Believe in Chicken: Ritual, Controversy, and Brand Community in KFC’s Cultic Advertising
This article analyzes KFC UK’s "Believe in Chicken" campaign, launched in 2024, and its infamous commercial "All Hail Gravy." The advertisement depicts a faux-religious cult performing a baptism in a lake of gravy, imagery that polarized audiences and led to over 1,100 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority (Marketing Beat, 2025). Drawing on sociology (Durkheim, Douglas, Turner), consumer research (Belk et al., 1989; Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001; Holt, 2004; McCracken, 1986), and psychology (Haidt, 2012; Rozin et al., 2008; Tajfel & Turner, 1979), we argue that the campaign's success was not in securing universal approval, but in its strategic use of infamy. It re-enchants a mundane commodity, exploits violations of purity norms, and transforms outrage into cultural visibility. Ultimately, "All Hail Gravy" demonstrates that in the attention economy, controversy can be a deliberate and effective strategy.
From Commodity to Myth: The Ritual Re-enchantment of Fast Food
At first glance, fast food is profane—transactional, convenient, and forgettable. Yet, the "All Hail Gravy" campaign intentionally blurs this line by treating chicken as a sacred object. It uses ritual aesthetics to elevate chicken consumption into a symbolic act. A secret woodland cult, with robed followers and a golden egg, baptizes an initiate in a lake of gravy, a textbook example of what Mary Douglas (1966) called "matter out of place." Gravy belongs on a plate, not in a lake for ritual immersion. The deliberate violation of this purity norm provokes a visceral reaction, be it laughter or disgust.
By incorporating elements of pilgrimage, initiation, and relics, the ad transforms a meal into symbolic participation. The initiate emerges "reborn" from the gravy, representing a communal passage into belonging. This mirrors Victor Turner’s (1969) notion of liminality, a powerful state of transition that creates vivid memories. The campaign leverages this structure to ensure its brand message is not simply noticed but etched into cultural recollection.
Brands achieve iconic status when they tell stories that resolve cultural tensions (Holt, 2004). In an era of cynicism toward institutions, a parody religion promising transcendence through chicken fills a cultural void. The symbolic meaning—absurd ritual, the golden egg, the baptism—is transferred from the world of culture into the product, and finally into the consumer (McCracken, 1986). By purchasing, consumers don’t just eat; they participate in a cultural phenomenon, signaling membership in an in-group that understands the joke.
Disgust, Polarization, and the Engine of Infamy
The 1,141 complaints to the ASA reveal the role of moral psychology in shaping responses. Jonathan Haidt’s (2012) Moral Foundations Theory helps explain the backlash. For many, the ad was offensive on the Purity and Sanctity foundation, which is closely linked to disgust. Immersion in gravy violates codes of cleanliness and mocks sacred rituals, producing outrage.
Yet, as Paul Rozin and colleagues (2008) note, disgust is one of the most potent attention-grabbing emotions. The image of a man lowered into a gravy lake is unforgettable. For younger, more ironic audiences, the ad’s grotesquerie was a source of amusement, not offense. This polarization became the engine of cultural salience.
Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) explains this dynamic. The public debate created two camps: those offended (the out-group) and those "in on the satire" (the in-group). This division, amplified by social media, turned the commercial into a cultural conversation piece. The outrage and amusement didn't neutralize one another; they created a self-sustaining cycle of attention. The argument itself became a form of advertising. Memes about "gravy baptism" and the "golden egg" demonstrated how the campaign seeded a symbolic vocabulary for consumers, extending its reach by reinforcing its central symbols (Muniz & O’Guinn, 2001).
The Ethical Cost: Voices of Complaint
The backlash against All Hail Gravy was not only a matter of taste but of principle. For many critics, the advertisement crossed into domains of life that ought to remain untouched by commercial parody. Their objections can be grouped into several categories, each of which reveals the ethical tensions that arise when advertising courts infamy.
Religious mockery. The most prominent line of criticism was that the advert trivialised baptism. Baptism is a rite of initiation into faith communities and is treated with reverence across Christian traditions. By replacing holy water with gravy, critics argued, the commercial mocked the sacred, reducing a transcendent act of belonging to a sales pitch for fried chicken.
Cannibalistic undertones. Another common objection was the transformation of a human into a chicken fillet. To many, this suggested a grotesque overlap between eater and eaten. The symbolism of humans literally becoming food triggered discomfort, with some interpreting it as a normalisation of cannibalistic imagery. What amused some as absurdist humour was, for others, a violation of deeply held taboos about the sanctity of the human body.
Glorification of sacrifice. The narrative of a willing initiate submitting to gravy immersion invited comparisons with sacrificial rites. Critics saw this as a disturbing celebration of suffering and submission, framed as entertainment. The sacrificial overtones were especially troubling because they linked death and ritualised offering to the consumption of fast food.
Trivialisation of animal suffering. Animal welfare advocates pointed out that the parody religion made light of the poultry industry’s realities. By staging a cult that worships chicken consumption, the advert seemed to mock genuine suffering in industrial farming. Critics argued that the joke fell flat when the underlying product is derived from practices that involve large-scale animal death, suggesting that the campaign trivialised this suffering for spectacle.
The commodification of life. At its most critical, the advert was read as a parable of consumer capitalism. The initiate, transformed into food, symbolises both human and animal life as raw material for the marketplace. Rather than only selling chicken, the advertisement could be seen as enacting the logic of commodification itself: everything, even life, is reducible to a product. For some, this message was not subversive but chilling, an unmasking of the darker truths behind consumption.
Taken together, these complaints reveal the double edge of the campaign’s strategy. The same imagery that created memorability also provoked moral condemnation. For its defenders, the advert was clever parody. For its critics, it was a cultural low point, exposing how far brands will go in pursuit of attention.
Simply Put
KFC’s "Believe in Chicken" campaign demonstrates how advertising can appropriate ritual and myth to create cultural icons. By leveraging ritual aesthetics, violating purity norms, and embracing polarization, "All Hail Gravy" turned fast food into a symbolic act of belonging and sparked one of the most debated advertisements in recent UK history. Its lesson for advertising psychology is clear: success is not always measured by approval, but by cultural salience. In the attention economy, infamy can be a deliberate strategy. Yet the voices of complaint reveal the ethical cost of this approach. What one audience experiences as satire, another sees as sacrilege or cruelty. For KFC, the gamble paid off in visibility. For society, it leaves an enduring question: how far should advertising go in the pursuit of attention?
References
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. Chicago: Aldine.
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