Even when we might want to consume an entire pizza for lunch, most people are looking for options that are built for one. That's why Pizza Hut introduced "Melts," designed for solo diners and definitely not to be shared.
Objective: Launch Pizza Hut "Melts" and create awareness that Pizza Hut now has lunchtime dining options for solo diners.
Strategy: Emphasize that Melts are a product for me, not we. And, that means that they aren’t for sharing.
Execution: To launch Melts we did the exact opposite of what you might expect a brand to do for a product launch: we told people not to share “Melts.”
Through our MDA (Melts Disclosure Agreement), we offered $100 to lucky consumers who promised not to share our new “Melts.” By signing our MDA, consumers agreed not to share melts anywhere, including
"All text posts, picture posts, blog posts, songs, mixtapes, diss tracks, comments, podcasts, streams, lives, bodybuilding website posts, virtual marketplace listings, fanfiction website uploads, posts on a social media you just invented, posts on your burner account that no one you know follows, posts on an online group where everyone pretends to be ants sharing food, or posts your grandmother will comment “beautiful pic my granddaughter” on."
We spread the word using influencers like Yung Gravy and earned media and people inevitably started posting their Melts. Then, we would swoop in and “negotiate” with them to take it down by replying to their posts with a special offer. The stir this created had fans bartering for an Xbox, drone, lava lamp and more just to delete their Melts. Of course, that only fueled more people to share–then not share–their Melts so they could get in on the action as well.
Turns out when you tell people not to do something, it only makes them want to do it more:
We garnered over 2.1 Billion impressions for the new Pizza Hut Melts from our earned media coverage and social campaign.
This included over 660 media placements, resulting in 266,000 fan signatures of our MDA.
In a world of sharing, we chose to launch our new product by doing the exact opposite, leading to Pizza Hut’s most-successful launch of the year, providing a boost to the brand’s Q4 sales.
