What KFC taught us about crisis management
Running out of chicken isn’t great news when you’re a chicken shop. Here, PR and social media expert Logan Harrington walks us through how KFC made the best of a bad situation with a perfectly executed crisis management strategy.
On January 5 2018, I declared that KFC was “still absolutely on point for another corker of a year” when it came to their social media strategy.
On February 19, KFC ran out of chicken (awks), and 600 out of 900 of their stores across Britain were forced to shut up shop. So, amidst #KFCCrisis trending and their competitors taking cheap shots at ‘em, what did we learn about crisis management on social media?
You rock up to your favourite chicken shop and it’s closed. What’s the first thing you do? Head to social media to rant and rave, and share a few quick quips about it. Seriously, everyone did. Even Jesus Christ himself didn’t miss out on the meme opportunity.
Yeah, its almost like KFC were overly prepared…..
Someone might have used Maths and worked out that shutting some stores for a couple of days might result in X loss of profits BUT in doing so would create over X worth of earned media…..resulting in sales and profit
I want a KFC, just like I wanted one last week when I COULDN’T GET ONE.
KFC has some smart cookies in the marketing team!
This was a great response, but on the scale of ‘Whoops we stuffed up’ to ‘We poisoned kids in 3rd world countries with our product!’ this crisis rates a solid whoops. Hardly a crisis.