Hungry Howie's Pizza.

The Power of Pink

The Why.

The most profitable franchisees in the pizza business are all deeply involved in a community cause.

WHEN PRICE AND QUALITY ARE EQUAL, CAUSE DRIVES CHOICE

The Way.

Given a choice between personal service and a social cause, 85% of millennials chose the brand that supports a cause. So, we asked, what causes do consumers actually care about?

Research.

We tested offers in matched-pair analysis against causes.

Whether we tested sponsoring school sports or even promotional offers such as getting a $5 discount on a Greek Salad, up to three times as many consumers indicated they would rather have pennies donated to fight breast cancer.

Tactics.

Owned Media
Howie’s turned 50 million pizza boxes pink (at no incremental cost), sold shirts and bracelets and, told the real-life breast cancer stories of customers and franchise owners in social media.

Earned Media
Love, Hope & Pizza™ outpaced all other social memes (paid or unpaid), creating almost a quarter-million Facebook fans, who posted statements including, “I love buying products when money is being donated to a good cause. I’ll have to go order a set of these (pink brownies).”

23% Sales Increase

Hungry Howie’s experienced sales increases of 23% in the first year, followed by October sales increases seven years in a row. This was accomplished without price-pointing for the entire month!

250K Social Fans.

Facebook, Instagram and Twitter lit up like never before, adding almost 250,000 fan page likes and increasing total social engagement by almost 26X over previous volumes. ​

57% Awareness.

The National Breast Cancer Foundation originally gave credibility to the message, but today, recall of Hungry Howie’s as a brand supporting the fight against breast cancer is 57%. That's greater than the awareness NBCF itself.

15k Lives Touched.

Based on early detection statistics from the American Cancer Society, Howie’s $1.7 million contribution (since 2009) has funded mammograms for 15,000 uninsured women, thus saving an estimated 67 lives through the NBCF.

"mutual respect and trust"

5/5

Client Testimony

Sales is the ultimate parameter when you operate in any retail business. DBA helped to contribute to many quarters of increased growth, and we saw increasing sales for the entire time that we worked with them.

We also look at key metrics through research; we use NPD CREST’s syndicated research to understand how we’re doing as compared to competitive sets. With DBA, we always did very well in most of the advertising measurements, such as awareness and persuasion. DBA does a great job building brands that result in increased sales. They were always on time and budget with sales-building ideas.

The relationship was one of mutual respect and trust.

There were many impressive things. I was always very impressed with their creativity. For example, they helped execute a promotion in conjunction with the National Breast Cancer Foundation that they named Love, Hope, & Pizza. That has stood the test of time; we still support that campaign 10 years later, and we’ve donated over $3.5 million to the organization. Any great brand has an association with a great cause, and DBA was responsible for that campaign.

Rob Elliot,
EVP of Marketing,
Hungry Howie's

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