Never a Lack of Ideas

Recap By now, you’ve probably heard about the KFC coupon promotion for a free meal of new Kentucky Grilled Chicken (KGC) that Oprah gave out through her website a few weeks ago. KFC severely underestimated the power of both Oprah and a free meal, and the coupon promotion backfired for the restaurant chain. Read about it in my first post about the KFC coupon . A Second Chance I decided to give Kentucky Grilled Chicken another chance. So, my co-worker and I headed back to the only KFC in Chicago’s Loop for lunch last week. We brought with us a new coupon that offered a free KGC meal if we purchased an equivalent one. We were shocked by what we saw on the store’s door when we arrived to the restaurant. The KFC restaurant has been closed indefinitely by the Cook County Sheriff’s office. (Check out the sign posted on the door in the picture on the right.) Unbelievable! According to some gentlemen standing outside the restaurant who had been working on a construction site nearby, the KFC res...

Get in Line Everybody hates waiting in lines. That’s why I was so refreshed when I visited Tony & Harry’s Restaurant in the city of Lihue on the island of Kauai in Hawaii. They have the coolest thing I’ve ever seen while waiting in a line to order some food, and I didn’t mind waiting because of it. Tiny Bubbles Tony & Harry’s Restaurant has a Playstation connected to a big screen television and a video camera. The camera shows people in line on the big screen and the Playstation superimposes virtual bubbles all over the screen. When someone in line moves around and “hits” the bubbles on the screen, they burst or multiply. It’s really fun. (That’s me in the photo on the right, taking a picture of myself on the big screen tv with bubbles all around me.) I had so much fun busting bubbles with my hands, feet, and head, that by the time it was my turn to order, I didn’t even notice that I had been standing in line for five minutes. Everyone that I was with also got in on the bubble-...

Gutenberg Would Be Proud For all the buzz about digital and social media marketing these days, I was really excited to see this Stihl ad in the Wall Street Journal recently. (Forgive the quality of the image – scanning a tall newspaper can be tricky. Click on it to blow it up.) I am excited by this weed-whacker ad because it re-affirms the qualities of a great print ad that can’t be duplicated in any other medium. This can’t work as a t.v. spot or a banner on a website. It can only work in print, and the execution of the ad is top-notch. It creatively blurs the line between the medium and the advertisement. The ad is creative, eye-catching, and it made me pause and admire it. I even started reading the article a little bit. It’s nice to see that Stihl put some time and effort into creating an advertisement that earned my attention. Creativity and Placement I’ll assume that the target market for a weed-whacker is a male homeowner above the age of 30. I’ll also assume that the majority o...

Conjuring up the Spectacular The Harry Potter edition of the classic board game Clue is fantastic because it exceeded my expectations. Even fans of Clue who have never read a Harry Potter book or seen a movie will enjoy this new take on the game because it’s something new. It’s original. A Major Makeover Parker Brothers, the game’s manufacturer, could have simply created a Clue game in which: the suspects are characters from the Harry Potter series the weapons are spells the rooms are located in Hogwarts – the school for witchcraft and wizardry That would have been enough to sell the game to thousands of Harry Potter fans, but Clue fans wouldn’t have been excited about the game. Parker Brothers chose to go above and beyond a simple facelift of the game, and they actually spent time thinking about how to improve the game by adding twists from the Harry Potter series. The resulting game is more fun to play than the original Clue, and will sell far better than the simple facelift would...

A Great Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, Kentucky Fried Chicken offered a coupon that was good for two free pieces of their new “Kentucky Grilled Chicken,” two free sides, and a free biscuit. The coupon had to be printed from a new microsite – www.unthinKFC.com between 9:00 a.m on May 5th and 11:59 p.m. on May 6th, but the coupon can be redeemed anytime from May 5th through the 19th. This promotion was announced on Oprah Winfrey’s show on May 5th, and it received a ton of immediate publicity. I heard about it via word of mouth from a co-worker. Needless to say, once Oprah got involved, word spread like wildfire. Oprah’s website even had a news story on the promotion and a link to the microsite. Clearly, KFC did a tremendous job generating publicity and word of mouth for this promotion. Failed Execution Along with several of my co-workers, I printed the coupon out on Tuesday. I made plans with a friend at work to walk to the only KFC store in the...

Boxes are Big Business A large cardboard box at the self-storage facility just down the street from my home costs $3.50. My wife rents a storage unit at the facility because she is a sales representative and needs to keep her product samples somewhere secure. There are several other sales reps. like her that store their samples at the same facility. Every time I visit the storage facility, I see a dumpster full of broken down cardboard boxes that are waiting to be picked up for recycling. The majority of the boxes that I’ve seen in the dumpster appear to be brand new. So, I got to thinking: Why doesn’t the storage facility sell these boxes at a discounted price to people who need boxes? Why bother to send them to a recycling center when they can first be reused? Reusing Boxes – A Win-Win Situation I’m willing to bet that when given a choice, a lot of people who are shopping for cardboard boxes would prefer to pay $2.00 for a gently used large box instead of $3.50 for a brand new box. S...