Fried Chicken and the KFC Problem

People ask me about the fried chicken thing.

Why KFC. Why fried chicken. Why would you attach your personal brand to a fast food chain you don't own, don't work for, and probably shouldn't eat as often as you do.

Simple. KFC is on every corner. Every city. Every country. You can't not see it.

Now every time you walk past one, you think of me. I didn't buy a billboard. I hijacked yours.

That's the whole strategy. That's the letter. I could stop here.

But since you're still reading, there's something underneath this that I think about a lot.

Most people build a personal brand by talking about what they do. "I'm a marketer." "I'm a founder." "I help coaches scale." Cool. So do 10,000 other people in my LinkedIn feed. You just described the menu. You didn't tell me why I should eat here instead of next door.

Fried chicken is my version of not describing the menu.

It's weird. It doesn't make sense on paper. It has nothing to do with marketing or AI or presentations. That's the point. It's a pattern interrupt disguised as a joke. And pattern interrupts are the only thing that earns attention anymore.

Your brain skips past "LinkedIn expert." Your brain does not skip past "the fried chicken lady who builds AI tools."

Branding isn't about making sense. It's about making a dent. Something that sticks in the part of your brain that remembers jingles and smells and that one weird kid from third grade.

I could have picked something professional. Something "aligned with my values." Something a brand strategist would approve of.

I picked fried chicken. Because I like fried chicken. And because the best brand decisions are the ones that make you go "wait, what?"

That's it. That's the letter.

— String

P.S. If KFC ever sponsors me I promise I'll still write these letters. But I'll write them greasier.