that they look forward to seeing the next execution. Endearing makes the brand a unique part of their life emotionally, even when they’re not engaged physically with the brand. That was one of the virtues of the Cow campaign. Endearing!
And it’s enduring. It has the creative underpinnings for a long run with multiple creative executions of the campaign. And because it’s a campaign, it represents good stewardship. There’s Cow creative one could pull off the shelf right now that was created years ago, and it would still work. It isn’t dated. It really stretches the financial investment. That’s enduring!
Real Cows
We faced the challenge of bringing the Cows into the restaurants, and our first inclination was to create cartoon cows. We even contacted Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side comic and the cows that inhabit his world. Fortunately, he declined the opportunity, because in hindsight, it wouldn’t have worked. Nobody eats cartoon hamburgers. If the hamburgers are real, the Cows should be real in order to convey the jeopardy.
A member of The Richards Group team suggested contacting a photographer he knew who took photographs of animals, usually dogs, and altered them digitally to put them in human-like situations. “Why not shoot actual cows,” the Richards Group reasoned, “and get them to do things?” The first thing they showed us was a replica of a seven-foot-tall Cow wearing an “Eat Mor Chikin” sandwich board. We knew immediately that was the answer. We debuted these “standing” Cows (with their painted signboards) in restaurants in July 1996 on multiple point-of-purchase materials, and within a couple of weeks customers had taken so many of them, we had to print more. We were thrilled! No one had ever taken our photographs of sandwiches or salads home with them. Now they were taking Chick-fil-A advertising and putting it in their homes and offices.
Years later the Cows are still finding ways to surprise the public. After seeing Chick-fil-A Cows hanging from water towers or climbing the “fowl” poles at Minute Maid Park, where the Houston Astros play baseball (and won the 2017 World Series), people sometimes ask, “How did they get away with that?” Getting away with it started by having a great creative team at the advertising agency who thought like children, and having media partners who were willing to be creatively flexible on potential execution applications.
Dominating the Category
A key factor in the success of Chick-fil-A throughout the chain’s history has been the ability to dominate particular categories, even with an extremely limited budget. The obvious example is the first: Truett created the boneless breast of chicken sandwich and for more than a decade it remained uncontested.
By pioneering fast food in shopping malls, Truett once again established Chick-fil-A as the dominant player in this environment where the chain would flourish.
Moving outside the malls meant going head-to-head with companies that spent more in a week promoting their brands than Chick-fil-A spent in a year. What marketing category could we dominate that they had not already claimed?
Most fast-food advertising is TV driven. Other media are secondary. With our limited budget we couldn’t go head-to-head with them on TV. We decided instead to try to dominate outdoor advertising as a brand builder. Even in that category, we knew that the major players would spend millions more than we ever would.
Fast-food billboards traditionally pushed a price point or told potential customers where to turn. The industry used other media to build their brands while utilizing billboards to influence the location of transactions. We went against the prevailing thinking by using billboards to build our brand. As the only fast-food chain utilizing the medium for brand building, we believed we could dominate with smart execution.
Chick-fil-A’s domination of billboards for brand building never had, and never could, rely on plastering more boards in a market than our competitors. In Atlanta in 2009, for example, we had fewer than twenty 3-D boards for a metropolitan area of more than five million people. We won by putting a limited number of boards in high-traffic areas, with creative that people talked about. High visibility, high impact, always remembering it’s the quality of the impression, not the quantity.
These billboards were working 365 days a year. In a major market we could buy a spectacular board location alongside an interstate highway for a year, or we could buy six or seven weeks of television advertising. The agency’s job, then, was to develop creative that worked all day, every day.
How did we evaluate creative? It wasn’t complicated. Every execution had to make us laugh. It had to be endearing. At the same time, every use of the Cows had to be appropriate. There had to be an element of self-preservation on the Cows’ part, and the jokes had to align with Chick-fil-A’s culture. We couldn’t show anything mean-spirited or that got too close to barnyard humor.
We thought of the Cows as seven-year-olds. That was their mentality. Because of that, there’s not a lot we came up with that would be inappropriate for Chick-fil-A as a company. But sometimes one of our creative groups would cross a line into an area that wasn’t right for the brand. Or they would create something that was too sophisticated for the Cows. We wanted to make sure the joke wasn’t one that only a twenty-five-year-old would get. The humor had to be broader than that—charming, endearing, and funny to a sixty-year-old as well as a six-year-old.
