The company. Marketing Strategy

Telepizza is a Spanish based food company, specialized in delivery and takeaway service.

Telepizza was founded in Spain in 1988. It opens its first store in Madrid. Pioneers into the home delivery pizza segment in Spain. In 1996 goes public through an IPO. In 2006 Telepizza is no longer public and becomes part of private capital

According to company source, ‘Telepizza is the leader in delivery service and takeaway in Spain, Portugal, Andorra, Chile, Poland and Central America.’ In 1999 it had a market share of 62% in the Spanish pizzas market.

In 2010 Telepizza has more than 1.183 stores worldwide.

As many other fast food and delivery and take away services, Telepizza is very actively in the marketing strategy based in promotions. Basically all commercials are based in presenting promotions. See for instance Teleppiza’s Youtube Channel videos. A similar appraoch is ised in Facebook Telepizza Wall. As well as for main web site. Twitter is used rather as a channel to interact with costumers.

To ensure that promotions reach target audience, they require aggressive messages to attract attention, pushing to surprise, amusement or curiosity.

 An unusual promotion for an unusual day

By mid February Telepizza announced an audacious new promotion: as 29 February 2012 is an unique day happening every four years, so it will be for Telepizza customers. This day they can buy as individual size many pizzas as they want for one euro each (1.3 US$). The normal price without promotions is 11.95 euros.

Telepizza has used in other cases to link a promotion to a specific day, like St. Valentine. Some call this marketing approach as Dayketing.

The promotion was so attractive for Telepizza’s customers that it could create a powerful call effect. My understanding is that in this occasion the message itself was the marketing tool chosen to become the channel to widespread the promotion to new circles. A promotion to create a reaction powerful enough to escape from the circle of traditional Telepizza customers and reach other costumers currently preferring other fast food brands. In other words, the cost of the subsidised pizzas is the price of an indirect ad campaign nourished and developed by customers benefiting from this unusual promotion.

The key element for transforming the promotion into induced publicity is paradoxically to renounce to the core business model. Being basically a home delivery and take away food service, the promotion was restricted only to those buying the products in the company restaurants. This restricted the options for consumers to on restaurant consumption and take away commands. Obliging costumers to go to the stores overcrowding the restaurants or showing to the public the pizza boxes if taken away was the obliged choice to ensure and multiply the visibility of the promotion and Telepizza products. If successful, this marketing campaign should show everyone that there is a lot of Telepizza lovers.

Why are we covering this marketing case in our blog about crisis, media and reputation?

Brand promotions as crisis.

Because when you create an ad campaign designed in purpose to become a viral event, you control as a company the starting point of the storyline, but if you succeed and you marketing idea become a viral phenomenon, the development of the storyline escape completely from the hands of the company. It is taken by social media actors, and public mood may stay attached and friendly to the company, or turn aggressively against the interest of the company.

We have plenty of examples of viral ad campaign launched by companies that turned completely wrong. One recent case that will become an epitome of branding suicide is the Twitter hashtag launched by McDonald’s, #MCDStories, to ask customers to share their best experiences. The hashtag was posted by McDonalds Twitter account by 18 January 2012. It turned quickly as a weapon used to create bloody tweets reproducing and increasing the impact of usual attacks against McDonald’s practices and products (health concerns, labor conditions, quality of the products, preference for rival brands). Twitter is a perfect platform for turning into derision, mockery and subtle or gruesome attacks any kind of otherwise serious items. McDonald’s pulled the campaign within two hours, but the hashtag developed and grew by its own eventually becoming a TT. You know how these kind of risky bets start, but you do not know at all how will they finish, as you do not control the final message. As Forbes Kashmir Hill journalist invented, a hashtag becomes for you a bashtag.

Within two hours, McDonalds pulled #McDStories, saying that the effort “did not go as planned.”

This was a hard price learning experience. “As Twitter continues to evolve its platform and engagement opportunities, we’re learning from our experiences,” Rick Wion, McDonald’s social media director, said in a statement today.

Going back to our Telepizza case, launching a potential viral marketing ad was not without risks. It contained some spicy ingredients. Risk of negative comments could come from:

Those that consider that all kinds of fast food proposals create unhealthy consumption behavior.

