Amy Power has as firm a pulse on Golden Chick as anyone. About a decade after Mark Parmerlee acquired the chicken chain in 1989, he tapped her PR agency, The Power Group, with an objective of making the brand more relevant.
Golden Chick had been around for decades prior, and by that point, consumers were clearly gravitating more toward chicken. Parmerlee wanted to strike a hot iron.
This work to build the brand’s relevance continued for the next 20 or so years. Parmerlee brought on a marketing veteran in Howard Terry in 2015 and he hired the LOOMIS Agency shortly thereafter.
Now the company is ramping up its efforts even more with the help of a new campaign, called “Gimme That Golden” and Power said it’s about time.
“Golden Chick is like the tortoise that wins the race, and now they’re speeding up a little bit,” she said during a recent interview. “They’ve earned it. They have a consistency in making great tenders and not getting too far outside of their lane.”
The new campaign is targeting new, younger consumers who haven’t tried the brand before. It’s certainly a big charge as the tenders category intensifies, but Golden Chick has not only the support from its longtime agencies but also a new-ish marketing team who support Terry.
Shelby Shipley, digital marketing director, came on board about 3.5 years ago, after previously serving at Raising Cane’s (which is also where Terry worked prior to Golden Chick). Sharon Pewitt, brand marketing director, came on board two years ago after work on the agency side, but also had a stint at Cane’s. Creative Director Andrew Ross has been with the brand for about four years, after about 18 years at — you guessed it — Raising Cane’s.
Fittingly, the three of them have a group chat called Three Musketeers, and they’ve been tasked with ensuring that Golden Chick’s new campaign grows and sustains momentum.
“When I came on board, the question was, ‘How do we take this legacy brand into the future?’ The biggest hurdle was people didn’t want to try the brand, so trial became our focus,” Pewitt said during a recent interview at Golden Chick’s Richardson, Texas-based headquarters.
Prior to “Gimme That Golden,” the company deployed food trucks to familiarize more people with the brand. More recently, it shifted its media strategy toward digital and began a journey to define its core identity.
“We had to figure out our unique positioning in the chicken category and solidify it, and we had to modernize,” Pewitt said.
Prior to this work, and this team, people had slept on the brand or had never heard of it at all, Shipley added. Ross confirmed as much, saying he hadn’t even heard of it despite having worked at a competitor in the same Dallas market.
“That’s what we struggled with when we joined — getting our name out there to the everyday guest,” he said. “I had never eaten at a Golden Chick before, but when I did, I realized it was really good and they know what they’re doing.”
The team began researching the broader consumer set to understand what the brand needed to get to the point where it could start “talking about ourselves, our food,” Shipley said.
“Who are we? How do we identify? There are a lot of brands that want to be everything to everyone. We can’t do that, so we had to understand our current customers and who we’re missing out on,” she said.
Pewitt added that the first priority was to figure out what “lane we were going to pick” with its branding.
“We want to embrace our legacy, but there’s a line. We can talk about it from a nostalgia perspective, but modernization is what people want and expect. They want to see the food, they want authenticity, craveability,” she said.
The next priority was to make sure Golden Chick was showing up for the right people on the right platforms. That largely meant digital and social, as the brand’s consumers skew younger — mid-to-older Gen Z and millennials — and they’re “tenders obsessive.”
The Three Musketeers agree that their consumers want a vibe, not just an offer. They want to embrace the breadth of Golden Chick’s menu — not just tenders, but also roasted chicken, fried legs and thighs, wings, Southern fried catfish, fried okra, dirty rice, and more. Pewitt described the menu as “Southern soul with a Texas twist.”
Armed with the insights from its recent research, the team now knows it’s important to be more intentional in aligning with that cultural identity, and also making sure consumers are aware of the variety and customization available. Consumers can order their tenders spicy, for instance, or add signature queso dip. Spicy tenders, by the way, are the highest return item.
“That’s why it’s important to make sure everybody knows what we have. It’s low-hanging fruit,” Shipley said.
Golden Chick’s previous campaigns, including the food truck deployment, were effective in bringing people in, but hit a plateau. Now the brand is ready for its next chapter, bringing in a new and different audience, showcasing younger consumers in its new ad spot, and pushing what differentiates it from the rest of the crowd so that they’ll come back for more.
“We’re saying we’re not your grandparents’ chicken. We’re the chicken you can eat with your friends and feel cool about eating,” Pewitt said. “We want people to see themselves in our restaurants and identify with this brand. That’s why we’re leaning into spicy tenders, customizable flavors.”
The company is also introducing a new loyalty program to “tap into the personalization of it all.” The launch comes on the heels of a systemwide point-of-sale system rollout and is in response to consumer demand for such a feature.
“We knew we had frequent customers who wanted (a loyalty program). We started working on it two years ago and it’s been frustrating to see every other brand add a loyalty program,” Shipley said. “But we wanted to make sure we were doing it right and that everything was aligned — that we were really rewarding our loyal customers.”
“Sometimes you have to go slow to go fast, and I think we’re there now,” Pewitt added.
Just like an Aesop fable featuring a tortoise and a hare.
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
Follow her on TikTok: @aliciakelso
