Papa John's Courts Backlash With Social Media Pizza Promotion
Papa John's (PZZA) is having a contest in which customers create new pizzas for the chain. The biggest problem with it: The company has promised the winning pizza will be permanently added to the menu.
Company managers might have wanted to ask the franchise owners what they thought about that first. They could have offered prizes without saying, "We're adding this pizza to the menu forever," a promise that may well have to be broken later.
The contest began back in April with the submission of more than 12,000 consumer recipes. The next step, Papa John's handled right -- they had a hand-selected panel review those recipes and choose 10 finalists. They also asked the contestants to choose from the company's existing better-pizza ingredient list, which helped avoid the introduction of new ingredients that might be unaffordable or hard to source nationally.
Papa John's at least didn't have the finalists chosen by a customer vote, an approach that sent Kraft (KFT) wildly awry earlier this year with an Australian contest to name a new Vegemite product. The crowd chose: iSnack 2.0. Appetizing, huh? The name had to be scrapped and Kraft eventually came up with another new name and packaging, at no doubt a substantial loss.
At Papa John's, once the pizza finalists were narrowed down to three by the company's panel, they threw it back to the customers for the final vote. In August, the three pizzas are on the menu, and the one that sells the most will be the winner. The winning pizza chef gets free pizza for life, an up to $10,000 cut of their pizza's profits, and an appearance in a Papa John's ad...plus the glory of having created a new menu item for the chain.
Now that they've climate-controlled the finalists, the crowd can't go too far wrong...unless the pizza turns out to be a lame fad that's over in a month or two. In that case, franchise owners will still be stuck supporting the new pizza -- promoting it and teaching employees how to make it. If it turns out to be a higher-cost pizza that makes the franchisees lose money, it's apparently tough luck. This is the kind of top-down edict that has made Quiznos franchisees hopping mad in the past, and could come back to haunt Papa John's.
To illustrate, one of the winning pizzas, the Big Bonanza by Blair Dial of Springfield, Ill., includes a double portion of bacon, as well as beef, ham, jalapenos, onions, roma tomatoes, and mozzarella. That's a lot of meats -- one of the highest-cost ingredients -- to throw on one pizza. It's also flat-out gross. It smacks of fad food something like the KFC Double Down, something that gets attention and draws customers for a month or so, but then may be over.
Ultimately, the winning pizza may need to disappear from the menu one day. Given that Papa John's cranked up the marketing machine to promote the contest and the finalist pizzas, that won't go unnoticed. The contest could have offered the prize of being a special pizza for a month or a season and had the same positive customer engagement. As it is, the excitement may turn to disappointment if the pizza doesn't make the grade and needs to be taken off the menu.
Photo via Flickr user Moresheth
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