• Those that consider that Telepizza, like other brand sin the food delivery sector offer low salaries and poor working conditions.
• People loving fast food consumption but who prefer rival brands.
• People considering that Telepizza offers poor quality products or poor quality delivering services

All these existed, as according to some sources Telepizza does not enjoy an excellent reputation. Even if numbers are not representative, you can check here the results from an Android app about customers’ satisfaction.

The specific profile of the promotion could create tailored negative comments and reactions:

• It could reinforce the perception that products are of bad quality, and this is why they are offering them at that price.
• In the context of the current severe economic crisis inSpain, reduced promotion prices could lead people to conclude that Telepizza is a greedy company getting extraordinary margins with normal times price of products.
• The promotion could create the perception that Telepizza is oriented to poor working class customers and low income. This could create a bad segmentation of costumers, pulling out some people that do not want to be associated to a low income brand.
• Of the conditions of the promotion are clearly labelled, faked consumers tend to overreact negatively crying against what they consider a misleading marketing operation.

Some other negative reactions could emerge as a result of the eventual success of the promotion in attracting a lot of pizza lovers.

• Some locals could enter into shortage of products and could stop offering the promoted pizzas before 12pm, creating anger among customers.
• If the promotion attract a lot of people, it could generate crowd agglomerations and long waiting queues

Tracking the impact of the 29 February events

If the indirect campaign has to run as ideally expected, the mechanisms for amplifying the existence of the extraordinary promotion should come all from social media channels. Main channels for a day-on-day social media viral diffusion are Facebook, Tuenti (a Spanish social media networks similar to Facebook, strongly oriented to young people and teenagers), Twitter and smartphones.

There is no direct way to track smartphone and Tuenti traffic. As for Telepizza, some analysis may be reached by using reactions and comments posted in Telepizza Facebook page. They are not representative of reaction inside Facebook community. The restriction imposed to the access of the content posted by Facebook users limits the utility of this channel for social media impact analysis.

By contrast, the very nature of Twitter, rooted on the principle of universal access to all content published inside the network makes it an excellent source for social media impact analysis.

We have monitored systematically reaction in Twitter community concerning Telepizza by 29 February and before and after this day. Based in the design of our data set and with the information collected, we propose in this post a brand perception impact analysis.

29 February 2012 at Telepizza Restaurants. Telepizza Social Media Diffusion Strategy

Stage 1: until lunch time.

Stores open al 11am. The dynamics of the opening hours are crucial for defining the momentum of the marketing operation. Approaching to lunch time (that in ‘Spainis different’ means 1:30pm to 4pm, even in working days) should create already the call effect coming from those already taking advantage of the promotion. It required that accumulation of people in Telepizza stores should be noticeable, and happy consumers share it to friend and social media community.

Checking out Telepizza Spainofficial Twitter account (@telepizza_es), we find that morning tweets were used to explain to costumers which were the affiliated stores (as a franchise system, not all stores accepted to apply the promotion), and which products were affected by the promotion.

They reinforced the message ‘take as many pizzas as you want’

Telepizza was also directly promoting the ‘share you experience’ movement by asking people buying a lot of pizzas to upload their photos.

Creating a visible crowd effect was also a crucial factor in the amplification impact of the promotion. Again, photos showing crows and agglomerations were asked to be upload by Telepizza Twitter. This was 12:04 pm

They promoted directly first photos showing people queuing in a Telepizza store. This was 2:30 pm

Then came the photos by customers chosen by Telepizza. here they are.

As crowds around Telepizza restaurants started to appear in different places by mid day, people observing the spectacle shared spontaneously photos in Twitter. We present here some examples of captions published before 3pm.

Points in common of photos published by Twitter users is that almost all refer to people queuing for having their pizzas. Some of them comment that these images are creating an excellent publicity to Telepizza promotion. In general, content is positive and do not show aggressive negative attacks.

As this is an open an public information, we show also in the last caption the profile of the Twitter user, as it gives the information of number of followers each person has. Twitter users become the prescriptors of Telepizza promotion and contribute to make viral its diffusion.

