Tapping into the brains & bellies of consumers to find out what out what makes them tick—and order pizza
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 came to Brainsights to figure out how to attract new consumers, including one source of growth: younger ones.
The brand had a number of innovations coming to market in 2022 that it believed would appeal to this demographic.
But Pizza Hut needed to ensure that it would still maintain its appeal with the 35+ segment, where larger families were more likely and its higher price point and indulgence messaging were more likely to resonate.
This required a deep understanding of what each segment valued, making sure those values cascaded into the right messaging for all of their priorities.
Here’s how we got the results.
Audience
We recruited target customers from our pre-built community for Pizza Hut.
Technology
A broad range of video content comprised the clutter reel and 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.
If you need a refresher on what this looks like, take a look at the concept testing case study.
Analysis and advice
For each ad, neuro data was analyzed by each key consumer segment (18-35, 35+, loyalists and non-rejectors). This was to help us understand two things:
What messages appealed to older/younger consumers?
Which appealed best to existing customers and potential customers?
More category and non-category ads and messaging were analyzed to augment and provide additional nuance and support to Pizza Hut’s findings. This provided the brand with vital insights to their questions, like how can we best communicate with and acquire infrequent buyers? and the world’s biggest question: what do Gen-Zers really want?! Or, put more eloquently in the words of Pizza Hut: How can we better communicate so we can appeal to younger consumers?
The results
Risk reduction and performance improvement.
Using these insights, Pizza Hut made some radical improvements to two key areas:
Their media plan: By understanding which ads appealed to key customer segments, Pizza Hut could target specific customer segments with messages known to resonate.
Their creative development for greater appeal: Understanding the unconscious response curves of various key audience segments allowed Pizza Hut to focus in on the messages, tones, products and promotions that delivered the greatest resonance.
