The Franchise Industry and PR world have been busy dissecting the recent KFC promotion involving Oprah’s giveaway of KFC grilled dinners. At last week’s Bulldog Media Relations Summit in New York, many autopsies were performed on this campaign. Several top PR professionals gave their diagnoses on what went wrong and how well KFC is doing in repairing the damage.
Overall, KFC did a good job cleaning up the mess which included media reports of customers lined up outside some KFC locations and angry about not getting their promised dinners. KFC had to get an apologetic message out via press releases and social media channels to show that they are making good on the free meals.
More importantly for other franchise systems is this question: how can we avoid a similar self-inflicted media crisis? The answer is to include, and in fact to focus on, all local franchisees in any major PR campaign.
The way to accomplish this is to issue customized news releases via local franchisees.
Instead of a general, generic corporate message that may include the water-down phrase “at participating locations”, successful franchisors are executing customized, localized versions of the release on behalf of each franchisee.
The effect is:
- Closing the communications loop. All franchisees would be aware of and involved in the news content going out to their local media and national media.
- Driving more business to each franchisee’s local store. This is due to the specific naming of the location in the localized release. Let’s not have the customer guessing “is my neighborhood store a participating location?”
- Increasing media pick-up in community media. It’s increasingly unlikely that national media cares about promotions and giveaways (until it breaks bad and gets ugly!), but local media have the interest and space to publish a story about a local business.
- Promote the franchisees as hundreds – or thousands – of local business people involved in a fantastic national promotion. Plus, what local franchisee would not want to be mentioned in a positive local news story alongside Oprah?!?!?!