In fact, some to Twitter users publishing pics about people queuing at Telepizza stores aknowledge that they are sustaining the ad campaign, like the following two cases:

The way was paved to create an auto generated explosion of the diffusion of the effect.

Stage 2: during the afternoon. Becoming a Twitter TT

Reactions, comments and sharing developed during the afternoon through the different social media platforms.

And then, Telepizza became a Twitter trending topic (TT). This is a capture by 5pm. This means that pizzas for 1 euro by Telepizza becomes a subject to talk about for open public not directly related with the promotion (pizza consumers, witness of the crowds in front of the stores).

As explained before, it is at this very moment that the Telepizza brand enters into the crisis area. The company does not control or at least direction the message anymore. It pertains now to the Twitter community, and the evolution of the mood depend entirely on how ‘twitterstars’, ‘Twitter directioners’ and common users react to this new topic.

We have already identified which were the main risky items with the power to transform this promotion into a negative brand reputation crisis.

As commented in here and in previous post, Twitter is the natural place for mockery and ironical messages. With the ongoing evolution of events, reflected in uploaded pics, Twitter users had additional ammunition to refer and joke about the promotion: the growing long queues by people wishing to by pizzas for one euro each.

As we will show later in a quantitative analysis, messages related with the crowds longing for cheap pizzas eventually became the preferred component of the storyline linked to Telepizza promotion. There are some examples of imagination and mockery like this one tweet. ‘I am in the queue of a Telepizza… HELP!’ The author, @LoQueTuPiensas, has more than 5000 followers, and the tweet was retweeted by many.

Telepizza stayed as TT for almost all the rest of the day. For instance, by 7pm the TT became more explicitly linked to the promotion ‘Telepizza a1’

How did the visual content evolve after Telepizza became TT?

It maintained basically the same profile showed in the morning. Pics were mainly made by people queuing or witnessing the crowds. There were also pictures of people proud to show their collection of pizzas. Some examples below for pictures after 5 pm. Some of the pictures are a direct message of a successful an unusual popular phenomenon.

There were even people that uploaded a video in Youtube showing the crowds waiting for pizzas.

The queues and Twitter comments and messages continued well after the end of the promotion.

Measuring the impact of the promotion in Twitter

First relevant measurement is traffic received by Telepizza during all 29 February in terms of tweets explicitly mentioning the brand.

Normally numbers in absolute terms are meaningless. Relevant figures emerge when you provide terms of comparison to absolute values.

A fist way to approach the impact of the indirect publicity made for Telepizza by the Twitter community is to assess how much it represents in comparison to an average business day. We take as reference the tweets per day generated between 22 and 27 February 2012 by Telepizza. We give to this figure a value 1.

Our analysis shows that Twitter traffic was some 63 times higher than in a normal day for Telepizza. Abnormal high traffic started already the day before, as it reached a value 3.2. This shows the induced impact of the ads and commercials directly created 8and paid) by Telepizza announcing the innovative promotion. The day after was also a day of extraordinary traffic (due also to late night tweets just after the expiration of the promotion). Twitter traffic the day after, in 1st March was 7.9.

So, we find that Telepizza created a number of tweets equivalent to two months of normal traffic, in one single day. This result is for us extremely relevant. Not only because of shows the size of the impact of the promotion and the consequences of becoming a TT. It also implies that for many Twitter users that are no usual customers, brand perception about Telepizza quality of the product and attractiveness of the consumption experience would be highly influenced by the content of the messages channelled through twitter during 29 February. This is what we call shock branding. Content analysis is crucial. Before analysing content, we provide some additional elements of evidence about the impact of the marketing campaign.

We provide a second way to gauge how relevant is the increase of mentions received by Telepizza thanks to its innovative promotion.

We have show in  the following figure a ranking of brand visibility in Twitter of competitors of Telepizza acting in the fast food sector. We have taken measures of presence in Twitter message between 25 February and 3 March 2012, for tweets written in Spanish. We have given a value equal to 1 to the average of all brands in our list.

