For six weeks, France lived and died by penalty shootouts and last-minute goals. As an official partner of the FFF (Fédération Française de Football), KFC France launched the Ultra Box des Bleus, a limited-time offer designed to let fans enjoy KFC on match nights. But a 40-day World Cup is about more than match nights. The real question was what to do on all the days in between.
World Cup sponsorships are built around peak moments: kickoff, the final whistle, national celebrations. But a 40-day tournament has far more ordinary days than extraordinary ones. KFC France therefore needed to give Colonel Club members a reason to come back to the app throughout the competition, not just when France was playing.
KFC France had never launched an in-app game before. There was no playbook to know whether gamification could keep members engaged for six weeks or simply create a spike on day one before fading away. The game also had to be integrated with Comarch, the loyalty system, while ensuring a simple and seamless member experience: open the app, play, earn points and see the balance update instantly.
At first, we thought that simply getting members to come back and play every day would already be a win. But the data showed us something even more interesting.
Winners ordered more. The reward appeared to act as a real trigger for consumption: after earning points, members came back to use them, whether through click & collect or in restaurant. This insight changed the way we looked at the mechanic: the game drove engagement, but the reward created an opportunity to come back and purchase.
Working with KFC France, and aligning with the Comarch and loyalty integration teams on the technical side, the build centred on Poulet Décisif: a 15-second whack-a-mole style game, tap the bucket, dodge the red card, running inside Braze's in-app message layer. Colonel Club members got three tries a day, and each win credited 30 loyalty points, up to a 150-point cap across the whole tournament, so there was always a reason to come back tomorrow even after a bad day at the game.
The game itself is custom HTML/JS running inside a Braze in-app message. The harder problem was underneath it: a webhook Canvas that calls Comarch the instant someone wins, credits the points, and syncs the balance back so the app reflects it immediately. No new ledger, no separate rewards system, just a live connection into the loyalty programme KFC already had. Hitting the cap triggered its own automated email, and seven days of inactivity triggered a push and email nudge to come back before the tournament closed.
It's a small loop: open, play, win or don't, come back tomorrow. That simplicity is what let it run every day for six weeks without anyone babysitting it.
115K Colonel Club members played Poulet Décisif at least once, generating 350K+ games played throughout the tournament. The win rate landed at 29%, just under the 30% target, and 46% of players won at least once.
The commercial proof came from a randomised 10% holdout that received none of the World Cup activation: no game, no Ultra Box communications, nothing. Members outside the campaign bought at 4.6%, compared with 16.6% among members exposed to the activation, a 3.6x lift.
The data behind the early insight held up in the results too: 65% of members who never played made a purchase, compared with 47% of players who never won and 93% of players who won at least once. Winning was the trigger, exactly as expected.
The result: a campaign that deepened and monetised the existing loyalty base, with a clear experimental proof of impact and a playbook ready to scale.
The next version of the game will run its own holdout, so KFC France can tell how much of the 3.6x lift belongs to Poulet Décisif itself versus the wider World Cup campaign. A slightly higher win rate is also on the list: since winning, not playing, is what drives purchase, nudging more players over the line should convert more of them into buyers.
Because this tournament mostly deepened spend among existing members, the next build will pair the game with acquisition and reactivation mechanics to bring in players who weren't already Colonel Club regulars. Football won't always be the hook either. The same trigger logic, daily play, points on a win, a webhook into Comarch, is reusable for any live event calendar KFC wants to build a habit around next.
