If you don’t know by now the KFC (@kfc_colonel) Free Chicken Meal offer from Oprah (@oprah) is now over.  KFC pulled the offer and is now having the President of KFC apologize to America through a youtube video.  Both Oprah and KFC should have realized that this type of promotion had the makings of disaster. I was one of the lucky ones to actually redeem my coupon but I could not get the grilled chicken or my choice of sides as advertised on the coupon. I had to settle for a substitution of the original recipe and coleslaw with mashed potatoes. I was not mad at them for the substitution and I really appreciated them still honoring the coupon even though they had run out of the grilled chicken. But I was one of the lucky ones because now there is only a “Rain Check” waiting for anyone willing to bring their Oprah/KFC coupon into a KFC location.  Check out the details below.

One good learning experience that came out of this mess for both KFC and Oprah was the marketing impact this offer had on both their brands. This will be an obvious case study on what not to do with a free meal offer.

The Twitter impact was also both good and bad. KFC and Oprah were both top trends for the past few days almost bringing the Twitter platform to a halt. This serge of traffic pushed Oprah’s followers over 900k but only increased KFC to just over 2k.

I in turn got a Tweet from KFC to my @jbrath twitter account saying they would make good on me not getting to sample the Kentucky Grilled Chicken with my free coupon.  They instructed me to send them a DM and they would take care of me.  So KFC its on you to redeem yourself to me and all those millions of people who were turned away empty handed with no grilled chicken on behalf of Oprah.

I will update this blog post with the KFC answer to my DM.

Let me know your thoughts

JB

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