The figure shows us that during the period covered by our analysis, the main reference is the beberage brand Coca-Cola, with 3.8 points. It is follower by fast food burger McDonalds, with 2.8 points.Third place, at a substantial distance, we find Pepsi, with 1.3 points. It is followed by Kentucky Fried Chicken (1.06 points) and then VIPS (0.9). VIPS is a Spanish based chain of restaurants. Telepizza takes the eighth place, with 0.5 points. This corresponds to the natural position of Telepizza, and has been obtained by measuring tweets reveived excluding 28, 29 Feb and 1st March, as they do not correspond to normal business days.

We can appreciate the impact in brand visibility for Telepizza thanks to its audacious promotion in the next figure.

When we include the impact of tweets linked to pizzas for one euro promotion, Telepizza brand visibility rockets to a total 5.35 points. Thus all traffic received during this special week becomes Telepizza as the leading reference in of the fast food business sector in the Spanish speaking area, above giants Coca-Cola and McDonalds.

So, in terms of brand visibility, we can judge the marketing initiative as a tremendous success.

We can take a look on the dynamics of Telepizza visibility in Twitter during the day of the extraordinary promotion. It is shown in the following figure. We give a value 1 to the hourly average of tweets during day 29 February. The restaurnts opened at 11 am. The impact was not really noticeable since 1pm. Spain is a country of late eating schedule. Lunch time is between 1h30 to 4pm in week days, dinner time is around 9-10pm. Twitter traffic reached a first peak of 1.7 around 4pm. Lunch time attendance and initial crowds and queuing was the motor of tweets. It allowed Telepizza to become a Twitter trending topic (TT) in Spain, as we have shown, around that time. This created the perfect preparation of social media impact for dinner time, which is much more important for fast food and home delivery restaurants during week days. Number of tweets increased and exploded after 7pm. They reached their day maximum (and probably their history maximum) by 9pm, with a value of 5.1. Number of tweets were still extraordinarily high in the following hours, and ceased after 3am.

Next step is to assess to which extent quantity was connected to quality, and if this huge but concentrated increate of social media attention portrayed positive messages about the brand, and has strengthen or al least preserved the brand perception of the company.

The role of Newspapers

Before showing the profile of Twitter message, we present the results concerning the impct of this promotion in newspapers. We ahve chosen to monitor their online edition, as we wanted to track their reaction to the impact of crowds around Telepizza stores as possible news story. The figure below presents the number of news by day during February 2012 and since 6 March 2012.

The average number of news per day is 2.51. If we exclude the news about the 29 February promotion, the daily average is 0.85. This is a low visibility in newspapers. This low profile is explained by the fact that Telepizza is currently a private non traded company.

We have distinguished news in three groups: news about 29 February promotion, news about other promotions, and news not related with promotions. News about promotions (including pizzas for one euro promotion) represent 84% of all news about Telepizza during the period under analysis.

The special promotion for 29 February day was relayed by many newspapers, as it was published in 32 newspapers, de day before. This is 53% of all news in February. Almost all news were based in the content of the press release launched by Telepizza. Content was focused in the expected increase of sales (700%) estimated by the company thanks to the promotion.

The promotion was present in another 8 news during the promotion day. They were all of them news based in the Telepizza press release, acting as lagged media. There was no news at all published during the day commenting the pehnomenon of long queues around Telepizza restaurants. This is not a surprising result. But this is providing us a very relevant piece of information: the diffusion of the promotion, once it started, was not supported through traditional media: it was due entirely to the effect and impact of social media reaction.

There were few mentions about the special promotion between 1st to 3rd March.Among them, the crowds as main topic of the news was chosen only by Que! (Telepizza a 1 euro el 29 de febrero: un Gran Hermano en la calle) and El Confidencial (La oferta de pizzas a 1 euro de Telepizza trae mucha cola). The other news commented the impact of the promotion in terms of increase of sales.

Again, we conclude that this story was completely ‘told’ through social media channels.

Twitter Content Analysis: Crowds and Queuing

First reference that we propose concerning Twitter messages content analysis is to check the extent of the ‘look! there are crowds out there waiting for buying pizzas’ effect.

