Pizza Pizza is running a new brand platform to make sure pizza stays accessible to everyone, and it’s starting by letting customers lock in a fixed rate on the price of a pie.
The QSR’s creative offers buyers the opportunity to “lock in” the price of an extra-large four-topping pizza like a mortgage, for up to 12 months, with no price increases, guaranteed.
A form on the campaign’s microsite also asks applicants pre-approval-style questions, like “Do you like pizza?” and “Do you dislike inflation?” and OOH and social includes lines like “Don’t get priced out of pizza.”
The message and the pre-approval form are tounge-in-cheek, a way to creatively talk about its plans to not raise its prices the way other companies its customers deal with have. The program is part of Pizza Pizza’s new brand platform, “Everyone Deserves Pizza,” developed by Zulu Alpha Kilo, with which the QSR began working last year.
Adrian Fuoco, who joined Pizza Pizza as VP of marketing in 2020 from rival Boston Pizza, says he appreciated the creative using a surprising and funny redirect to tie into supply chain and inflation issues that are top of mind right now for budget-conscious consumers.
“Typically we’re a fairly tactical brand,” he says. When it’s pushing out deals or connecting with sports occasions, it does those really well. The challenge, he says, is that every QSR is doing that and it needed a way to stand out.
“We see ourselves in the research that we’ve done, we’re the people’s pizza brand” Fuoco says. There’s a positivity with pizza eating, and Pizza Pizza wanted to articulate the idea that pizza is for everyone and talking to people “more personally than straight up tactically.”
He says the move to doing more personable brand work would’ve come earlier, had it not been for COVID, when it had to pivot to meet heightened demand.
Fuoco says when it comes to the competitive set, foreign, well-funded pizza competitors were a bigger threat a decade prior, but now it’s broadened considerably. What is actually a challenge now, he says, is that it has to stand out from more kinds of restaurants, as they are all available by deliver, previous one of the pizza category’s keep value offerings.
The target for this campaign is young families, and Fuoco says that summer is not typically a peak season for pizza, but the brand is taking an always-on approach. “It was a window…and a net new opportunity to get some messaging out there.”
Canadians can sign up to be “pre-approved” at the “locked in rate” online and on mobile as of July 18th, 2022. Paid media is planned by Media Experts leveraging YouTube pre-roll, programmatic display, digital OOH and connected TV, with targeted PR outreach lead by spPR.
Pizza Pizza Limited was founded in 1967 in Toronto and has over 730 restaurants across Canada.
