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Popeyes is aiming to clip the wings of its competitors with the permanent addition of wings to its menu, accompanied by a scorching campaign with as much spice as its chicken.
In the new campaign, created by agency McKinney, the brand’s spokesperson excitedly shows up to a football game watch party with a bag in hand, announcing that “After 51 years, Popeyes is crashing the wings party!”
“Makes no sense it took so long,” she says, while doling out boxes to guests and revealing a larger, zestier tray of wings with five different flavors.
She adds the brand’s new tagline: “We don’t make sense, we make chicken.”
Fans may also catch an Easter egg toward the end when she asks, “Y’all good?”—a sly nod to the viral tweet that catapulted the brand’s chicken sandwich into the spotlight and taunted its competitors.
This time, the taunting is shamelessly overt, with the brand strategically placing out-of-home signage near the locations of competitor restaurants to convert wing aficionados. A billboard that reads “Our wings GO” menacingly hovers over a Wingstop restaurant, for example.
Popeyes also launched “DISScount codes” with savage prompts such as NOTTHATWILD, OPENSUNDAY and ONLY1WINGFLVR, which can be redeemed for a free six-piece order of wings with a minimum $10 purchase through the brand’s app and website.
Winging it
Like most quick service restaurants, Popeyes is no stranger to experimenting with limited-run menu items to excite customers. But none have come close to achieving the lightning-in-a-bottle success of its 2019 chicken sandwich launch—until this past January, when the brand unveiled its ghost pepper wings to ravenous acclaim.
“We sold out in two and a half weeks,” Jeff Klein, Popeyes chief marketing officer, told Adweek. “That’s bad … but very good at the same time.”
Klein said the unexpectedly high demand left the brand scrambling to replenish the product, noting that some of the seasonings used in the recipe are imported from overseas, complicating the process.
When the wings returned in May, Popeyes introduced a second flavor, Sweet ‘N’ Spicy, which Klein called “additive to the ghost pepper wings.”
“Then we started to see lineups at drive-thrus that we hadn’t seen in… I’m not comparing the chicken sandwich time… but I spent a lot of time on the weekend driving around to Popeyes to see this phenomenon. And people had been sending me pictures. We decided we needed a full wings lineup,” he added.
