KFC Just Invented a Job to Fix Its Own Brand

When a company creates a role that never existed, it is usually admitting something. KFC has just created one.

On Thursday the chain named Amy Ellis Durini its first global chief brand officer, effective 1 November, with a remit covering brand strategy, loyalty, retail, new concept development and innovation. She reports directly to global chief executive Scott Mezvinsky and will work alongside the market-level CMOs rather than above them.

The timing matters more than the title. KFC launched a global rebrand in June, an overhaul that reached into the most protected corners of the identity — Colonel Sanders included — while the menu was recentred on boneless chicken and everyday value. That is a lot of moving parts across a system of franchisees on several continents, and until now nobody owned the whole picture.

Chief brand officer roles tend to appear at exactly this moment: when a business has decided that consistency, not creative volume, is the constraint. Marketing chiefs in individual markets are measured on traffic this quarter. Somebody has to be measured on what the brand looks like in three years.

For parent Yum Brands, the appointment also reads as a signal to the analysts who have spent two years asking why the US business keeps ceding chicken ground to Chick-fil-A, Popeyes and Raising Cane's. Chicken is the category everyone wants; being the chain that invented it has stopped being an argument on its own.

The interesting test will be the Colonel. He is one of the few genuinely famous brand assets left in fast food, and the pressure on a new brand chief will be to modernise him without spending the equity that makes him worth modernising.