We have monitored the tweets explicitly reffering to crowds and queuing when posting a tweet about Telepizza. Our results, presented in the figure below, show that this topic played a crucial role in the storyline of how the Telepizza promotion was perceived by Twitter users.

Mentions to crowds appear as soon as the restaurants opened at 11am. At 2pm, the share of tweets talking about crowds represented 53.1% of all tweets about Telepizza. Overlapping this figure with the previous one, we see that by 2pm the number of tweets grew substantially. After this moment, share of mentions about crowds oscillated between 20% and 30%. This means that during the two peaks, at 4pm and at 9pm, there were a substantial proportion of them talking about the impressive crowds of people waiting for having their pizzas. This is a first element concerning the content profile of tweets about Telepizza: crowds around Telepizza restaurants was the main single topic of the storyline.

Telepizza Brand Perception: Twitter Content Analysis

Now we enter into the territory of brand reputation analysis. We have shown in previous posts some tools developped by our Media, Reputations and Intangible center. Now we show new proposals on how to track and measure the impact of events and crisis in brand perception in social media.

First, we present a global measure of the share of tweets with positive-negative content. Reaching a value 100 means that all tweets with positive-negative profile are in fact positive towards the brand. If it reaches value 0, it means that all possible positive-negative tweets are in fact attacking or showing a negative perception about the brand.

Our analysis show that satisfaction index reached a 91 points value the days before the promotion emerged as topic. 27 and 28 February tweets were already driven by the approaching promotion day. The weight of negative content tweets raised, as satisfaction index dropped to 76 points. During the promotion day, that experienced this unpredecented explosion of tweets, the satisfaction ration was established around 80 points. Satisfaction ration dropped a little bit in the aftermath to 75 points. During the following days, where new content emerged, not related with the impact of the astonishing promotion, satisfaction ratio recovered previous values, to 90 points.

So, first results suggest that the massive social media impact was associated in the short term with a deterioration of the brand perception inside the Twitter community.

My personal view is that this is not telling us by itself that the audacious social media marketing strategy went wrong also in this case, and promoted hashatag become a treasonous bashtag. Consider rather that this promotion generated a Twitter traffic some 60 times higher than normal day, and that this massive impact was accompaigned with a satisfaction ratio of 80. This means that for every tweet with a negative content about Telepizza, its quality, the ridicoulous queues and so, there were some other four tweets with a positive content about this brand. If we consider that one of the constituent elements of Twitter is mockery, attacks to rivals and creative comments, Telepizza phenomenon creating crowds of people waiting for their pizzas did not receive a bad rating by Twitter community. Furthermore, it has to be taken into account that when you become a TT you are reaching new observers from outside the circle or people directly interested by the promotion or the event in the streets. You reach new people completely or partially unconnected with the story, who can react in very different ways.

All in all, we consider that these figures tell us that Telepizza survived quite well the risk of a global social media exposure in Spain, and bran perception was basically preserved. It also reveals that the brand did not receive a direct increase of praise and brand reputation. But this promotion contributed to build brand equity based in a substantial short lived increase of brand visibility. It was financed by the diminution of income per pizza, but this was the prize to pay for creating crowds around Telepizza restaurants as mechanism for free social media viral diffusion.

Telepizza Brand Perception: Twitter Positive Content Analysis

Next step is to consider what did Twitter used like when posting a tweet about Telepizza with positive content. We have also the information about the structure of negative comments, but we do not include the results in this post to control the extension.

In normal times, positive comments about a brand is mostly driven by product or service costumers having a direct and personal experience. There are also a portion of positive comments that arise from brand lovers reaction to a news about the brand.

Telepizza created a social media event, so it attracted in Twitter communication a lot of people not directly related with the consumption (and queuing) experience, nor the experience of acting as witness of the crowds around Telepizza stores. Lokking into the detail of what people find positive when talking about Telepizza provides useful information about the brand perception impact of the promotion for the global public opinion.

