KFC biggest marketing failure

KFC is a very familiar term to almost every one of us also called Kentucky Fried Chicken. As it is generally famous for its amazing food & marketing campaign. The marketing concept of KFC is, it focuses on the customer & make improvements & modifications in the menus as per their needs & wants.

But an incident faced by KFC in the year 2009, failed them in their marketing campaign. On 5 May 2009, KFC promoted itself on the popular American talk show hosted by, Oprah Winfrey. The brand has offered free coupons, regarding the KFC meal. The viewers were offered the scheme that they can download free coupons from the Oprah website within 24 hours & could use the coupons to get a 2-piece chicken meal till 19 May.

KFC had not done any research regarding the response of the customers towards the downloading of coupons, & 10.5 million coupons were downloaded from the website as it was for free.

As a result, a blunder had created, a lot of KFC restaurants faces very heavy traffic with the people trying to redeem their coupons as per the scheme & promise done by the KFC.

KFC gave away free food almost dollar 42 million but still after that many restaurant faces a shortage of chicken, hence KFC could not deliver what they have offered as a promise. Later they apologized to Oprah & customers for all the inconvenience as they were not having any other option. Many of the customers who downloaded the coupons & stand in the cue for the free chicken were angry as they didn’t get what they were promised.

That is the live and real example of the importance of research. Business research helps to identify the opportunities & threats. It also helps in identifying problems & using the information to make wise decisions for the company. It also helps to understand the customer better & hence can be useful to communicate better. That’s why companies should do proper research before spending their money on marketing campaigns.

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