Pretzel Crust was coming back for the fifth time. Despite having a small but vocal community of rabid and devoted fans, sales declined each time we brought the product back. We needed to give Little Caesars a reason to keep the product around. We needed to recruit MORE fans.

This was an opportunity to break sales records and capture pizza eaters’ attention in a way that no other product on the menu could. Forecasts internally were high and expectations for success were even higher. Our tasks were clear: Reach a bigger audience, create the conditions for Pretzel Crust to go nuclear, earn media, and sell the S#!t out of it beyond its established cult-like fan base.

A small group of rabid fans ask for Little Caesars to bring back Pretzel Crust. Every. Single. Day. They’re obsessed. But we needed to get everyone talking about Pretzel Crust, not just this small group.

Our idea: Let’s make our rabid fan base so loud that the rest of the world would have to take notice. How? By giving them a pizza they didn’t ask for –Corn Cob Crust Pizza. We knew this group of fans would get so loud that everyone would take notice and turn their attention towards Pretzel Crust pizza.

Despite having a small but vocal community of rabid fans, Pretzel Crust sales declined each time we brought the product back. We needed to go beyond our fans and get mass audiences begging for Pretzel Crust, especially people who were on the fence.

In creating the idea of Corn Cob Crust, we bet that our fans would make their disappointment loudly known while also amplifying their fanatical love for their favorite product. If we played our cards right, the Internet would take notice and they did.

It was critical that we developed a fake product that rode the line between believable and farcical. But we knew whatever we made, we had to commit to the bit. So we went all in on Corn Cob Crust pizza: a pizza sold with a 2L bottle of butter.

We developed a launch campaign just like we would for any other “normal” product including live action videos, food-forward video content, partnerships with influencers, social content, and even a PR blitz announcing our fake product.

For one week, we released nothing but content promoting Corn Cob Crust. People were confused, outraged, but more importantly they kept asking why we would release this pizza and not Pretzel Crust. Their outrage made casual fans of Little Caesars take notice. After everyone couldn’t take it anymore, we launched Pretzel Crust with a packaged PR apology, admitting that we were wrong.

Awareness post-campaign for Pretzel was 72% vs. +/- 35% prior to the campaign.

While we can’t get into specific sales numbers here (check the confidential section), Pretzel Crust sales outperformed all forecasts and became the most successful product campaign in company history. Sales were strong and sustained even when campaign media was extended an additional 4 weeks. Sales and chatter were significant enough to drive the decision by Little Caesars’ leadership to include Pretzel Crust as a core menu item versus a LTO.

Stores were not the only place where we saw growth. The campaign’s 1.5MM total shares on social media are 93x greater than Little Caesars’ two previous LTO campaigns combined. Content from seven influencers raked in 41.3M views and 31k new followers to the Little Caesars handle, proving out our influencer strategy. In total we saw a 22% follower growth on TikTok.