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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Pasta Hut vs. Pizza Hut
October 09, 2008
Pizza Hut made the headlines earlier in the week after rebranding itself as Pasta Hut in the UK. If the move really is just a clever bit of PR, as some people suspect, then it seems to have worked. In addition to significant media coverage, the company has also benefitted online: as the chart below illustrates, yesterday the Pasta Hut website received twice as many UK Internet visits as the Pizza Hut UK homepage. In fact, yesterday was a record day for the restaurant chain online.
Of the people who did visit the Pizza Hut site yesterday, 37.4% went to Pasta Hut afterwards. Overall 6.7% of Pasta Hut’s traffic came from the Pizza Hut homepage. The site’s clickstream also reveals a surprise: as the table below illustrates, 43.9% of traffic to pastahut.co.uk came from MSN UK, more than 3 times the amount that it received from Google UK. Presumably the company either ran advertising or a paid search campaign on the Microsoft portal / search engine.
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:00 PM
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In Categories Branding | Food
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Comments
Great stat. We should look at the developement on the long term. I wonder where the fluctuations are comming from.
Posted by Billigflüge | October 14, 2008 04:08 PM
After the initial media interest, time will tell if drawing traffic away from Pizza Hut's core online site really is such a smart move. I suspect that much of the traffic seen in the last few hours is media or curiosity related. Does this sort of gimmick translate into any long term brand benefit? Does anyone feel warmer towadrs Pizza Hut because they ran a spoof marketing campaign? I doubt it. For my money, brands should treat their consumers with more respect and not use lazy gimmicks to buy short term attention.
Posted by Allister Frost | October 9, 2008 02:53 PM