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Oct 1, 2019

Crisis Communication: KFC, a success case

KFC

Every year there are cases of well-known companies that, for some reason, went into crisis. In these circumstances it is essential to be transparent, proactive, to have a plan in case something goes wrong. We present the case of KFC, an American restaurant chain known for its fried chicken.

After a major delay in deliveries to KFC warehouses, most of its restaurants in the UK and Ireland have run out of chicken. The situation forced more than half of the restaurants to close.

Quickly the teams of public relations e marketing of KFC got together and started trying to work around this crisis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6cEM0RvT9Y

As a solution, they released an ad in the newspapers with their acronym on their famous fried chicken buckets rearranged: FCK instead of KFC, with an apology explaining the situation.

kfc

"WE'RE SORRY

A Chicken restaurant without any chicken. It's not ideal.Huge apologies to our customers, especially those who travelled out their way to find we were closed. And endless thaks to our KFC team members and our franchise partners for working tirelessly to improve the situation, It's been a hell of a week, but we're making progress, and every day more and more fresh chicken is being delivered to our restaurants. Thank you for bearinhg with us"

They also created in their site a place where customers could check how the chicken stock was doing in the restaurants and which ones were working or not. They remained active on social media, always responding to customer comments and questions. This incident went so viral that they even created the hashtag #KFCCRISIS with which consumers posted messages of support and praise for this campaign on social media.

The KFC team did everything transparently, quickly, and true to the voice of the brand. They became a crisisThis could have been fatal for the restaurant chain, in a funny moment causing the customers to support them and find the situation funny, instead of criticizing.

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