I am not sure how many college students think that it’s too troublesome to make a stodgy old phone call to get their pizza, but I love that PizzaHut is taking advantage of digital and social tools to make some dough. With everything from digital coupons to free music downloads through a partnership with eMusic, PizzaHut is warming up to consumers by letting them get their Pizza any way they want – plus delivering some free goodies as well.
In a recent article in BrandWeek, Ron Paul, president of Technomic, a food-service consultancy in Chicago, comments that he doesn’t know how successful the strategy will be at bringing in new revenues because “the telephone works well enough.” Wow. Did he miss the boat. This is still the age of personalization and marketing to individuals – if one person wants to text in their order for a large anchovy pie, they should be able to. And of course, since the story is even being covered in BrandWeek, among numerous other news outlets, the PR value may outweigh the incremental revenue gain. Finally, differentiation is a clear competitive advantage – and why not differentiate the experience and the customer service as well as the product.
I still like Domino’s Pizza Tracker (where you can follow the progress of your pizza’s development online) but I wish it had a real-time mash-up with a Google Map so that I could actually see how far it was from my house. (Feel free to send me the royalty check when you implement this…..)
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