A fine hue of capitalist color palette was seen in a surprising and unusual cause-marketing push by KFC. It offered to help in tackling the pothole problem in Louisville, Ky. in exchange for stamping the fresh pavement with “Re-freshed by KFC,” in a chalky stencil.
Col Sanders filling potholes
“This program is a perfect example of that rare and optimal occurrence when a company can creatively market itself and help local governments and everyday Americans across the country,” said Javier Benito, exec VP-marketing and food innovation at KFC. Louisville Mayor Jerry Abramson noted in a statement that budgets are tight for cities across the country, and finding funding for road repairs is a dirty job. “It’s great to have a concerned corporation like KFC create innovative private/public partnerships like this pothole refresh program.”
The KFC program appears to be part of a growing body of consumer-service marketing that connects in a meaningful way. This past holiday season, Charmin provided a public restroom in Times Square for the third year running. The company has also developed an application for iPhone and BlackBerry that helps consumers find toilets when the need arises. Samsung has installed electrical charging stations in many major airports to help travelers stay connected while in limbo.
Creating goodwill
KFC has for long been accused by animal rights people of using inhuman ways to kill chicken or using modified chicken for prepration, am not sure if these accusations are correct or not but they dont help the brand in any good way. Filling potholes may not entice people to wat more KFC chicken burgers but surely can create a goowill and hence increasing sales, decressing guilt inside consumers filling the potholes of KFC’s reputation.
More from: Adage
Every other weekend when I check the ever growing internet for new startups, its surprising to see the new ideas which have come from different black corners. One of these startups I have seen growing in front of me where I know personally the three musketeers who have created it is Fachak.com
Fachak
Lets talk about the idea of this startup first. Fachak.com has rolled out what it calls as the “independent ‘format-neutral’ & ‘multi-source’ content sharing platform”. Fachak allows one to share content of various formats like DOC, Videos, JPEG, PNG, PDF and PPT etc. Its USP lies in enabling users to not only share the data by uploading it at Fachak servers but also sharing the content from other famous content shating sites like YouTube, Slideshare and Scribd. So in case you already have some file uploaded in YouTube by yourself or someone else, you can embed that in Fachak and share with Fachak’s community. Its a clever feature as a typical user may share his presentations from Slideshare, videos from YouTube and Images from Flickr over here in one consolidated profile page. But the revenue doesnt come from the content per se, revenue for these host – YouTube, Slideshare etc come from the UI in which they show this content. So in the end Fachak saves upon the server space and cost as content is coming from other website’s server while it gains the revenue as UI is of Fachak! Pretty neat!
For a social sharing site the flow of pipeline is very important. People should keep sharing the stuff and people should keep viewing the stuff, any one of this dries up, the site may go in for a toss. So how is this site faring? I logged in today and saw this message “Your last log in was Mar 6th, 21:46. There are 8640 entities since your last login”. Boy! That is a huge number now!
And just to emphasize the fact that it is promising enough, check these stats by WebSite Outlook
Net Worth : $15395.7
Daily Pageview : 6451
Daily Ads Revenue : $21.09 ( This has been rising and was $15 just 2 weeks back!)
Backlinks : 2051
Google Page Rank : 3
The website is in alpha right now and have been adding features, improving them and becoming more mature. The entry is by invitation, but the views are for free. I have invites available , so in case you want it just leave a comment mentioning same.
