Eat up Pizza Hut

I’d like to share a story about Pizza Hut in China, but before I do, I’d give some background information: 1) with many remarkable efforts, Pizza Hut has successfully upmarketed itself in China. It is relatively expensive, but offers happy exotic dining experience. Therefore it is typical to find young couples going on a date or celebrating Valentine’s in Pizza Hut (to get a feel of its branding strategy and target consumers in China, here are some commercials of Pizza Hut China); 2) on its menu, there is this all-you-can-eat fruit salad. It is self-served, comes with a tiny bowl, can be fetched from the salad bar only once, and costs ￥30 which is not inexpensive at all considering its regular amount.

Anyway, some three years ago, a post titled “How to Eat up Pizza Hut” became extremely popular and got forwarded onto thousands of discussion forums, blogs and SNSs in China. In fact, a search of the title in Chinese still generates 48,300 exact results now.

The post begins by complaining that Pizza Hut’s all-you-can-eat fruit salad is ridiculously expensive. Then it gives detailed instructions on how to take steps to pile up the salad really high so as to maximize the amount. Here are some crazy pictures from the post-







So the post became sensationally viral, and everyone after reading the post wanted to go and try eat up Pizza Hut. It wasn’t learned until last year that the one that called on eating up Pizza Hut was Pizza Hut itself.

In my opinion, the most amazing part of this social media campaign is that NOBODY, for two years, felt it was a campaign! People went to Pizza Hut out of curiosity. They believed it was one of them that had sent the original message.

Three lessons I’ve learned from Pizza Hut:

Research Comes First.
Pizza Hut obviously had learned what held their consumers back from buying the yummy salad (i.e., the price/amount ratio). When it becomes so tempting to just use the social media to make a buzz (as if such a function were automatic), it is important to make sure that you have carefully listened to and thoroughly understood your consumers.

Choose the Right Channel.
Being able to differentiate various social media technologies and employ them appropriately is also crucial. Pizza Hut ‘made the wave’ (thanks everyone for liking the metaphor!) through discussion forums, blogs and SNS as these social media spread entertaining contents very rapidly, and congregate the most young audience among whom many are Pizza Hut’s target consumers.

It’s a Conversation.
Social media is about communication, connecting, and sharing. Thus, instead of treating it as a one-way marketing channel and directly pushing messages across the board, organizations need to engage in conversations with the audience. Like the post by Pizza Hut, it encourages people to come with ideas of how to pile up the salad higher. In response, many netizens posted their Pizza Hut triumphs. Some even posted salad piling structural charts to teach people how to build a stable salad foundation! The orange bars in the second chart were supposed to mean carrot sticks :)





FYI, the campaign was so successful that recently Pizza Hut China had to take all-you-can-eat fruit salad off the menu. Pizza Hut is happily eaten up.