Endorsement deals of enormous amounts are common for celebrities of all kinds. I have wondered often how profit-seeking firms determine the price and the size of any endorsement deals that they offer. I am quite impressed that Oprah Winfrey's feature about a chicken give away by KFC has resulted in such an overwhelming response from the public that the franchise has had to cancel the promotion.
This leads me to note two things. First is that Oprah Winfrey is capable of pulling consumers towards a brand. The second and more material question is whether KFC took account of the fact that the economic situation added to Oprah's promotion could lead to such a response. In short, the KFC's marketing managers should be thankful to Oprah while their supervisors ought to take them back to school. they have not figured out yet what moves their product.
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KFC consumers' flight to free food said more about the size of Oprah's television audience and political past than it did her ability to bring consumers to a product. Each Oprah episode has an average audience of 7 million viewers, but her history of work with PETA, especially receiving the PETA Person of the Year award recently, put her endorsement to a much wider audience (HuffPost, CNN, MSNBC all carried the story) because of KFC's animal rights record. Ryan Seacrest could have used American Idol's almost 40 million viewers to send a message to even more people, but the American media would probably not have picked up the non-story. Had Pam Anderson (a significant PETA advocate) endorsed the giveaway, it would have received similar coverage.
KFC didn't just demonstrate a failure to anticipate a huge reaction, but a failure to control its own image as the campaign escaped its own ads and was part of a larger story about animal rights and unpreparedness.
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