Managing Creative Risk to Deliver Strong Topline Growth for Pizza Hut
The situation
If you live in Canada and love a classic pan-fried pizza, you’re probably familiar with Pizza Hut. Maybe you’ve dined at the restaurant, made your own sundae for dessert, or, as a kid, celebrated your love of reading with their Book It! program and a well-deserved personal pan pizza.
And because you live in Canada—and clearly love good food—you also probably know that this country offers a lot of options when it comes to quick-service restaurants.
From towns to cities, you’ve got national institutions like Tim Hortons colliding with global brands like McDonald’s and Subway (seriously: count the number of Tim Hortons in the next small town you visit).
So, how does a brand keep up while standing out? Product development, advertising campaigns, new menu innovations… the list of expensive options goes on, without a clear direction of what one will move the needle. Fortunately, we were here to deliver the goods: the data.
(We left the pizza delivery to the pros.)
The challenge
Digital-first behaviour favours delivery-oriented incumbents. For the pizza segment of the market, that means Domino’s, 241, and Pizza Pizza.
While Pizza Hut has been long-perceived as a delicious dine-in pizza option, they’re not top of mind when it comes to delivery options: but they’ve been working hard to change this, offering a multi-channel approach that includes mobile app ordering, and the brand is putting money behind increasing adoption.
This means attracting new and younger consumers while keeping the same growth in the restaurant.
Mobile apps + pizza + younger consumers. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Not exactly.
With only a fraction of the budget and market size of its competitors, Pizza Hut needed some cost-effective methods to figure out where to begin, and more importantly, how to unlock consumer insights to drive efficient and outsized growth.
The ask
Referred to Brainsights by another marketer who’d found success with our approach, Pizza Hut initially came to us in need of a much more robust concept testing solution; one that quantified the qualitative and more comprehensively managed marketing investment risk.
They needed to really nail this concept test, because their creative agency, Ogilvy, had brought them two really strong ideas, and they had to make a choice.
The problem? One of these ideas would require quite a bit more investment in terms of music licensing, which meant Pizza Hut needed proof of ROI. Was this going to be worth it in terms of incremental sales growth and longevity?
Well, we found out.
Pizza Hut had two animated storyboards they wanted to test to answer two main questions:
Did the promotional concept have the ability to break through the market?
Could it drive positive brand consideration?
Audience
Constructing and issuing a participant recruitment survey, we recruited more than 90 target consumers for Pizza Hut.
Loyalists and non-rejectors
A wide age range to allow for 18-35 and 35+ splits
Various family sizes to understand how different households perceive the promotional messaging
People who ordered regularly from mobile apps and live within the physical catchment area of a Pizza Hut store
Technology
Now for the fun stuff. We used a broad range of video content that was constructed into a clutter reel for viewing, then equipped participants with mobile EEG headsets to record levels of attention, emotional connection, and memory encoding. The video was synced to the brain response of our participants at the millisecond level through Brainsights’ Audience Brain Measurement system.
Did we lose you?
Okay, picture this. Participants watch the clutter reels, and those contain a bunch of stuff: entertaining clips mixed in with some news clips, some competitive advertising (hi, Domino’s), and even political ads. The video content was intentionally run-of-the-mill and designed to represent what consumers could be viewing on any given day.
After the viewing, participants completed an exit survey — yes, even though we already read their minds.
Analysis and advice
After the data collection was done, we analyzed the focal advertising and benchmarked it against three sets of data for comparison:
The clutter reel: consumer response in the time period
Category advertising: for the last six months
Concept benchmarks: including animatics and animated storyboards
Then, we presented the champion: the winning concept (with proof).
Not only were we able to identify and recommend the ideal spot for production, but by splitting loyalists from new customers, as well as young vs. older demographics, we could identify which ad performed best amongst current and new customers. The result? We could also give Pizza Hut insights on how to bring in a fresh set of customers without alienating their current ones. Boom.
The results
Let’s talk about why we’re here: risk reduction and business growth. Or, to be blunt, did it work?
By quantifying the qualitative with neuro-measurement, Pizza Hut felt much
more confident in their recommended path forward, and were able to rationalize the incremental investment that was needed for the winning concept.
So, how winning was it?
When distributed in-market, Pizza Hut reaped 6.7% YOY sales growth, underlining the sound risk management and optimization insights from Brainsights’ concept testing approach.
(Not that we’re bragging, or anything).
