The Amazon rain forest is on fire, anti-government protests in Hong Kong have lasted into their fifteen week, and the risks of a No-Deal Brexit loom large over the United Kingdom, but all pale in comparison to the month’s biggest story.
Popeyes says they make the best chicken sandwich.
Shots fired in the Great Chicken Sandwich War of 2019
This clash of American fast-food titans regarding the supremacy of their respective chicken sandwiches has brought the internet to its knees. It has also illuminated the role social media plays in today’s marketing landscape.
Opening salvo of the Great Chicken Sandwich War of 2019
The tweet seemed innocuous enough. A restaurant that makes fried chicken unveiled a sandwich with fried chicken in it, and humorously attempted to tell customers that it was good.
It turned out, however, that Popeyes’ claim Photo Editing Services to chicken sandwich superiority tread on the turf of established chicken sandwich heavyweights Chic-fil-A and Wendy’s, both of whom perceived the tweet as a slight. They responded in kind with sharp, clucking rebuttals, and the escalation quickly snowballed.
What has ensued has been a veritable cacophony of snarky sub-tweeting, salty shade-throwing, savage clap-backing, and dank-meme-referencing that has drawn in co-belligerents Church’s Chicken and Shake Shack and split the Twitter-verse into factions as each camp entrenches themselves for conflict ahead.
Why the Great Chicken Sandwich War of 2019 matters
The Great Chicken Sandwich Wars of 2019 did more than expose the divisions between fans of different take-out restaurants. In the grander scheme of things, it exposed the changing landscape of social media marketing.
In today’s marketing climate, engagement with users on social platforms is one of the best ways to establish brand identity online. This means that many brands try to replicate the tone, language, and delivery of social media’s most popular personalities.
Twitter has become the de facto home of brand personality quirks. This owes a lot to the platform’s atmosphere of immediacy and virality. A particularly amusing off-hand remark can rack up tens of thousands of retweets in hours and reach an audience of millions.