May 7, 12:22 pm
Behold, the power of chicken
By Dan Bobinski
CEO, The Center for Workplace Excellence
This week on Oprah the word went out: Free chicken at KFC. With a few mouse clicks, a coupon could be printed for a free two-piece chicken dinner, featuring KFC’s new grilled (not fried) chicken.
Did KFC realize what they were doing? This was, after all, a promotion on Oprah, and any promotion by Oprah is the best advertisement a product can get.
One would think that the marketing and operations departments at YUM! Brands (the parent company of KFC) talked with each other … especially considering they were giving away millions of pieces of chicken.
Well, if the two departments did talk, they didn’t communicate very well. In cities all across America today, people are being told “NO” when trying to redeem their coupons.
The BlackSpin Blog reports that people were holding sit-ins and threatening to call the cops unless they got their free chicken. Jay Hancock’s Blog at the Baltimore Sun reports that KFC’s around the country are posting signs saying We are not accepting Internet coupons.
There’s no such thing as a free lunch
KFC’s idea was great: Oprah promotes our online coupon — we don’t have to pay for mailing or printing — and people will flock to our stores, love us, and buy even more KFC food.
Oops.
Either KFC didn’t do their math or they didn’t communicate very well. The resulting frustration from “NO CHICKEN” may turn hundreds of thousands of people AWAY from ever going to KFC again. Granted, I might be wrong. Maybe KFC believes that even bad publicity is good publicity, and they know they’ll come out ahead in the long run.
If that’s their formula, it’s a risky proposition. Such gambles sometimes pay off for very large companies (like KFC), but they rarely work for smaller ventures.
Learn from the power of people wanting free chicken. If you embark on a wild marketing idea that could pay huge dividends, be sure you have resources available to back up your plan. Otherwise you might get grilled and your business reputation might get fried (pun intended). And the jury is still out … That still might happen over at KFC.
Filed in Business, Sales, Selling, Advertising, Customer Service, Workplace
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FOLLOW UP:
Well, it looks like they were taking the gamble on purpose. In an AP story, KFC’s president Roger Eaton said:
Reading between the lines, we can interpret two key phrases:
- - “a day like yesterday”
Translation: even though yesterday looked like a disaster
- - “the relative costs … are very small”
Translation: it’s going to pay off for us big time.
Apparently marketing WAS talking to operations … and they knew what they were doing.
- Dan
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