Pre-testing Global Innovation Advertising to Gauge Local Demand
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
Pizza Hut uses a mix of price, promotion, equity, and innovation messaging in market to support its various promotional windows. Some of these windows are annual campaigns to support tried and true promotions (like $10 Favourites) and others are for launching new menu items and ingredients.
Pizza Hut had two new innovations coming to the Canadian market in 2022 and required a read on where and how consumers resonated with the proposed messaging.
Audience
Brainsights recruited Pizza Hut’s target customers from its pre-built community for Pizza Hut.
Technology
A broad range of video content comprised the clutter reel (check out the concept testing case for an example). Participants were equipped with mobile EEG headsets that record levels of attention, emotional connection and memory encoding. The video was synced to the brain response of participants at the millisecond level through our Audience Brain Measurement system, and after viewing, participants completed an exit survey.
Analysis and advice
Second-by-second and average overall neuro data was analyzed for each out-of-market innovation ad. This revealed impact differences on Canadians, plus opportunities to improve performance.
By comparing these to Pizza Hut ad benchmarks, we could understand whether the global asset would resonate with the local audience and drive business growth and how best to adapt the ad for the local market.
The results
Significant cost and time savings.
Understanding both the overall performance of global assets and their moment-by-moment impact on consumers helped convince Pizza Hut that adaptation (and the significant time and cost savings from doing so) was a viable and attractive approach.
For example, Pizza Hut decided to adapt their mid-east ad for Canada using their own ambassador and assets. The result was savings, in both time and money. They didn’t have to start from scratch, and could remove the entire creative ideation component, which meant no presentations or back-and-forth communications with their agency to get the winning concept.
It also had the blueprint necessary to make surgical changes to global assets to ensure optimal impact on local consumers.
For all the pizza-dough lovin’ CFOs out there, think of it this way: it’s like finding a way to get the extra toppings you want, but without having to pay the extra dollars to do so.
What Pizza Hut found amounted to hundreds of person-hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cost savings, collapsing timelines and improving organizational efficiency.
Prioritization, but make it pizza.
