SUMMARY

Boasting a secret recipe of numerous spices and “finger licking good” chicken meals, KFC was started by Harland Sanders as a tiny restaurant called “Sander’s Court and Café” at a gas station. Now, a more than 11000 restaurants in 85 countries, KFC is the world’s largest chicken fast-food restaurant and one of the top fast-food chains worldwide. It was also one of the first fast food restaurants to go international4 and is popular in many countries. After having gone through many different hands, KFC is now under Yum! Brands Inc together with A&W All-American, Food Restaurants, Long John Silver’s, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell. With a market such as China with a longstanding tradition, KFC executes must realize that they are faced with customers very different from the rest of the world. It cannot distribute the exact same products there as it does in every other part of the world. As they are faced with different markets, KFC must learn to adjust its products accordingly. Like most multinational companies, KFC was first attracted to China by the size of the country’s market potential which is 1.3 billion people, 20% of the world’s total. China is a market with a few thousand years of recorded history, a deeply entrenched culture, and very different from the West. KFC’s decision to pursue a broad and active localization strategy in China began with the assembly of its local leadership team made up of US-educated ethnic Chinese drawn from Taiwan and other parts of Asia which was, practically speaking, as “local” a leadership team as feasible during the 1980s. Once a qualified and experienced leadership team is in place that is very knowledgeable about both the best industry practices outside China and the local context inside China, KFC was in a strong position to assess how far, how deep, and how fast to expand localization practices across people,