Alexander, as the Colonel, is cast in an overarching sitcom theme in which KFC is trying to win back the attention of younger consumers who had started to drift away.
The campaign taps into consumers’ nostalgia for pop culture ephemera from the ’80s and ’90s — eras when key age segments like millennials grew up and ones they are particularly fond.
Alexander is promoting the chain’s $US20 Fill Ups, KFC’s bucket-centric takeout bundle intended to feed a group.
Alexander starred in a number of KFC commercials for a few years after 2000.
More recently KFC has cast a wide range of stars to play Colonel Sanders in recent years, including Billy Zane, Darrell Hammond, and Reba McEntire, who served as the chain’s first female Colonel earlier this year.
The chain debuted its Colonel Sanders-centric marketing campaign in 2015.
Despite initial backlash, the campaign has sparked somewhat of a turnaround at KFC, which has seen moderate sales growth over the last three years in the US.
The latest creative also builds on KFC’s catalogue of leveraging weird internet humour. The videos in some ways recall “Too Many Cooks,” an absurdist parody of vintage sitcom intros that was created by Carton Network’s Adult Swim unit and went viral in 2014.
Like “Too Many Cooks,” “What’s for Dinner?” starts off fairly normal but increasingly takes on a tone that goes from cheery to vaguely creepy as Alexander takes over different archetypal roles on the fictional show, like the mother, father, neighbour and eventually the family couch.
