Kentucky Fried Chaos

KFC gave their famous acronym a new meaning with the disastrous launch of their newest product: Kentucky Grilled Chicken.

When spending millions on a television advertising campaign didn’t seem like enough of a force to take the ‘F’ out of KFC, they pulled in the mother of all marketing reinforcement: Oprah Winfrey. (I guess they figured if she can sell a Presidential candidate, she can sell some chicken.)

During the May 4th airing of Oprah, KFC offered two free pieces of grilled chicken, along with two sides and a biscuit, to anyone who downloaded a coupon within the next 48 hours. The result was disastrous, and as much as I wish I could, I can’t blame Oprah for this one. Oprah did her job well; Approximately 10.5 million coupons were downloaded, and KFC gave away 4 million meals in 2 days. OK wait…10.5 million… minus 4 million…that leaves… 6.5 million coupons unclaimed? Yep– The rest remained unrewarded as supply ran short of demand.

The interesting part comes not in KFC’s failure to plan ahead, but rather in the buzz this stunt created on the Internet. KFC became the hot topic of tweeting and blogging  nationwide–including this one! According to AdAge, from the time the promotion started to the time it crashed, KFC went from showing up in 538 blog posts daily, to 1319 mentions, and back down to 772.  While some of the buzz was positive and some was negative, the question is…did the promotion really fail? It certainly got people talking, and it certainly spread the news of a new product. So, in my opinion, maybe they ran out of chicken, but the bull feathers that came out of their mouths succeeded in making one clucking crazy product launch.

Read more details and find a list of some other marketing blunders here.