- Pizza Hut: Global Invention in New York City
THE CHALLENGE:
Pizza Hut wanted to create new product ideas for family dining solutions in over 100 global markets, but they did not have the time or capacity to focus on each country individually.
Pizza Hut would normally rely on the market for direction, but not on this scale. Faced with such a huge challenge, the company recognized that if they wanted truly powerful and innovative solutions that addressed each country’s needs then they needed to choose a more audacious path. So they turned to Synecticsworld for help.
THE PROCESS:
Rather than visit each of the 100 highly individual global markets, Synecticsworld’s creative thinkers looked into Pizza Hut’s own back yard and found that rather than go out into the world for the solutions why not simply go to New York City – the place where the world comes to Pizza Hut.
The Synecticsworld-led team immersed themselves in the rich mix of cultures and ethnicities that make up New York City, conducting in-depth customer research in the Big Apple’s myriad of communities, which include Russian, East Indian, Italian, Korean and Middle Eastern. The team not only asked customers about their eating habits, but also visited their homes, experienced their family lives and observed their leisure activities.
Even further, the team conducted an exploratory session with a variety of foreign students, all of whom had been in U.S. less than five years and still had family back in their native country. The session was invaluable for uncovering hidden truths about the student’s typical family dinners, while also revealing what it was about the dinners that they missed.
The team used these insights to create a better collective understanding of the needs and wants of customers in each individual market, and to invent unique new products that could be launched in each country.
THE RESULTS:
In all, the team created 25 new product concepts, several of which are in the process of being implemented throughout the world, but perhaps even more importantly, the team’s work became the formal ideation and product development mechanism used throughout the company. Not long after the conclusion of the project, Synectics was asked to train a number of local managers on how to conduct their own internal sessions, which were designed to further refine the products on a local level.
