Pizza Hut has revitalized itself through changes to menu options, logo, customer experiences and online presence in order to save itself from its looming demise. This brand revamp includes changes to physical in store structures, offering new healthier options, enhancing the digital experience and offering one of a kind adventurous menu items with a variety of crusts and sauce flavours.
Pizza Hut has fallen behind the competitions in terms of innovation, development and sales. With 56 years in the industry, Pizza Hut was due for a major change in order to have an attempt at gaining back its popularity. Some new flavours include Curried Away, Ginger Boom Boom, Honey Sriracha and Salted Pretzel, and new toppings including Peruvian cherry peppers, sliced banana peppers, and fresh spinach.
These changes resulted from consumer research that indicated they wanted more unique flavour offerings that you couldn’t find anywhere else. As well, Pizza Hut wanted to reach a larger audience of those who are heavily involved in the health trend in buying fresher, healthier ingredients, but that could also have the pizza experience without sacrificing those values.
While this company makeover has been receiving a lot of media attention, my concern is the gimmicky nature of its menu items. With such outrageous flavours its menu items may be more novelty purchases (try it once for fun) opposed to building important long term loyal customers. In addition this strategy will heavily rely upon continuous innovation of new menu items. The unconventional flavours that they use will likely not become the next “traditional pepperoni pizza.” This revitalization will be best communicated through their social media platforms. Educating consumers will be key as this is such a radical shift from their previous positioning and it will be important to retain previous loyal consumers in the midst of attracting new consumers. Social media will also provide consumers with the ability to communicate back to Pizza Hut, letting them know their thoughts on the new image which will help with brand development. They could also get conversation going through a flavour contest asking consumers which flavours they would like to see on their next untraditional pizza!
The true test of success will be whether or not Pizza Hut will be able to sustain this as an ongoing strategy. This will depend on their ability to innovate and create unique original flavours that will keep its adventurous customers returning for more. If it is not able to sustain this type of ongoing adaptation, they will have to determine the most successful/popular pizza types and solidify its menu into a unique but stable offering which may fall in popularity back to the position they were in before their revamp. Only time will tell.
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