A Recipe for Loyalty?  Or Something Else…

Ho hum - another major brand with a user-generated content promotion, and another commentator all excited about it.  Colloquy’s Bill Brohaugh, obviously a pizza lover, waxes poetic (sort of) about a Papa John’s Facebook promo that lets you submit ideas for their next specialty pizza.  The winner gets a slice of the sales and free pizza for life – sounds delicious! But still…

“Community, customer engagement, a certain level of data collection, a continuing promotional opportunity…” – these are the benefits the author sees in this promo that will help drive customer loyalty.  But let’s think about that:

1. You have to “like” Papa John’s to be admitted to the entry page.  So a little bit of a back-handed hand-raiser tactic so their postings can start appearing on your wall, and they can grab your profile info.  No proactive data sharing.
2. The community aspect is simply the opportunity to see what others have posted, and give it a thumbs-up.  Not terribly interactive.  And you’ll never be able to order any of these from Papa John’s, except for the winner post-promo.
3. I always wonder how people think about engagement.  In this case, there is no call to action to order anything from Papa John’s.  And once you’ve entered your recipe, there is little reason to come back again – they haven’t built in a mechanism to bring you back to the site.  Since I could make it myself at home, there is really no engagement with the brand, other than they are the sponsors and it discusses their category.  This same promo could be run by Domino’s, or Pizza Hut, or Little Caesars, or any other pizza shop.  If it wasn’t being run through Facebook, wouldn’t be considered terribly innovative.
4. Across all of these runs the issue of scale.  The author states that there were over 1,100 recipes submitted when he looked at the site the day after launch.  One week later, the site showed that 2,400 recipes had been submitted.  Not exactly rocket-like growth trajectory.  And the most popular recipe had over 800 people who “liked” it, but the numbers fell off pretty dramatically.
   

That last point highlights what has always been a point of concern with UGC promos – at most, you are going to interact with a number of consumers that peaks in the thousands, not the millions.  And they’re more than likely already fans, so you’re not really growing your base.  So where’s the payback for a big national brand like Papa John’s?  Still waiting to see the case study…

Posted by jkeenan on 05/10

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