The Most Unusual Marketing Stories Of All Time V: Krav Maga And How To Apply It In Sales and Marketing.
Have you heard of Krav Maga?
It is widely known as the world’s most effective and dangerous form of martial art.
In effect, it is also the deadliest in the world.
Krav Maga is a military self-defence and fighting system developed for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli security forces.
It is derived from a combination of the most effective and practical techniques of other fighting styles – boxing, wrestling, judo, aikido, karate and street fighting.
Krav Maga focuses on real-world situations and doesn’t care for rules and opponents well being – either permanently damage your opponents or kill them.
Its theme is:
“When you fight them, don’t fight fair cos you’ll never win.” – Kendrick Lamar (Ronald Reagan Era)
Krav Maga was derived from the street-fighting experience of Hungarian-Israeli martial artist Imi Lichtenfeld, who made use of his training as a boxer and wrestler.
Some of the keys focus of techniques in Krav Maga are:
– Finishing a fight as quickly and aggressively as possible.
– Aiming at the most vulnerable parts of the body.
– Continuing to strike the opponent until they are completely incapacitated.
– Using any available objects at hand that could be used to hit an opponent.
This last sentence leads to the next point of using Krav Maga in your sales and marketing campaigns.
But first of all, let’s talk about a multinational corporation that turned around a negative situation with what can only be described as a Krav Maga technique.
Enter KFC.
It’s 2018 and KFC restaurants are running out of key ingredients, including chicken.
Not particularly due to the company’s or any of their staff’s fault.
It was a logistics issue.
But it was so bad that there were at least 53,000 mentions of KFC running out of chicken, alongside hashtags such as “#ChickenCrisis” and “#KFCCrisis”.
KFC had 900 of their restaurants closed.
Now, think about that as a business owner.
According to Meghan Farren, KFC’s chief marketing officer for the UK & Ireland, “At the time, our business was, to be honest, on its knees. We have 26,000 team members across the UK and Ireland, and many of them were taking abuse from customers, day in and day out. They were being berated for not having salt, for not having ketchup sachets, for running out of hot wings.“
The executives at KFC knew they needed to do two things:
1. Send out a mass apology to the public.
2. Explain what the problem was, what was being done to fix it, and fix it immediately.
So, how did they achieve this?
Enter the FCK Campaign.
FCK pronounced as f*ck was guided by the “three Hs” of “humility, humour and honesty”.
But the fact that it was the word “fuck”, an everyday swear word, but used creatively (rearranging the letters KFC) blew everyone’s mind.
It seized attention, before offering an apology.
Even the apology was funny.
It was a massive success.
The ad would go on to appear in over 700 press articles and TV discussions reaching a combined audience of 797 million all over the world.
Plus, 219 million social-media users within three months.
By that time, the campaign had generated more than one billion impressions. All from a single ad.
All thanks to Krav Maga, this just proves that no situation is irredeemable.
Just fight with anything and everything you have…and you might just win.
I hope this helps you.
– Uche
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