Mapping Category Share of Mind for QSR

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

Understand the competitive threat, and learning what connects with consumers from the category.

Pizza Hut operates in a highly competitive climate. Along with the numerous famous brands in the market, they’re working in a dynamic environment that shifts with consumers’ tastes.

That means a strong brand with strong messaging is essential.

A key input into this is understanding the strengths and vulnerabilities of the competition. By studying consumer response to the competition, Pizza Hut had the potential to learn how to talk to consumers about specific innovations in a way that really resonates.

Here’s how we found out what that sounded like.

Audience

We recruited Pizza Hut’s target customers from our 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 brain response of participants at the millisecond level through our Audience Brain Measurement system, and after viewing, participants completed an exit survey.

Among the clutter reel content were competitive advertising, plus specific advertising relating to plant-based meat alternatives.

Analysis and advice

We analyzed consumer neural response data at the overall ad level and at the second-by-second level. Ads were content-coded by key variables of interest, including brand, ad objective and plant-based/meat alternative communications.

The Results

Learning what connects with consumers is a big task with some even bigger questions:

What competitive blunting can we expect? Where are the threats and opportunities? Can we learn anything from the competitive activity and what works on the consumer’s unconscious mind?

Yes. Yes, we can.

By analyzing consumer response to category advertising, Pizza Hut could understand with more precision and confidence the best way to communicate innovation, particularly in plant-based meat alternatives.

When we plotted competitive activity, Pizza Hut could get the true value of competitive media activity, combining creative quality to media spend and impressions in-market.