Marketing Restaurant Online

Free Chicken  Promotion is most probably the great marketing promotion  that restaurants like  KFC can do if executed well. If not done with cautious planning then it can turn out to be a marketing disaster as it did to Kentucky Fried Chicken. This was definitely not the first time that a restaurant has done this kind of Free Food promotion. Denny’s breakfast restaurant had done it’s FREE breakfast promotions that they advertised during the  Superbowl.

When I was checking my twitter updates I saw KFC as a trending topic.Having a keen interest in the topic of restaurants, I rushed to check what was all this buzz about on Twitter. To my amazement, it was KFC’s Free Chicken promotion announced by non other than most influential Oprah.  Well I was excited for the fact that at least there were restaurants doing a bold promotions on new social medias like Twitter. But later that day and following few days after I started to see the  skeleton of that FREE marketing promotion. It started to bother me especially when I saw the above video of KFC’s President apologizing in front of the video.You do great marketing promotion to create buzz from the customers and not to have President of a company apologize for how bad it went. I also saw the twitter updates and most of them started with “sorry” and “apology”. I started to think how hard that job had been for the PR person who was handling the KFC twitter account.

I don’t agree with the millions that Denny’s spent during the Superbowl just to announce Free Breakfast. I think if you are giving Free breakfast one doesn’t have to spend millions. It could have been advertised with out spending that kind of money. They could have contacted with few hand full of food bloggers and given them  the Free Breakfast coupons with limited numbers of downloads. Denny’s would have saved those I don’t know how many millions of dollars. Additionally it would have been more effective than the Superbowl Ad. The most important thing would be to facilitate the restaurants to track the number of downloads. The sophisticated software would even allow to distribute the coupons at certain town or city and also the numbers of coupons that would be able to be downloaded by the customers.

Without the tracking mechanism built which is virtually impossible on tv broadcast, it was chaos in some way. It was overwhelming and some of the customers who had to wait too long or could not even get into the restaurant were now angry at the restaurant. So thought the promotion was to create the buzz, it had negative counter effect. I think this is more harmful than the money they wasted in the drain during the Superbowl. They might be able to earn back the money they lost during the Superbowl. But the trust they lost due to the broken promise that they could not keep up with their customers could possibly be never earned back.

The same thing happened with KFC Free Chicken promotion too-overwhelming and chaos. They went on and announced with the help of one of the most influential figure in media-Oprah. In a way people were listening to Oprah than KFC. I am wondering how Oprah felt with all the situation and if she would be willing to do this kind of risky announcement later in the future. I bet she would be very careful with restaurant promotions she would agree to announce. Oprah, definitely would not want to risk the leverage of her trust with her viewers and admirers.

KFC’s idea is brilliant. But the way it was executed and how the chaos was handled is certainly not encouraging one. In fact it did more harm than the buzz that they initially wanted to create out of this promotion. Internet is powerful medium. It either works for you if executed well or it works against you if not planned well and things don’t go your way. So the key is to be very careful before you do this kind of mass scale Free Food marketing promotion and have a careful plannings and control mechanism built before rolling any promotions.

I know that KFC had a website where they were allowing customers to download the coupons to redeem it for Free Chicken at one of their restaurants. Later I also heard that they had taken down the coupons just to control the chaos. They couldn’t handle the overwhelming rush of hungry customers which were more than the amounts of chicken that they had in their restaurants. Some of them even had to close their restaurants just because they could not keep up with the demands.

I am not sure if their Free Chicken Coupons distribution had a control mechanism built with special coupon tracking software. With the havoc that went on, it seems they didn’t have it or they couldn’t execute it well enough. Other wise people wouldn’t be talking the negative thing about the free chicken promotion.I believe restaurants have to come up with a mechanism where they should have a control over the Free Food down loadable coupons. They should be able to distribute evenly to all parts of the area where their restaurants are located. With the help of sophisticated software they could assign certain numbers of coupons to certain town or city even dissecting it to zip codes. That way you would know for sure that you would send only that amount of traffic to the restaurant where the staffs would be able to handle the crowds and the customers who got the coupons would be happy to be seated on time and enjoy the breakfast rather than complaining for the chaos.

This is a big lesson for any restaurant to rethink before they do Free Food Promotion. It is a good marketing promotion if you can control it by limiting the number of coupons that you can let your customers download based on the capacity of your restaurant in that particular area.

Should you have other ideas how KFC could have done better, please share your thoughts too. It would be beneficial to all restaurants including Kentucky Fried Chicken should they decide for free food promotions in the future.