Sharing Your Big Idea: Four Lessons from Chick-fil-A and its Original Chicken Sandwich
By: Kc Sledd
Tags: Chick Fil A, Content Marketing, Branding, Audience Engagement, Content Strategy

Sharing Your Big Idea: Four Lessons from Chick-fil-A and its Original Chicken Sandwich

How We Helped Chick-fil-A Connect with Audiences Outside of Atlanta

Quick, someone mentions your brand’s name at a party: What do they picture? Is it remarkable service, a bold technological innovation, or an enduring reputation? For Chick-fil-A in its hometown of Atlanta, its fond memories of pickles, peanut oil, and the famous “my pleasure.” When Atlantans picture Chick-fil-A, they feel familiarity and trust.

But outside the city, much of Chick-fil-A’s brand story remains unknown, despite the fact that the chicken giant is poised to become the third-largest fast food restaurant in the U.S. by 2020. To continue to grow, Chick-fil-A needed to do more than add restaurants in new markets — it needed to build the same stories and warm feelings that it’s shared with Atlantans for decades.

Companies today are faced with the same challenge when seeking to tell the story of their brand. How do you stay true to your core while compelling new audiences to view your brand the way it’s meant to be seen?

At the end of last year, Atlantic 57 joined forces with Chick-fil-A to do just that. But we didn’t just hop on the phone, interview customers, and begin typing out articles. We immersed ourselves in the company’s culture, interviewed employees and customers, and explored different editorial themes and entry points.

We learned three lessons for bringing your story to life at your company.

1) Embed yourself in your teams’ daily routines.

We got to know Chick-fil-A by spending time in their Atlanta headquarters. One of the most important elements of our engagement was spending several days immersed with the Chick-fil-A team. During this trip, we acted as sponges, absorbing everything from the way the kitchen staff breaded chicken to the business challenges that occupied executives’ time. We also met employees who’d been working at Chick-fil-A for decades.

You can take a new perspective at your organization by getting into the day to day of your employees’ lives. Take time to understand how they contribute to your brand’s larger mission and purpose, and learn about the values that matter most to them. These personal histories can connect distant points across the lifecycle of your product or service.

2) Find the throughline between the past and the present.

We identified the themes that made Chick-fil-A unique by examining its history and archives. Apple founder Steve Jobs once said that simplicity is harder than complexity because it takes a lot of work to organize, distill, and edit one’s thinking. In many ways, Chick-fil-A has done just that over the course of 60 years: deliberated, revisited, iterated, and tested its sandwich to create a product that embodies simplicity, accessibility, and elegance.

What’s unique about your heritage, and how do you continue that heritage today? Like Chick-fil-A, organizations can look back to their founding to find the ideas they can authentically own. Once you’ve made this initial connection between past and present, you can search for other stories that exemplify those concepts and values.

3) Take a high/low approach to appeal to new audiences.

One of our favorite storytelling techniques at The Atlantic is making complex issues broadly accessible — or giving popular topics a high-brow and intellectual tone.

Illustration by Atlantic 57

With Chick-fil-A, we opted for the latter: telling the story of a chicken sandwich with the intellectual and cultural heft of an Atlantic feature.

Chick-fil-A Website

By landing on the Science of the Chicken Sandwich as our editorial lynchpin, we anchored our campaign on the idea of the simple chicken sandwich as a major American cultural touchstone. Our campaign included:

A long-form, deeply reported article delving into the history and science behind of Chick-fil-A’s famous chicken sandwich

Sidebar articles magnifying little-known, intriguing threads of Chick-fil-A’s heritage, menu, and service

Videos with Chick-fil-A employees and customers bringing the company’s people and culture to life

Shareable GIFs unpacking the details and history of Chick-Fil-A’s chicken sandwich

Static graphics showcasing the art and precision behind Chick-fil-A’s recipes

Created for Chick-fil-A by Atlantic 57

Once brands have identified their central concept, they can experiment with formats, angle, and tone to create content that resonates with a variety of audiences.

Continuing the Story

The goal for any organization is to find the concept that solidifies its legacy, values, and ideas with audiences old and new. This could be anything from the delicious simplicity of a chicken sandwich to delivering the future of technology to creating the perfect packaged good. Brands can bring these core ideas to life by using their editorial strategy to guide the narrative.