Travis R. Martin, CPA

KFC may do chicken right, but free chicken? That’s another story.

On Friday, KFC issued an apology and a raincheck to angry “customers” who were turned away during a recent promotion for the chain’s new Kentucky Grilled Chicken.

The promotion, designed to be the centerpiece of the Grilled Chicken product launch, was fairly straight forward: place a coupon offering a free two-piece grilled chicken meal on the KFC website, have Oprah mention the coupon on her show, serve up some free chicken, and then sit back and watch America fall in love with the new offering.

Unfortunately for Colonel Sanders and his crew, somewhere between plan and execution things got clucked up.

To understand what went wrong for KFC, it helps to compare their debacle to a recent restaurant giveaway that was executed successfully.

Not since the Chicken Famine of 1987 has poultry caused this much of a stir. (AP Photo/Darron Cummings)

In January, Denny’s surprised the breakfast world (which is not an easy group to surprise, given their penchant for early mornings and coffee) when it offered the entire country a free Grand Slam breakfast. The promotion, which was advertised during the Super Bowl, packed Denny’s restaurants across the country on the morning of February 3^rd. But, unlike the KFC freebie, the masses went home from Denny’s satisfied, and the breakfast chain enjoyed a flood of good publicity.

A closer look reveals three key ways in which the KFC promotion came up short.

Underpromise, Overdeliver

In offering the internet masses free chicken, KFC backed itself into a promise they were unable to deliver on.  By being unprepared for the amount of people who flooded their stores, KFC overpromised and underdelivered. In a business climate where one unhappy customer can vent their frustrations to millions of other potential customers with the click of a mouse, businesses can not afford to make promises they cannot keep.  Although KFC never anticipated that everyone would attempt to redeem their coupons at once (the original promotion was set to run over the course of multiple days), someone should have had the foresight to do some “what-if” planning.

Avoid the Coupon Mentality

Although coupons are not cash, they do share similarities: each is scarce, both are printed on paper, and both require effort to obtain. When KFC forced customers to get a coupon in order take part in the promotion, they inadvertently turned the act of giving away chicken into a monetary transaction. As a result, KFC did not just turn people away by refusing to honor the coupons; they essentially told the holders “your money is no good here.” The sense of entitlement that comes with holding a coupon led to a lot of strong negative reactions when the coupons went unfulfilled. As such, KFC may have been better served to forgo the coupons all together.

Own the Story

With a television show that draws over 7,000,000 viewers every weekday, Oprah has the ability to reach a captive mass audience. She also has the ability to draw a seemingly equal amount of people that enjoy lampooning anything she is involved in that doesn’t turn out as planned. While the power of “O,” initially helped spread the word on the chicken promotion, it also took ownership of the story from KFC. Instead of being a “KFC” story, the promotion became an “Oprah” story. This shift made it much harder for KFC to conduct damage control after the giveaway was botched.

The fact that KFC wasn’t telling a particularly good story to begin with did not help matters either. After Denny’s made good on their promise of a free breakfast for all, multiple blogs and newspapers praised the promotion as an altruistic act to help raise spirits during a down economy. Of course it wasn’t, but since Denny’s was in control of their publicity situation, they received this type of spin. KFC’s giveaway was never portrayed as anything more than a launch of a new product.

Next Time

Like all controversies that take on a life of their own on the internet, KFC’s mismanaged promotion will soon be an afterthought.

In the meantime, Colonel Sanders is urging his customers to UNthink KFC. As for the hungry patrons turned away during the chicken giveaway? They would like to see the Colonel’s team REthink their strategies before they try to roll out another promotion involving free food.

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