Spend a day on our social platforms and you'll see that among a slew of loyal fans lies loud, vocal internet trolls eager to rag on Little Caesars. They complain of poor quality, bad taste, or negative experiences spreading the misperception that Little Caesars doesn't taste good—which we know is a damn lie. Our task: provoke the loyal masses to help us shift taste and quality perceptions. Through Burn the Burns, we discovered that acknowledging negative brand perceptions can not only unlock a truth army in the comments, but ultimately influence people to give us another shot.

They say all good things have haters. Well, we must be really good then because we get a lot of hate. “Little Caesars tastes like cardboard, Little Caesars is desperation food,” the list goes on. Back in the day we’d ignore these comments and keep tweeting about pizza. But frankly, we’re sick of it! In October 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 found three haters who were posting about our pizza, and instead of begging them to just try us again, we cooked up something else besides pizza: A surprise, veiled as an invite to join a taste test with other like-minded people.

We get LOTS of hate comments, especially about the quality and taste of our pizza. We also get compared to our main competitor, Domino’s. To avoid the spread of negativity, we typically don't respond to the trolls.

Ironically, these "haters" turned out to be the fuel we needed to attack negative perceptions head-on. When we spotlight the haters, our "truth army" of online loyalists comes to our defense.

We played into the humor sensibilities of the broader gen-z audience on TikTok, and reached our ultimate target audience—the community of pizza eaters on TikTok. Specifically, we sought to change the minds of people who were hating on Little Caesars pizza in the comment section.

We blindfolded our 3 haters and brought them to a 10’ bonfire in the middle of the woods. No, really. That’s what we did. We etched their hate comments into wood planks, threw the planks into a bonfire, and cooked 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. We invited Zoe Roth, face of the popular “Disaster Girl” meme, to be the host of this fiery event. (You know, the meme with the child smirking into the camera as a house in the background goes up in flames… yeah, that girl). Zoe served as a shocking cultural reference (the meme is 20 years old, after all) and the ‘host’ of our Burn the Burns bonfire.

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! ROASTED!