Applying PR Knowledge on The Campaign KFC'S FCK BUCKET KFC (Reaction Paper Sample)

Applying PR Knowledge on The Campaign KFC'S FCK BUCKET KFC
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KFC’s FCK Bucket Campaign
When KFC’s chicken crisis ended up becoming international news when its UK and Ireland operations were on the verge of collapse, customers became extraordinarily bitter and ranted all over social media platforms (Jocelyn, 2018). This was a massive crisis for KFC, because, without a good public relations strategy, it would have been quite difficult for the organization to recover or bounce back to where it was before. Therefore, while the crisis was ongoing, the organization’s top management knew that it was severe and that they had to act fast on the situation at hand. As a result, the top management locked themselves in a room for a meeting, which took 24 hours trying to come up with a solution to this huge crisis (Scott, 2011). It was in this meeting that they came up with an idea of rearranging the letters of its KFC name to “FCK” and used it on their chicken bucket to act as an apology to all its customers (Jocelyn,2018). Besides, they also printed a full-page advertisement in the United Kingdom’s newspapers, which was also meant to make an apology for their chicken shortage. This strategy won a majority of KFC’s fans for the organization’s clever humor.
If I were the public relations manager at KFC during this chicken crisis, I would use various techniques to know if this “FCK” public relations strategy worked. The first technique that I would utilize to measure the effectiveness and success of KFC’s public relations strategy would be to; track the number of press clippings that mention the organization’s products and success after the crisis (Austin & Pinkleton, 2015). For instance, after releasing their “FCK” apology, KFC’s apology became the talk of most media houses in the UK; it flooded all the news stations, and various articles were also written about this apology. Therefore, receiving a huge number of mentions in the media outlets would play a huge role in making me know that the public relations strategy used during the crisis worked.