They also created a hashtag #wheresmychicken cambodia whatsapp number and set up a website cleverly containing crossed-the-road in the URL. To round up their social media strategy, they kept up with a few Q&A-style posts on Twitter with the caption “There’s gossip in the hen house, here are the facts…”.
Outcome
These supply chain disruptions are not as uncommon or quite as problematic as some might think. However, in KFC’s case, their chicken-dependent menu and single location warehouse played into this being a bigger problem that was quickly caught by the customers. KFC played it off great, using social media to its advantage. Not only were they in on the joke (because there is a joke to be made with KFC running out of chicken), but they kept going with it throughout the crisis.
Just as Johnson & Johnson did, KFC took actionable steps to keep people informed. And social media makes it so much easier nowadays. They didn’t leave it at one post/statement. Rather, they kept up with informative content to keep people updated and to answer some FAQs. What’s more, they put an ad in the newspaper with a clever rearrangement of letters in their name – just to further drive home that “our bad, we messed up”.
