Controversial promo sets sales records for Pizza Patrón franchise

Officials for Dallas-based Pizza Patrón were pretty sure their limited-time offer from this past spring, La Chingona, was a hit: the spicy-pepperoni pizza drove an 11.6-percent same-store sales increase and a 15-percent gain in traffic through the first half of 2014, and it won the award for Best PR Campaign at the 2014 U.S. Hispanic Idea Awards. But leaders of the pizza brand that serves Hispanic customers get more confirmation of the item’s popularity every day, in that people keep asking for the pizza or can recall all the advertising for the item with a controversial name, said brand director Andrew Gamm. “Months after the promotion ran, I was in a store that does not really cater to our Hispanic demographic, and when the girl ringing up my order saw ‘Pizza Patrón’ on my shirt, she immediately said, ‘Oh, you guys came up with La Chingona,’” Gamm said. “It stuck with her after months and months, even though she wasn’t the target of the advertising. So we feel the connection of the product name stuck pretty good, and it’s one of many steps we’ll take to solidify our relationship with our core Mexican-American customers.” The promotion was part of Pizza Patrón’s repositioning to focus more intently on Mexican and Mexican-American customers, who made up the vast majority of the chain’s customers. But the campaign still courted controversy because the name “La Chingona” could be misconstrued by other Hispanics and non-Hispanic consumers. Brand officials said the item name was a reference to slang among Mexican Americans calling something “chingon,” which has a good connotation, like calling something “badass” in English. However, other Spanish speakers don’t share the same affinity for the slang word, because it is too close to the Spanish verb “chingar,” which is the equivalent to the English curse word beginning with F. But Pizza Patrón’s core Mexican customer loved the product and the ad campaign, brand officials said. During the promotion, the item achieved a sales mix of more than 4 percent, twice the typical rate of any limited-time offer for Pizza Patrón’s system. The sales results for La Chingona made it one of the most successful limited-time offers in the 91-unit brand’s history, Gamm said. During the three months that the pizza was offered, the average unit volume of Pizza Patrón stores rose $1,000 per week, and the system’s total revenue rose 6 percent compared with a year earlier, despite having 20 fewer restaurants open than it did during the same period in 2013. Pizza Patrón had plenty of challenges with the promotion, Gamm said. About 20 percent of the franchisees did not want to sell the product because of the controversial name, and many Spanish-language radio stations would not say the name of the product or had to run commercials with the name bleeped out. Still, the chain managed to make the most of the setbacks, he said. “The franchisees that didn’t run the promotion had to deal with upset customers,” he said. “If they didn’t have it, they hustled to keep customers from walking out after they’d come to the store looking for La Chingona. Our experience was that a lot of our customers had a lot of fun with it.” Pizza Patrón also had fun with the fact that local radio would bleep the name of La Chingona. Turning around the notion that the brand was “being censored for speaking Mexican,” Gamm said, Pizza Patrón changed the product’s name to “La Ch!#gona” in marketing materials and re-recorded commercials with the name bleeped out. The controversy only drove more media attention, causing sales to take off in the first few weeks of the promotion.La Chingona remains so popular that customers still ask for it, even though the limited-time offer ended two months ago. “It developed a relationship with our customer, to the point that they’re expecting big things from Pizza Patrón,” said Edgar Padilla, marketing manager. “The next campaigns we do next year will definitely be something they’ll like, and they’ll keep us ‘speaking Mexican.’” The brand also has maintained its momentum with an aggressive marketing calendar to end the year. Beginning this July to coincide with the World Cup, Pizza Patrón ran an “Any 3” deal that offered three pizzas for $6.99 each, followed by a separate Monday-through-Wednesday deal that priced a large pepperoni pizza at $3.99. Gamm said the latter offer has not cannibalized any of Pizza Patrón’s strong Thursday-to-Sunday business and has driven 20-percent same-store sales growth the past two months. “We’re having the best year we’ve ever had, and comps are the strongest they’ve ever been, and we’re looking to carry it over into next year,” he said. “It will be a challenge to comp against this year, but our CEO said we have a long way to go before we reach the ceiling, and we’re not letting up at all.”