Insights + promotional offer testing delivers results for Papa John’s

Background:

Pizza is a favourite among Canadians and Papa John’s knows this well. As the world’s third-largest pizza delivery company, Papa John’s has over 200 restaurant locations spread across Canada.

The secret to Papa John’s success is baked into the company’s DNA. At the core is their commitment to their brand promise: ‘Better Ingredients. Better Pizza’, which means constantly sourcing and investing in the finest ingredients. This brand promise extends to every aspect of their business, including marketing. The Papa John’s team believes that to lead change, they must think differently and continually look for opportunities to innovate and expand their reach into more Canadian homes.

This forward-thinking approach is why their direct mail partner, DCM, brought CiG and its intelligentVIEW platform to the table. It is an innovative solution to cut through the clutter in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Situation:

The highly competitive pizza industry is driven by a combination of brand awareness, geographically targeted direct advertising, and promotional offers.

With 40 locations in British Columbia, Papa John’s was looking to innovation as a means to both grow market share and increase marketing efficiencies to acquire more customers at a lower cost.

Papa John’s primary media mix included a mix of geographically targeted digital ads and direct mail. The in-house team was responsible for the manual process of defining the targeting for each one of the 40 locations, which were:

• Time-consuming and resource intensive.
• Based on generalized demographic profiles of their best customers across all locations.
• Constraining opportunities to test and optimize.

Despite having valuable customer data, Papa John’s team didn’t have the right tools to take action on the data or insights to understand better the profile of their different customer segments in each of their 40 locations. To increase market share, they needed to both automate their internal processes and find a way to turn their data into insights to drive their campaigns and promotions in real time.

What was important to Papa John’s:

User-Friendly Tool
A platform that its internal team could easily adopt.

Segmentation
Understand unique segments in each location.

Lookalikes Feature
Profile each location to identify and target lookalikes.

Connect Direct Mail to Digital
Need to reach the same households with the same message.

“Once we started using intelligentVIEW, we gained many insights and a clear understanding of who Papa John’s consumers actually are, compared to who we thought they were.”
Chris Hannah
Marketing Manager at Papa John’s

With guidance from the CiG Customer Success Team, the Papa John’s client quickly became a power user, and within weeks, the insights were impacting their programs.

Before they used intelligentVIEW, the assumption was that their top customer segment and primary target were lower-income young families, based on a generalized one-size-fits-all demographic profile.

With intelligentVIEW’s robust data and built-in intelligentSEGMENTS, they quickly discovered that their top segments were actually quite diverse across each of their locations, a combination of:

Older empty nesters
Seniors (a surprising 43% of seniors over age 75 in just one location!)
Young couples
Singles
The team shared these profiles with their agency partners and creative teams, who immediately began optimizing their campaigns.

Key Strategies:

• Creative: Customized imagery and portion combinations.
• Location and Segment Specific Offers: Optimized offers based on household composition.
• Timing: Target moment-in-time events relevant to each segment, such as Back to School or the Super Bowl.
• Media Targeting: Able to reach the same household through direct mail and digital.
• Data-Driven Insights – The secret ingredient for success

Pizza is very competitive in B.C.; pricing is a key differentiator, but instead of changing their prices and eroding profits, Papa John’s can now target prospects more effectively and timely to gain an edge over competitors.

By using intelligentVIEW, Papa John’s achieved: 🌟

• 6% increase in comparable store sales.
• Identified new segments to grow market share.
• Maximized media allocation between direct channels.
• Developed lookalike programs for each location.
• About DCM

DCM is an Expert Canada Post Partner and a leading provider of marketing and business communications solutions that simplify complexity by streamlining operational, marketing, and communication workflows – our goal is to make everything surprisingly simple.