We present first the distribution of categories of positive tweets before the impact of the promotion, as represented in the following figure. This refers to tweets between 22 and 28 February. We cannot present here the details of the methodology applied to produce the results presented in this section, as we want to focus our analysis in the presentation of the results. Methodological steps are oriented to academic or professional readers. We find that in 45% of cases they refer to messages showing personal satisfaction experienced by the author of the tweet (‘I’m happy’). The same weight (44%) is given to messages showing that what they are doing, talking about or watching is amusing (‘It’s amusing’). We have 9% of positive tweets directly writting that they like Telepizza brand, products or services (‘I like it’). There are finally a small percentage of tweets (2%) that show surprise, astonishment or admiration (It’s amazing).

What can we say about the structure of positive comments about Telepizza? Nothing special. As we have pointed out many times in this blog, numbers taken alone are normally meaningless in the brand reputation sphere. They become informative and relevant by comparison with other moments in time, or if we comapre them against other brands. We could provide comparison of Telepizza positive brand perception against other fast food brands, but this is not the main aim of this post.

What we can do, is to observe how the structure of positive comments has been affected by the massive social media coverage during the special promotion day. Results are shown in the following figure.

We find that massive social media coverage during day 29 February has been translated into a substantial increase of the share of comments type ‘It’s amusing’, as they share increases from 44% to 69% of all positive comments. This is a clear reflect of the impact produced by people talking about queues in front of Telepizza restaurants. Many of them come from people being there, waiting for ordering their pizzas. They share the moment with friends. Other comments come from people witnessing the spectacle of long lines of people, and react with sympathy. Finally, some other comment all the events from the distance and find them amusing.

Direct positive experience (‘I’m happy’) drops substantially, as it moves from 45% to simply 18% of all positive comments. Clearly, the story is not in enjoying eating the pizzas, but in waiting for eating them. The same occurs for the ‘I like it’ comments.

Finally, we observe an increase of the weight of comments showing admiration, ‘It’s amazing’. It goes from 2% in normal days, to 7%. This is again a direct reflect of the crowds phenomenon induced by the promotion.

Finally, we have the after the promotion positive reactions. They are captured in the following figure.

We observe a retrenchment to normal times profile of positive comments: the share of ‘It’s amusing’ comments is reduced, from 69% to 61% and the ‘I am happy’ increases again, from 18% to 30%. The ‘It’s amazing’ comments disappear and lose the role played during the promotion day. The ‘I like it’ direct experience comments reach again the 9% level.

Of course, further time analysis is required to extract rubust conclusions about the impact of the special promotion both in the share of positive comments and in their inner structure. Our aim was just to show metrics and tools that allow to identify the impact of a relevant event in the brand perception of a brand. Depending on the very nature of each brand (a corporation, an institution, a personality, a star, a country) and on the type of event or crisis suffered, the design of the Twitter analysis should be defined in consequence. Each story requires its own interpretation schemes.

Impact on Visual Brand Perception

There is another way to check the impact of the promotion in Telepizza brand perception. It consists in analysing the influence it has had in the brand image of the company. We talk here about images in strict sense.

There is an indirect way to assess the perceived quality and reputation of a brand, corporation or personality by the systematic analysis of the images chosen by someone to represent a brand. This is brand analysis technique that it is not widely used according to our knowledge.

We have depelopped our own techniques on visual brand perception at MRI Universidad de Navarra. We have shown to the public some of our results in previous studies.

For instance, in this blog we have shown some reputation crisis analysis based in the photos in news articles chosen by journalists to explain a crisis affecting several corporations. We found out that Bank of America was the brand most punished in the collective lawsuit by FHFA against 17 banks.

We applied this technique also to show the negative reputation impact of the false accusations by German authorities against cucumbers produced in Spain of being the source of the E Coli contagion. We have a post about E Coli crisis in this blog. The analysis about the impact on visual perception of Spanish produced vegetables are included in the full report as pdf document.

We apply this technique in the Telepizza case, but using an adapted approach. Our aim is to evaluate to which extent the social media viral success of the marketing promotion and its translation into amazing images of crowds waiting for having their pizza may affect the global visual perception of Telepizza as a brand. News analysis is not relevant in this case, was we have shown before.

