Pizza Hut promotes its price cutting

Months after stirring up the pizza category with promotional price cuts, Pizza Hut is putting its products on sale.

Pizza Hut, part of Yum Brands, was to introduce a campaign Sunday for new low prices on its mainstay menu items.

Most medium pizzas will cost $8, most large pizzas will be priced at $10 and most so-called specialty pizzas — like the new Big Italy pie, which has 18 slices — will cost $12 each.

“Every pizza price slashed,” signs for the menu deals promise, with the word “slashed” slashed almost in half.

The campaign comes after Pizza Hut introduced in early February what it called its “$10 any” promotion — any pizza, any size, any crust, any toppings, for $10 each. Special deals on pasta dishes on Tuesdays and wings on Wednesdays will continue to be offered in addition to the new pizza prices.

The $10 promotion has stimulated business, according to Pizza Hut executives.

Revenue rose 6 percent to 7 percent in the first quarter compared with the same period a year ago, they said, and rose about 10 percent in the second quarter compared with the second quarter of 2009.

The price changes at Pizza Hut are indicative of how marketers are scrambling to address changing consumer behavior as the economy remains sluggish.

Not that long ago, it was believed that marketers would soon be able to stop running price-oriented ads, or at least fewer of them.

But the most recent economic news, suggesting that the recovery has slowed, is calling into question those assumptions.

That is why, for instance, Quiznos is promoting a value menu with sandwiches priced at $3, $4 and $5, and the Campbell Soup Co. is running ads in Sunday newspaper coupon inserts that proclaim Chunky soup can help make “dinner for $4 in under 4 minutes!”

“We want to make sure we can provide people's favorite foods at accessible prices,” Brian Niccol, chief marketing officer at Pizza Hut, said during a press conference last week at the Institute of Culinary Education in Manhattan.

In some cases, the sale represents “almost a 50 percent reduction” in menu prices, Niccol said.

Pizza Hut spent $199.2 million to run ads in major media last year, according to the Kantar Media unit of WPP. In the first quarter of this year, the company spent $60.6 million, Kantar Media reported, compared with $59 million in the same period a year ago.

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