Spend a day on our social pages and you’ll see that despite your typical hate comments, many people LOVE Little Caesars pizza. Our task: provoke the masses to help us shift quality perceptions. In Burn the Burns, we discovered that acknowledging negative brand perceptions can not only unlock a truth army in the comments, but can ultimately influence non-fans to give us another shot.
We get lots of hate comments, especially about the quality of our pizza. We typically don’t reply to avoid giving those who spread negativity more power. Yet, ironically, these “haters” would turn out to be the fuel we needed to turn quality perceptions of Little Caesars around. We discovered a powerful truth by looking through all our DMs and comments. When provoked, people come to our defense.
So, in October of 2023, our task was clear: we had to change perceptions around the quality of our pizza by making our haters eat their words. Literally.
We combed through the comments and found three haters. Instead of begging them to just try us again, we brought them to a 10’ bonfire in the middle of the woods and cooked them a pizza over the ashes of their hate comments. No, really. That’s what we did.
We etched their comments into wood planks, threw the planks into a bonfire, and cooked our very own Little Caesars pizza over the flames. Then, we watched them eat their words and more importantly change their minds. But that wasn’t the only surprise because we invited Disaster Girl (she’s a meme, google her) to be the host of this fiery event. She not only successfully wooed our haters but also tens of thousands of commenters on TikTok. Boom, roasted.
Without the aid of a product launch, limited-time offer, or promotion in this two-week TikTok flight, our videos earned 58M views with over 16.5% Ad recall (well above the 11.4% average), 190K engagements, 8.3k total comments, boasting 7.3k shares and over 404k likes. The next closest QSR competitor, Dominos, saw only 22.0k during this time. We gained over 17.7K followers, 6x our usual follower growth in a 2-week period. Most notably, we changed the haters' minds (ya can’t put a stat on that!) and saw a 106% YOY increase in quality perception. BOOM!
