China Marketing Lab

KFC, the usually savvy China marketers, got their fingers burnt last week due to their ’Super Value Tuesday’ online voucher promotion. The offer featured a 50% discount on their popular chicken bucket.

This is my understanding of the promo. It is run in conjunction with the popular online store Taobao, with the idea that 100 lucky respondents will be eligible for this ’instant’ offer. There are three rounds in which offers are posted; round one is at 10am, round two at 2pm and round three at 4pm, consumers respond instantly through Taobao in the hope that they will receive a voucher in their inbox, the winning recipients can then redeem their vouchers at KFC restaurants. However, it seems that last week, before round one had even finished vouchers supposedly for round two and three already begun circulating on the Internet. It would seem that they were being shared as ‘valid to all’, rather than on the original basis of being valid only to the lucky 100 winners. Read the rest of this entry »