"Pizza Hut In A Slice"

Pizza Hut, the world’s largest Pizza chain with over 12000 pizza restaurants and delivery outlets worldwide has the vision of becoming the best branded restaurant with the best delivery and franchise network thereby providing the best food and best value to the families. Pizza Hut as a company has always tried to target and satisfy various diverse customer categories in different countries depending upon various factors and situations. Pizza Hut in order to fulfil its marketing objective of maximizing customer satisfaction by providing high quality products, has believed in the following marketing strategy:

“Think Global, Act Local” 

Target Market of Pizza Hut:

Pizza Hut has tried to target each and every diverse population segment either on the basis of

·         Age (kids, teenage, office goers, senior citizens)

·         Lifestyle (singles or couples)

·         Special interest groups (celebrations, parties, festivals)

Pricing of Pizza Hut:

The pricing of Pizza hut is premium / skimming pricing. Pizza hut knows that it is one of the first entrants for pizzas. On top of it, Pizza hut provides higher quality food as compared to its competitors and at the same time the ambiance of the pizza hut chain is better and richer than most of its competitors who serve Italian products. Thus, even though Pizza hut has a premium pricing, people prefer Pizza hut over others.

Promotions of Pizza Hut:

Pizza hut is known to be a smart promoter for its own products. The ATL promotions mostly concentrate on introduction of new products as well as to build brand equity. Like:

·         During festivals, the ads take a different route and promote discounts and offers on products to attract customers.

·          At the same time, pizza hut does several enterprise discounts as well and gives discounts to corporate customers.

·          Finally, the success of the chain depends on local marketing. And local marketing depends on the local pizza hut outlet which may use BTL activities like hoardings, newspaper inserts, guiding customers to the outlet and lollipops.

Successes of Pizza Hut in my point of view:

·         

      Pizza hut has a Premium positioning in customer’s mind because it was one of the first entrants to start pizza.

·         The promotions and brand equity of pizza hut is better than competitors.

·         Pizza hut is the range of Italian food that it has. The pizza and pasta range is excellent and Pizza hut delivers on its promise of having an excellent Italian meal. The food is of high quality and so is the ambiance in any Pizza hut restaurant.

·         Due to its higher prices, it also gets good margins thereby giving Pizza hut an excellent sustainable advantage. The brand has an excellent presence online and offline with Pizza hut delivery giving home delivery and Pizza hut also having an online ordering system for its pizza.

Breakdown points of Pizza Hut in my point of view:

·         While maintaining its brand image, pizza hut is losing the turnover that it can generate by being present in B grade towns. If not the fast food chain, than at least Pizza hut delivery, which is pizza huts home delivery franchise should be present in such places.

·         Another weakness of Pizza hut is that the taste of their pizzas is there since ages and customer’s recent polls have shown that customers are not satisfied with the same old pizza taste and there is more interest in wider range of pizzas.

·         They always fail to maintain the consistency of taste of pizzas. Even if it is in the outlets of one country or in every country.

Finally I can say reality of the market is that Pizza hut is a fantastic food chain, but it is slowly being overtaken by others. Ignoring the B grade towns is a deliberate marketing strategy of Pizza hut. But in the long term, whether this marketing strategy is right or wrong, only time will tell. . . .