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Chicken Licken Turns Female Solidarity Into a Soul Food Moment
Chicken Licken's "Soul Sister" campaign is a 2019 South African food campaign created by Joe Public that uses six 45-second films and one 20-second spot to dramatise female solidarity, presenting three fictional SoulSisters who arrive as backup singers whenever a woman — or anyone in need — faces a defining moment.
Published in May 2019, the campaign marks a deliberate strategic evolution for the Johannesburg-based quick-service restaurant brand. Where earlier Chicken Licken work had leaned into long-form, single-narrative storytelling — most notably the 2017 "Afronaut" series featuring fictional hero Rodwell Tshabalala, as documented by Bizcommunity — "Soul Sister" distributes its emotional weight across multiple short-film vignettes, each anchored by a different moment of need or celebration. The format allowed the campaign to travel across television, social media, digital, outdoor, and activations simultaneously, extending the reach of the narrative well beyond a single broadcast window.
In South Africa, the campaign arrived during a period of heightened cultural conversation around women's experiences and collective female support. Joe Public built the creative concept directly from the product name, transforming "Soul" into a vehicle for both culinary identity and human connection. The three SoulSisters function less as brand mascots and more as a chorus of affirmation — present in joyful moments, difficult confrontations, and, in one particularly noted execution, alongside a young man summoning the courage to come out to his father, as reported by LBBonline. That creative choice signals a campaign that understands sisterhood as a disposition rather than a demographic.
Across its six films and one short spot, "Soul Sister" establishes Chicken Licken not simply as a food brand but as a brand with a perspective on South African life. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 82 out of 100, reflecting strong narrative coherence, cultural specificity, and multi-format creative ambition.
Joe Public grounded "Soul Sister" in a precise cultural observation: that South African women consistently show up for one another in moments that institutions and individuals often fail to meet. This insight translated into a campaign architecture that places female support not as a theme but as the structural engine of every film.
The move reflected a broader strategic shift at Chicken Licken. According to Bizcommunity, the brand migrated its agency relationship from Net#work BBDO to Joe Public United in mid-2016, and the subsequent years saw Joe Public reposition Chicken Licken as a culturally embedded South African voice rather than a conventional fast-food advertiser. "Soul Sister" is the fullest expression of that repositioning to date, using music, performance, and humor to make the brand feel indigenous to the emotional texture of South African life rather than imported from a global QSR playbook.
The competitive context matters here. In the South African quick-service restaurant category, Chicken Licken competes directly with KFC, which has long dominated fried chicken brand recognition in the market, and with McDonald's, which according to Financhill held approximately 21.4 percent of the global fast-food market share in the period surrounding the campaign's launch. Neither competitor has pursued a campaign with an equivalent commitment to locally specific female narrative as a primary creative strategy, which gave "Soul Sister" genuine differentiation within the South African food advertising landscape.
No reliable monetary valuation for the South African QSR market in 2019 has been independently verified, as noted by Insight Survey, but the category's competitive intensity in South Africa made emotional brand-building a rational strategic investment. By anchoring the campaign to a meal name and expanding it into a social philosophy, Joe Public gave Chicken Licken a platform that competitors could not simply replicate through media spend alone.
Director Greg Gray led production on "Soul Sister" for Chicken Licken, working through Romance Films with executive producer Helene Woodfine and director of photography Paul Gilpin. The creative team at Joe Public United was led by group chief creative officer Pepe Marais and chief creative officer Xolisa Dyeshana, with executive creative director Roanna Williams overseeing execution. Senior art director Natalie Walker and senior copywriter Jeanine Vermaak shaped the individual film narratives, with Tshepo Tumahole contributing copywriting across executions, as documented by LBBonline and Ididthat Co.
The decision to build the campaign across six 45-second films rather than a single long-form piece reflects a sophisticated understanding of how South African audiences consume content across broadcast and social channels simultaneously. Each film is complete as a standalone piece — a woman at a crossroads, a celebration that needs witnesses, a son and his father — but the three recurring SoulSisters create continuity across the set, functioning as a repertory company rather than a single protagonist.
Music and performance sit at the centre of the creative execution. The SoulSisters arrive as backup singers, which allows the campaign to use song as both a tonal signal and a narrative device without tipping into sentimentality. The humor is grounded and observational rather than absurdist, a register that has characterised Joe Public's best Chicken Licken work since the "Afronaut" series, as noted by Ads of the World. Production art director Keenan McAdam contributed to the visual world that makes each scenario feel specific to South African social life rather than generically pan-African.
Head of TV and radio Di Cole and group account director Amber Mackeurtan anchored the production and client relationship through a campaign that required coordinating six distinct film shoots into a coherent release.
No verified performance data for the "Soul Sister" campaign is publicly available in the trade press. No independent reviews or effectiveness metrics appear in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious publications, as the research record confirms.
Structural analysis of the campaign's design, however, points to a number of effectiveness indicators that informed the Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100. The decision to produce six discrete films rather than a single hero spot gave the campaign natural longevity across a multi-channel South African media plan — each execution could refresh the social feed and the broadcast schedule independently, extending audience contact without repetition fatigue.
The casting of the SoulSisters as recurring characters rather than one-off creative devices creates brand memory structures that compound across viewings, a technique supported by long-running effectiveness research from the IPA in the United Kingdom, which consistently identifies character-based campaigns as stronger long-term brand builders than message-led executions. Applied to the South African food advertising context, this approach positions Chicken Licken to accumulate emotional equity over successive campaign cycles rather than relying on a single cultural moment.
The inclusion of a male character — the young man coming out to his father — within a campaign framed around female solidarity also demonstrates creative confidence. It signals that the brand understands sisterhood as a value system with universal application, which broadens the campaign's audience without diluting its core insight. For a food brand operating in a competitive South African QSR market, that breadth of emotional address is a structural asset.
"Soul Sister" is a 2019 South African food campaign by Joe Public for Chicken Licken. It uses six 45-second films to depict three fictional SoulSisters who appear as backup singers whenever someone faces a difficult or celebratory moment, turning a meal name into a narrative about female solidarity and collective human support.
Joe Public United created "Soul Sister" for Chicken Licken. The campaign launched in South Africa in May 2019. Group chief creative officer Pepe Marais and chief creative officer Xolisa Dyeshana led the creative, with director Greg Gray of Romance Films handling production across six individual film executions.
"Soul Sister" comprised six 45-second films and one 20-second spot. Each film functioned as a standalone narrative while sharing the three recurring SoulSister characters. The campaign ran across television, social media, digital, outdoor, and activations in South Africa, as documented by Clapboard and LBBonline.
Joe Public built the "Soul Sister" concept directly from the product name, transforming it into a platform for female solidarity. The 2019 campaign arrived during heightened South African cultural conversation around women's experiences, giving Chicken Licken a culturally grounded point of difference from competitors such as KFC and McDonald's in the local QSR market.
"Soul Sister" by Chicken Licken holds a Clapboard Score of 82 out of 100. The score reflects the campaign's strong narrative coherence across six films, its cultural specificity to the South African market, the confidence of its creative execution, and the strategic use of recurring characters to build brand memory structures over time.
Greg Gray directed the "Soul Sister" films for Chicken Licken through Romance Films. Paul Gilpin served as director of photography and Helene Woodfine as executive producer. The campaign was created by Joe Public United in South Africa and launched in May 2019, as credited by LBBonline and ididthat.co.
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