Also in this report:

– Toyota with a twist: Toyota designed a saucy Tercel campaign specifically for Quebec: page 31

– Listerine relaunch: Popular character Oncles Georges helps repopularize Listerine in La Belle Province: page 35

Pizza Hut’s Stuffed Crust Pizza, sex and pleasure.

That was the focus of Pizza Hut’s successful tv campaign in Quebec for its new product, a pizza with mozzarella cheese inside the outer edge of the crust.

The campaign, which was created by Montreal-based Auger Babeux FCB and ran for four weeks in its first flight in July, captured the hearts and stomachs of Quebecers.

The campaign included two tv spots, radio sponsorship, point-of-purchase materials, direct mail, merchandising materials and a public relations effort.

The tv creative, the core of the campaign, featuring Quebec stand-up comedian Marie-Lise Pilote, set out to communicate the relationship between sex, food and pleasure, to families and younger adults with a male skew.

In the guise of one of her characters, a woman from a rural island in Quebec, Pilote explains local love-making rituals.

For example, Pilote says there is nothing like eating a pizza, crust first, and drowning in a sea of cheese, where between each bite the pizza eater must get mouth-to-mouth resuscitation from a lover on the table.

Two tv spots, with slight variations in the script, were produced.

In the 85 days after the introduction of the pizza to Quebec, more than 400,000 stuffed crust pizzas were sold in the province – far exceeding the expectations of the product launch.

Post-campaign research conducted in September, in the form of a telephone survey, revealed Pizza Hut had doubled its brand awareness, which is significant considering Pizza Hut has only 69 restaurants, and is second in the marketplace to Mike’s Restaurant chain, which has more than 100 restaurants in Quebec.

Marc Seynave, senior account supervisor at Auger Babeux FCB, says when Quebecers were asked to name a pizza chain, Pizza Hut was mentioned twice as often as Mike’s Restaurant chain.

Also, seven of 10 Quebecers had heard about stuffed crust pizza.

Seynave says the launch and campaign for stuffed crust pizza in Quebec were undisputed successes.

But success did not come easily.

Stuffed crust pizza was launched in the u.s. in April.

When the product was ready to be launched in Quebec, Seynave knew there would be problems.

He says the Quebec pizza market is unlike any other in Canada.

Half of the market is dominated by neighborhood pizzerias, where pizzas are made the old-fashioned way – with thin crusts and lots of toppings.

As a result, Pizza Hut – with an 18% share in the market – has not been perceived by Quebec consumers as producing the perfect pizza.

Seynave says market research revealed Quebecers’ preferences – more toppings, thinner crust, less sauce – which prompted Pizza Hut to create a distinct Stuffed Crust pizza for Quebecers.

When the product was perfected, Auger Babeux FCB had only one month to create and launch its campaign for Pizza Hut.

Not a lot of time to deal with some complex problems.

Unlike the campaigns created by BBDO New York and BBDO Toronto for the u.s. and English-Canadian markets respectively, the Auger Babeux FCB campaign could not simply rely on the new stuffed crust to sell the product to Quebecers.

‘We had a dual problem here,’ Seynave says. ‘All they had to do in the u.s. was to say, ‘Try this new product, you’re going to want to eat it crust-first.’ ‘

‘On our side, we had a negative perception of the quality of [Pizza Hut] pizza in Quebec,’ he says.

‘We had to explain two things. First, it’s a brand new pizza with new crust, less sauce, more toppings, and, you have cheese baked into the crust. It was a very complex scenario.’

The u.s. campaign also used big celebrities, as did the campaign for English Canada, where the celebrities might have gained more notice than the product.

‘We didn’t want to do that here,’ Seynave says. ‘We wanted the product to come across strong in the campaign.’

He says that, unlike the English-Canadian campaign, the message had to do more than simply emphasize the new product’s attributes.

‘We focused on consumer benefit, the pleasure of eating the pizza crust first,’ Seynave says. ‘Quebecers don’t care how we put the cheese in the crust; it doesn’t matter. What does (matter) is when you bite it, you get great taste.’

Mark Beaudet, Toronto-based Pizza Hut Quebec market manager, says, based on some marketing flops in the past, Pizza Hut knew it could not do a blanket launch for the product and believe it would work in Quebec.

‘In Quebec, Pizza Hut has a strategy to convince Quebec consumers that we have the best tasting pizza to meet all of Quebec consumer needs,’ Beaudet says.

There was some concern also, he says, about launching the product during the summer months when television viewing lulls.

‘Through some pretty creative media work by the agency, and good creative, we built a pretty strong awareness level in a short period of time,’ Beaudet says.

All in all, Seynave says, the campaign was a success because the product was innovative, tailored to the target market and supported by high-impact, high-production value creative with a strong media buy.

Both Seynave and Beaudet would advise other companies vying for a piece of the Quebec market to get to know it well.

‘If you want to go into the Quebec market, and you want to win, be successful and lead in that market, you’re going to have to get to know the consumers very well, and do a lot of research to understand what consumers want in terms of the product and what’s the best way to communicate it to them,’ Beaudet says.

‘It’ll pay off in spades,’ he says.