The Real Questions at Chick-fil-A: How did this happen? And how can they stop it from happening again?

By Charles Hayslett
CEO, Hayslett Group

Time was you didn’t mix business with politics or religion, let alone both.  Times have changed.  Dan Cathy, president of Chick-fil-A and son of company founder Truett Cathy, recently grabbed both of those third rails not once but twice with back-to-back public pronouncements aligning the $4 billion-a-year fast-food company in support of traditional marriage and in opposition to gay marriage.

His statements – at least one of which would have made Pat Robertson proud – touched off the predictable media firestorm, complete with much handwringing from marketing and PR types about damage to the venerable Atlanta brand.   At the AJC, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mike Luckovich is having a field day lampooning Chick-fil-A and its cows.

For what it’s worth, I think Chick-fil-A has gotten the initial PR strategy about right.  Put out a bland statement professing respect for all people regardless of, well, anything and everything – and then shut up, hunker down, and ride it out.  This too shall pass.

That said, there are a handful of important questions still to be answered.  How did this happen?  What if anything can be done to prevent it from happening again?  And will there be long-term damage to the Chick-fil-A brand?

To take the last question first, probably not a lot.  Yes, this incident will be out there on Google forever, but Chick-fil-A’s SEO people will probably bury the reference in fairly short order.  One marketing analyst was quoted in today’s AJC suggesting the flap could cost Chick-fil-A up to two percent in sales volume.  That’s about $80 million a year, or, by my rough calculation, something on the order of 15 million chicken sandwiches. 

Maybe they’ll take that kind of hit, but I doubt it – especially when you look at the (very Red, socially conservative, Southern) markets served by Chick-fil-A.  I wouldn’t be surprised to see their sales go up.  Increasingly, it seems the country is divided not just between Red and Blue states, but Red and Blue marketplaces.

Yes, they’re taking some flack in important expansion markets outside the South, and they’ll have to figure out how to make nice in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.  And they’ll have to do damage control with at least some franchisees.  But they’ll be able to handle all that.

As they get past the firestorm, somebody will no doubt focus internally on my first two questions (somebody no doubt already is).  Chick-fil-A has never been a client of ours (and probably never will be after this blog), but I’ve known a good number of PR and media-savvy people who have worked for and with the company, and they’re all capable folks.  It’s hard to believe any of them would have put Dan Cathy up for an interview knowing he was going to deliver a politically charged, anti-gay message.  This is, trust me, the kind of incident that drives a corporate PR manager’s liquor bill through the roof.

If either or both of the interviews were cleared through the PR department and PR knew what Cathy was going to say, then either a.) this was part of a truly diabolical marketing strategy to drive up sales with socially conservative customers while risking a smaller customer universe of liberals and gays or b.) somebody should be fired, maybe even shot at dawn.  I think all of that is doubtful (although some poor Chick-fil-A flack will inevitably take the fall and is probably already being fitted for a cow costume).

Which leaves us with the possibility that Cathy was practicing PR without a license – that somehow both Biblical Reporter and then radio host Ken Coleman’s bookers got access to Cathy without going through the media relations staff, and that he took both interviews without running it by his media relations staff.  I can see that happening once – a friendly, Christian publication somehow connects with Cathy outside the normal Chick-fil-A bureaucracy and gets him to do what should be an easy and innocent interview.  But twice?  Something broke down somewhere.

Of course, the very nature of Chick-fil-A makes managing this kind of situation difficult.  It’s still a privately-held company headed by the founding Cathy family, and I know it’s not easy to tell the founder’s son that he just stepped in a giant pile of either chicken or cow poo, and please, please, please don’t do it again. 

Undoubtedly, the first management option that came to mind inside the PR shop was to gag Cathy, tie him to his chair, disconnect his phone line, and lock him in his office.  Most likely, however, that hasn’t happened.  Whatever new protocol they put in place, we’ll know it’s working if and only if Cathy disappears for a  time and doesn’t do a third interview with, say the Mike Huckabee show or the 700 Club.

If that third interview does happen, well, then it’s time to bring in Bill Engvall and have him start handing out signs.  And they won’t say “EAT MOR CHIKIN.”