The Brief

Pizza Hut has always been the No.1 pizza brand but recently Domino's has entered the market and is threatening its position as the leader in pizza delivery. Pizza Hut needs to work harder to retain its fans and customers or risk losing them to Domino's. There's also an opportunity to garner new customers during the up-coming World Cup season where pizza delivery is highly relevant. Apart from maintaining food quality, Pizza Hut needs to stay top-of-mind and provide useful services which makes their delivery offering more superior than Domino's.

Describe how the promotion developed from concept to implementation

The times when you need a pizza the most, is also the times everyone wants it such as lunch or dinner peak hours, soccer or festive season. Or worse in the case of countries like Singapore, traffic rules do not permit delivery during rainy days at all. Working with pulled weather data, traffic data, soccer match schedules, and Pizza Hut's delivery CRM data, we created Pizza Forecaster mobile app. This app predicts rain, weekend and festive peak hours, soccer nights etc. and prompts the user to order pizzas one hour before delivery is not possible.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

With no media push, the app was seeded amongst Pizza Hut's 160,000+ fans on Facebook. Within the first day of launch, the app has been downloaded more than 10,000 times. After the launch of the app in just 3 weeks, 10% increase in delivery sales has been attributed to the app. With just a small budget of USD 7,000, this app has demonstrated an ROI that's reframing the client's expectations of what marketing can be as this has not only shown immediate effectiveness but also builds brand affinity with a unique service offering.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

This app is the first of its kind and was designed specially to solve a real delivery need. This unique solution from Pizza Hut allows the brand to position itself in a timely and relevant manner before its competitors like Domino's come to mind. This value-added service would be greatly appreciated by Pizza Hut fans and thus retain them. Its usefulness would also inspire Pizza Hut fans to share with their friends through peer to peer sharing or through Pizza Hut's Facebook page and this will help garner new customers.