Marketing Campaigns Gone Wrong – KFC
For part 2 of my 3 part series on Marketing Campaigns Gone Wrong, let’s take a look at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Following up on Denny’s offer of a free Grand Slam Breakfast for America, KFC went one step further by not only offering a free 2-piece chicken meal with 2 individual sides and a biscuit, but announced it on Oprah.
The only thing they didn’t count on was a) that this was Oprah and b) that the online world would pick up the story and run with it, making the coupon one of the top trends on Twitter.
4 million people printed the coupon and swarmed the stores looking for their free lunch, and not only did KFC not anticipate this load, but their stores didn’t know how to respond.
Police had to break up riots in the stores, stores ran out of chicken, staff refused to honor the coupons, Oprah’s site pulled the coupon offline, duplicate coupon numbers were being printed and not honored, stores were posting signs saying that they’re not accepting internet coupons, other stores were creating separate lines for coupon holders and not giving them chicken, and more.
The entire situation reflected terribly on KFC, and as a saving grace, the President of KFC came onto Oprah on May 8th and apologized, allowing rain checks and making it even better by adding a free Pepsi, too.
All in all, 10.5 million coupons were downloaded, equating to roughly $42 million in free food for America. Too bad it left it bad taste for so many.
The big lesson to learn here is that if you’re going to go out with a marketing piece, make sure you have the back end to support the influx of business and that the troops down in the trenches know what’s going on.
Coming up in part 3 is a good local story of a Bay Area business running an expensive promo and completely failing on the followthrough.
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4 Responses to “Marketing Campaigns Gone Wrong – KFC”
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It’s interesting how often companies like KFC go all out to create a marketing campaign and don’t plan for success. Communicate with the troops, people! – Fred
but didnt they get what they wanted? publicity. they got the pr even if it was bad. sounds like a suces to me.
Uh… Bad PR isn’t always good for your business either, Alex. Think of all the bad blood that’s been created, not just with the public, but within the organization, too.
When I help my clients with their marketing campaigns, we make sure the staff is fully on board, the call center is prepped, and everyone is “in the loop” so that it runs smoothly.
KFC should have done the same.
Great post, Jeremy. Thanks for sharing this with us. I remember all the press this got when it first came out.
I tried to go to the KFC site to get a coupon when I saw it on twitter, but the coupon was already offline.
Looking forward to part 3 of this post.