Wings Campaign Takes Flight For Pizza Hut
Want some wings with that pie? Pizza Hut is banking on it, with new marketing for its chicken wings, now sold in about half the chain’s 6,200 U.S. restaurants.
Pizza Hut launched national ads for the WingStreet brand on sports and prime-time TV this past Saturday.
Other pizza chains offer wings and other side items to boost customer checks, and rival Domino’s Pizza Inc. has aggressively promoted oven-baked sandwiches and pasta-stuffed bread bowls as meal options. Dallas-based Pizza Hut started offering pasta in April 2008, ringing up sales of nearly $500 million in the first year. The chain’s goal is to make its pasta a $1 billion a year business.
But it has put the WingStreet moniker on store signs. Since Pizza Hut launched WingStreet in 2003, it has sold more than 1 billion wings, which now go for $6.49 to $6.99 per box of 8 to 10. In 2008, Pizza Hut posted overall sales of $5.5 billion at its U.S. restaurants, while its parent company, Yum Brands Inc., had $18.5 billion in U.S. sales.
Louisville, Ky.-based Yum, which releases its third-quarter earnings report Tuesday, also owns KFC, Long John Silver’s and A&W All-American Food.
“Chicken wings are taking off in popularity,” Pizza Hut President Scott Bergren said. “Within just a few years, we’ve become one of the largest wing restaurants in the country.”
The company sees wings as both a stand-alone product, generally purchased by guys getting together to watch sports, and a complementary product for families and other customers buying pizzas.
