Who can argue “the power of Oprah”?  Look at what she has done for book sales for those books read in Oprah’s Book Club or the fads she starts with every new low-carb diet she endorses or the products that go flying off shelves when she includes them in her Favorite Things episode.  You’ve gotta love her.   Marketers crave her attention.  And KFC did too…until now.
 

Please Welcome…Corporate Disaster!!!!

 
The KFC debacle is a textbook case of how a marketer must have a crisis plan in place. 

It’s not Oprah’s fault really, but to have one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People In The World back your promotion, you better have thought of everything that could happen…the most obvious being the flood of people. KFC was not.  I’m sure most of you read in Ad Age, 5/11/09 that there were riots in some NYC’s KFCs,franchisees didn’t even know about the promotion or at least thought they were getting reimbursed, that customers were actually getting turned away at the door and NPR was calling KFC "the James Frey of fast food”.

It wasn’t long ago that disaster struck for Domino’s. How did they take a really big lemon and make it a little less sour?  They addressed the issue with an apology, then they moved on. What did KFC do?  They went back on Oprah and tried to weasel their way out of it by offering free Pepsi on top of the chicken IF you went to a KFC, filled out a ‘rain check’ form and waited for a coupon to be sent to you in the mail. That seems like a lot of work for all parties.

Now, I know that we are talking about an employee disgrace and a customer promotion but the commonality here is corporate crisis.  It’s early to see how sales were impacted at Dominos but within a week tweets were down significantly, blog posts were down 73%, and search volume was down 60% - all of these mediums were back to their pre-crisis levels. (Trendspotting.com)