Like the tomato sauce and other toppings it prepares, Boston Pizza is trying to spread the love around this Valentine’s Day with a surprise around its heart-shaped pizza.
To commemorate Boston Pizza’s 40th anniversary of the Valentine pie, the restaurant chain launched a video to show, in part, that Boston Pizza brings people together and creates pleasant surprises.
“We thought it was important to find a fresh way to celebrate the fact that so many people have shared a heart-shaped Boston Pizza together since we started making them all the way back in 1980,” Peter Blackwell, SVP marketing and communications at Boston Pizza, said in a press release. “Bringing people together” has been a key part of Boston Pizza’s brand positioning, and in recent years has been aiming to do that through the quality of its food, instead of simply being a place to watch sporting events.
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The video shows a young couple living thousands of kilometres apart, about to share the heart-shaped pizza at their respective Boston Pizza locations over a Skype call. The big reveal is that Boston Pizza has secretly flown one of them in so they can dine together. The online campaign was developed by Toronto-based creative agency Mixtape, and is being promoted through a social media buy.
Boston Pizza’s projections are to sell 60,000 of the pizzas on February 14th at its more than 390 restaurants across Canada. The franchise will donate $1 from every pizza sold on Valentine’s Day to the Boston Pizza Foundation Future Prospects to fund organizations that provide kids with access to role models and mentoring programs—including Big Brothers Big Sisters, Kids Help Phone, Live Different, JDRF and the Rick Hansen Foundation.
Boston Pizza has a habit of marking holidays with special takes on pizza; the company recently created a caroling pizza box that played the brand’s rendition of “Carol of The Bells,” to promote a Christmas pizza.
