Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), the famous eatery brand has been doing a particular thing differently. That is employing people with hearing and speaking disabilities. We shall refer them as differently abled. KFC, an83 year old brand has been doing this since 1986, that’s for the past 26 years. In 1986, KFC started employing differently abled people in Malaysia. The restaurant was a big hit, itwas a clear win-win situation. After this success, KFC opened two more restaurants that employed differently abled people.

Cupola Pakistan Ltd, the company that runs KFC in Pakistan hired 30 differently abled employees in 2008. The restaurant is specially designed to run daily operations easily, for instance there are bulbs that act as an indicator for some action.

In India, Devyani International (franchise of Yum Brands, that runs brands like KFC, Costa Coffee and Pizza Hut) opened a KFC restaurant in Kolkata in 2011 that runs entirely with differently abled people. It was again a huge hit and this model is now being replicated across India.

Travopia is a platform where we discuss the technology angle of Travel industry. Till this point, we haven’t discussed anything on technology. So, why this post?

Many would have been aware of this initiative by KFC for a long time now, but did the message reach a bigger audience? Did it go viral? Did the brand gain any positiveness because of this initiative? If this initiative had some impact on the brand, if yes then what was the impact level?

The answer to all questions above is Social Media.

Agreed that this initiative exists since 1986, but now with the advent of social media, this message is going viral. See the screenshot below that shows a Facebook post in Nov 2011. In 1 year, this post was shared 27,000+ times in Facebook.

We believe a majority of the ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ are done in recent few months, because 24 hours earlier the video had got 25K share and now its 27K shares.

Key takeaways from this case study:

• You don’t need a cutting edge technology enabled business to boost / scale business

• Building a brand or culture doesn’t need a technology hand, but technologies like social media is required to spread the word. The core action can still be implemented without technology intervention

• If you think you are doing something unique in your business, let the world know about it. Take advantage of social media. The initial push has to come from within. Even, Apple conducts a keynote event to market its products, that’s the ‘initial-push’.

• If your travel business involves more of human interaction (say travel agent, offline tour operator etc) and less of technology, do not worry much about every aspect of travel becoming web oriented or online. There is still enough room for ‘Human Touch’. Identify that area, master it and market it.

Author: Karthick Prabu