The alternative that we propose is to analyse the visual brand perception of Telepizza in internet. All different platforms in internet are currently the main source of contact with a brand (official websites, sites from other companies, online newspapers, blogs, forums, social media connectors like Facebook, Twitter or Youtube). We identify a selection of representative images, and we weight them according to the power and influence of the site showing them. We classify them according to content. We count with the results concerning Telepizza and many other brands.

In this post we will focus our analysis in a single component of the visual brand perception which is of strategic value for the business sector of restauration: images related with consumers experience. Images of people eating the products, seated in the restaurant or waiting for ordering are essential for food brand equity. The ‘we are happy’ images linked to a brand are crucial for creating customers call effect. In a mall, people tend to go to restaurants already full of people instead of chosing those with more free places.

In order to identify the visual brand perception in the ‘having a good time’ vector associated to Telepizza, we have performed an image analysis of the following brandds: McDonalds, Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, and local competitors 100 Montaditos and Pans & Company. As a way to ensure that results are comparable, we have monitored images published in documents written in Spanish.

In the following figure we have a visual representation of the weight of the ‘ having a good time’ vector of Telepizza and its competitors.

According to our results, the fast food brand that currently is more strongly associated to customers eating and drinking is Spanish based 100 Montaditos. Second brand is KFC and third brand is McDonalds.

Telepizza (with red line frame) is the brand that counts with the poorest records in this brand vector, less than one thrid that the average weight taken by its rivals. This is a result that should not be surprising. It is one of the brand perception consequences of the business model chosen by Telepizza. Their objective and strategy is to become the leading reference in home delivery and take away fast food services. Other competitors base their business in restaurant consumption. If main source of income for Telepizza comes from home delivery, consumption becomes a private experience that is not shared by other witnessess outside the inner circle. Telepizza renounces to the brand visibility that is created by seeing other people at fast food restaurants. This is also why Telepizza business model relies so heavily in continuos marketing campaigns based in promotions aiming to create a call effect.

Increasing perception as warm and convivial brand is withour doubt rewarding for Telepizza business. Those brands in the fast food sector being most associated to past good moments become top of mind brands, when a new consumption decision is planned for sharing a new good moment with family, friends and relatives.

This is why we consider that one of the main features of the marketing campaign designed by Telepizza is the creation of new experiences around the ‘we were in one of those waiting two hours for having our pizzas’ or the ‘look this crazy people ready to wait longtime for their pizzas’.

Measuring the impact of this specific commercial decision in brand perception requires the perspective of time. We have proven that the marketing strategy has been a success in creating an unprecedented event, relayed by social media channels. This creates what we call this short term shock branding impact. Only time will tell us if this short but deep association of brand Telepizza to crowds around the restaurantes will keep alive in the future as part of Telepizza brand identity (reinforced in the future with similar movements).

In the menawhile, we can provide some inshights about the short term impact in Telepizza visual perception. We have scrutinized a representative selelection of images upload in all kind of supports in internet during these few last days. We weight again each image by the power and influence of the site publishing it.

We have all the components of the visual brand perception of Telepizza. As before, we present here only thos related with our case. More specifically, we presen here the presence of captions directly linked to the 29 February promotion. We have organized the imto two groups. One for images about crowds and people carrying several pizza boxes, and another one concerning de ad material used by Telepizza to annouonce the promotion.

We present in the following figure the relative presence of 29 February promotion images just after it happened, by 1st of March, and a second measurement just one week after the events, by 6th of March. In order to have terms of comparison, we show the size of images that are associated to ‘having a good time’ before 29 February, and referred to all captions, and not only the recent ones.

Results are self explaining. The share of images showing people eating or waiting for eating pizzas at Telepizza explode. Share of images showing crowds by 1st March multiply by 4 the size of previous images about consumers in Telepizza images. Its weight further increase when considering images uploaded one week after. They represent some 7 times more images than the normal percpetion of Telepizza. The visual short term imapct of the promotion is reinforced by the images referring to the extraordinary prize offer.

The short term image of Telepizza as ‘we are having a good time’ brand is higher than any other competitor, including 100 Montaditos and KFC.