Never a Shill for the Brand
We also took great care ensuring the Cows never became shills for Chick-fil-A. They were in this thing for their own self-interest, not Chick-fil-A’s. If their work started to look too much like they were advertising for Chick-fil-A, such as promoting specific products and ingredients, they would quickly lose their edginess and even their believability.
One of the biggest challenges came when we introduced new products, and we were tempted to ask more of the Cows. We had to be careful not to expect the Cows to do too much. It made perfect sense for them to say, “Eat Mor Chikin,” but we didn’t expect them to say, “Drink more milkshakes.”
As I shared earlier, shortly before Jimmy Collins retired as Chick-fil-A president, he said at our Operator seminar, “It’s easier to become a success than to remain one. Be careful.” He was speaking of the chain, but the statement was true for the Cow campaign. It was easier to create it than to maintain it. Our goal was for people to feel, either consciously or subconsciously, I like those folks at Chick-fil-A. I don’t know where they come up with that advertising material, but that is funny stuff. Then when they were hungry, Chick-fil-A was one of the first places they remembered when they were deciding where to eat.
With all this in mind, the Richards Group wisely created the Chick-fil-A Moo Manifesto to serve as guardrails for the campaign. I suspect any client and agency managing an iconic campaign has something similar.
The Chick-fil-A Moo Manifesto
As the Chick-fil-A Cow Campaign evolves, we should ensure that all creative executions hold fast to these few but crucial (like the two pickles on the Chick-fil-A Chicken Sandwich) criteria.
The Cows Always Act in a Renegade Manner
These aren’t your garden-variety Holsteins. These guys pop up in places where you least expect them: on a billboard, taking over the airwaves, or even on the city’s water tower. They know that if they don’t continue to surprise and entertain us, they become boring and expected, which is one step away from becoming burgers.
The Cows Are Not on the Chick-fil-A Payroll
They are more believable, more endearing, and just plain funnier if they always act purely in the interest of self-preservation. They happen to endorse Chick-fil-A simply because Chick-fil-A makes the best chicken, thereby increasing the odds that people will choose poultry over beef. Uncomfortable as corporate pitchcows, they do their best to stay away from any company emblem. The only logo they would ever consider wearing is ours because it helps their cause. Fact is, they’d be offended if any company gave them money. Besides, they have no pockets.
The Cows Have a Fairly Simple Sense of Humor
They don’t believe in elaborate productions. Theirs is a “grassroots” effort, so they always opt for the simplest, most economical way to get their point across. They’ll just mow (or eat, if necessary) the grass in their field, or they’ll grab a bucket of paint and a brush. And their humor is marked by naïve silliness. Some would say stupidity. But that’s not very nice.
The Cows, with Increasing Frequency, Are Awkwardly Anthropomorphic
While originally content to stand on their own four feet, lately the Cows have dressed up their message in more and more human terms. Which translates into a steady reliance on costumes and awkward impersonation. None too subtle (to us, anyway), their clumsy attempts to infiltrate human culture are nonetheless admirable. Ridiculous, but admirable.
The Cows Can’t Spell
Oh, they give it their best shot. But cows aren’t the smartest creatures in the world, especially when using someone else’s language. Their grammar isn’t so hot, either. And they smell funny.
The Cows Are Low-Tech
When they manage to use technology, they use it in the most rudimentary and sometimes wrong way. They’re low-tech because they have hooves instead of fingers, they weigh about five hundred pounds, and they rarely read the instructions.
The Cows Are Not Always Politically Correct
Years ago, the Cows figured out that people want to eat them. Suffice it to say, they’re a little miffed. As such, they’ll stop at nothing to get their message across. Remember, they don’t work for Chick-fil-A, so they might “say” and do things we wouldn’t. While savvy enough to understand that offending us humans can backfire, they’re certainly willing to cross the line from polite to pointedly frank. (“Lose That Burger Belly” comes to mind.)
If we keep these simple guidelines in mind when creating and judging our ads, the ads will be better, the chicken will sell faster, and the Cows will be much, much happier.
And over the long haul, because of this strategic clarity, we had an iconic campaign, not just a bunch of ads. A campaign that was engaging, endearing, and enduring! What a gift, and what fun!
Awards and Honors for the Cow Campaign
The Cow campaign was not only rewarding in terms of sales and engagement, but it received many awards and honors over the years, such as the OBIE, two EFFIEs, being added to two halls of fame and the Smithsonian American History Museum. Stan Richards was inducted into the American Advertising Hall of Fame in 2017, and the Chick-fil-A Cow campaign was noted as one of his career milestones.