Great story on Yahoo! News this morning:
Kentucky Fried Chicken is transporting its secret recipe to an undisclosed location via armed guard.
Article says:
"So important is the 68-year-old concoction that coats the chain's Original Recipe chicken that only two company executives at any time have access to it.
The company refuses to release their name or title, and it uses multiple suppliers who produce and blend the ingredients but know only a part of the entire contents."
I bet a chef and a scientist could put their heads together and reverse-engineer the whole thing in about 3 days.
It might be even simpler than that.... just send a bag of fry mix to a lab to get analyzed.
BUT NONE OF THAT WOULD EVER MATTER. Because it's never about the product itself.
What matters is: KFC has a great STORY to go along with the food that their customers love.
My friend, their recipe and the mystique they create around it is a GREAT hook.
And every year the story gets better, because it gets older.
Then the PR department can cook up a great event like this one today, where the president of KFC opens the special safe where a yellowing piece of paper is stored... it's placed in a special suitcase and handcuffed to a special agent and taken to an unmarked building somewhere.
Dude, listen up: It's not enough to just make good fried chicken! People want a STORY to go with it.
A story of a secret recipe, a secret spice, something so special that only two executives have access to it at any one time.
Then... when somebody *says* they've cracked the code on the recipe -- everyone sort of doubts them, and at best they're merely a knock-off.
Now: The most important thing I want to tell you today is --
A secret recipe like this probably exists in your business, too.
Maybe you've heard the story of 1000 restaurant owners who rejected Colonel Sanders' Fried Chicken proposal, and Prospect #1001 who finally said "yes."
BUT... did you ever hear the story behind the story?
The real story is:
The Colonel had a restaurant in Corbin, Kentucky, which had been doing very well.
A new interstate highway was planned to bypass the town of Corbin.
Seeing that his business was about to dry up, the Colonel auctioned off his operations.
After paying his bills, he had nothing to live on except his $105 Social Security checks.
In 1952, confident of his chicken recipe, he began crisscrossing the country in his car, making an offer to restaurant owners:
He would walk into a restaurant, announce to the owner, "I bet my chicken recipe is better than yours" and propose a cook-off.
(The chicken provided by the restaurants he visited, using his recipe, was part of his plan for feeding himself during those lean days.)
If the owner was favorable, he would "franchise" his chicken recipe to them at 5 cents per chicken.
In all, just over 1000 restaurants turned him down, without one successful deal.
Then one day he was having his daily cooking duel with a bar owner, who said to him, "Sir, I'm trying to sell beer, not chicken. This stuff needs to be a whole lot saltier so customers will get thirsty and buy beer!"
So he grabbed the salt shaker, poured some salt on, and took another bite. "Now THIS is GREAT," he said. "If you'll add salt to this recipe, I'm a taker!"
The Colonel took a bite and spit it out -- it was terrible!
But Colonel Sanders had been on a NO SALT DIET for 30 years, so his tastes were obviously different than everyone else's.
The Colonel wasn't stupid! He might not like the salt, but it was better than poverty. Thus began the Colonel's enormously successful Kentucky Fried Chicken legacy.
Here's the kicker: At one time, if you bought a box of Kentucky Fried Chicken, here's what it said on the side:
"When Colonel Sanders added the 11th spice, he instantly knew it was the best chicken he'd ever had."
Of course they didn't tell you what spice it was.
This is so instructive.
First of all, Colonel Sanders could have made 1000 MORE presentations, driven his car until the transmission fell out, spent every dime of those $105 Social Security checks, prayed for success and recited positive affirmations every morning in front of the mirror.
But he still would have come up empty handed, had he not been willing to change his recipe!
Secondly, although the recipe he so passionately believed in was the best recipe for HIS taste buds, it was not the recipe that his customers really wanted. Without a recipe that the customers wanted, no amount of effort or persistence would make it work.
With the right recipe, he was unstoppable.
Third, the recipe he had before he added salt was ALMOST right. It was VERY, VERY CLOSE to what it needed to be.
Adding salt to a lousy recipe wouldn't have helped much.
So all the effort he expended developing the original recipe was worthwhile.
Fourth: Persistence DID pay off, but not the way we might expect it to. Sometimes we're looking for the magical day when our persistence, and the sheer number of people we talk to, leads us to the RIGHT person who will say "Yes" and open wide the doors to success.
But for Colonel Sanders, playing the "Numbers Game" was not the key.
The real key was bumping into someone with the audacity to suggest something different, and for the Colonel to be eager enough for a breakthrough to change his recipe.
Fifth, the magical ingredient was ordinary table salt. Salt, all by itself, is worthless as a food item. Chicken, all by itself, is pretty bland, and may not even do the trick with 10 other perfectly good spices. Put them together, though, and you've got a real winner!
Never overlook the possibility of combining very ordinary things to create something "entirely new."
Finally, motivation and hard work alone are rarely (if ever) enough to accomplish a challenging goal. Innovation, flexibility, careful listening, endless experimentation, and the setting aside of egos and old paradigms are all equally important.
Original Source: http://www.PerryMarshall.com/
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