“You are what you eat.” That’s a scary thought for many of us (particularly during the holiday season when gift baskets abound). But, increasingly, fast food marketers are trying to put a different cast on that maxim, with lifestyle statements aimed at whetting consumers’ appetites with items far removed from burgers, fries and shakes.

These fast food chains are moving beyond  the typical “marketing moments” (i.e. limited edition items that have been standard fare for years) with licensed and non-licensed products designed to seep into a consumer’s lifestyle. These recent efforts also go well beyond the grocery aisle where restaurant brands have long found a home and an extension of the corporate sponsorships that also are increasingly common.

Take, for example, Kentucky Fried Chicken’s branded, chicken-scented fireplace log, which returned to the market this year after debuting in 2018. KFC developed the product with Enviro-Log, which makes firewood from recycled waxed cardboard, a feature also that also appeals to environmentally-conscious consumers. A year ago, the firelogs sold out online in three hours and by late last week, this year’s stock (available exclusively on Walmart.com) was gone as well.

A few other recent product examples:

• Uglychristmassweater.com is selling a Popeye’s-branded sweater, seeking to capitalize on the viral popularity of last summer of the chain’s new chicken sandwich; it goes for $44.95, roughly six times the price of the sandwich.  The same site also has sweater available for the White Castle, Skyline Chili and Red Lobster chains.
• Dunkin’ (formerly known as Dunkin’ Donuts) launched its first online pop-up shop in November featuring a collection of 11 limited-edition items including a branded electric guitar and peppermint-scented wrapping paper.

Living the Brand

Then there was Taco Bell’s three-day takeover and instant sell-out of the 70-room V Palm Springs Hotel, which it developed with the marketing agency United Entertainment Group. The hotel wrapped consumers in everything from branded rooms and merchandise to hotel menu items “as riffs on the actual Taco Bell menu.”

Speaking of wrapping yourself up in a brand, Burger King, as part of a new ad campaign in Belgium, on Dec. 18 will pick a lucky winner who will get to live rent-free for a year in a branded apartment above a BK restaurant in Leuven, Belgium. “The Home of the Whopper” flat is replete with Whopper-themed furniture, including a bed fashioned after the burger and topped with lettuce-like blankets.

“With younger generations there is a sense of wanting to experience the brand all the time and not just necessarily sitting in a restaurant and eating the food,” said Beanstalk VP Jasen Wright, whose firm handles licensing for Taco Bell  and developed merchandising and collaborations for the hotel. “Restaurant chains know that consumers are reacting to collabs and topics that are popular on social media, so they are trying to figure out ways to continue to get in front of the consumer as the competition among them gets stronger every year.”

And increasingly, these quick-service restaurants are competing not just with each other, but with a larger movement toward healthier, more sophisticated culinary options. Sales continue to decline at the many of the big players. Meanwhile, younger consumers now have a glut of options for quick, good food combined with heightened nutritional awareness, so the classic American fast food chains are no longer the gastronomic mainstay they were for previous generations. The fact that just one 1 in every 5 millennials has even tasted a Big Mac, says it all.

Successful lifestyle plays like the ones we’ve seen in recent months, help these fast food brands maintain affinity with consumers who may be trending away from them in a culinary sense. Perhaps more importantly, these unique, often tongue-in-cheek extensions get a lot of play in the press and on social media, maintaining their position in the zeitgeist whether people are eating their food or not.

Year-Round Collections

What started primarily as limited-time promotions are in many cases giving way to year-round collections. Taco Bell licensee Ripple Junction sells t-shirts, sweatshirts and other apparel through Target, Hot Topic, Pac Sun and other retailers.

And McDonald’s earlier this month launched an e-commerce site dubbed Golden Arches Unlimited to sell 20 items – a Big Mac bag and McFlurry Dessert Journal among them – as part of plans for a permanent direct-to-consumer business that is a major break for a chain that has previously relied on limited-time promotions. The chain has partnered with multiple fashion brands and retailers on apparel since the 1980s; two years ago, it teamed with UberEATS to celebrate global delivery day by giving away limited-time products to customers using its McDelivery app.

Another sure sign of a more permanent licensing strategy has been the addition of licensing agents with a mandate to help in creating lifestyle extensions through merchandise and experiences. Beanstalk signed with Taco Bell in late 2017 and has since addedd seven licensees with plans to expand into limited edition luggage and footwear in 2020. Brandgenuity began representing White Castle a year ago for lifestyle products.  And White Castle has already had collaborations with fashion brand Supreme and footwear supplier Vans and has signed H3 (headwear), Trevco (print-on-demand t-shirts) and Bioworld (t-shirts) as licensees.

“You are going to see more and more of this [merchandise] as an everyday strategy that is designed to get products on store shelves. [Restaurants’] chief brand officers are very much looking at this as part of their year-round strategy that complements the sponsorship and other deals that have been used to highlight brands in the past,” says one licensing agent.