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Sravanthi Challapalli

Pizza Hut's new campaign focuses on how the generation gap can be melted with a good pizza.

THE generation gap melts as easily as the cheese it carries. A mom-daughter squabble is laid to rest over a Chettinad Pizza from Pizza Hut, whose new campaign tries to woo women, apart from reinforcing its `good times start with great pizzas' proposition.

The campaign focuses on the Chettinad pizza, the latest addition to Pizza Hut's Pan Hindustani range which was launched with tandoori pizzas last year.

According to Pankaj Batra, Director (Marketing - Indian Sub-continent), Yum Restaurants International, Pizza Hut's campaigns have strived to project the fast food chain as an international brand with an Indian heart.

The TV commercial features a mother (played by theatre personality and film actress Lillette Dubey) and daughter arguing all the way to the restaurant, competing for slices of the same pizza and, like all moms, the mother thawing and giving away the last slice which she's grabbed to her daughter. And funnily enough, the mom is all Western chic, while the long-haired daughter is clad in a demure salwar-kameez.

Says Bipasha Banerjee, Assistant Vice-President and Senior Creativer Director, JWT, Delhi, who was in charge of the campaign, "As Pizza Hut is all about getting people together, we extended it to getting generations together. This would also get the older generation also interested in pizza, which is more a youth product." Moreover, so far, the protagonist in earlier ads has never been the woman, even though she has been featured in it. "We thought making women the central characters would address more women directly and bring more of them into the restaurant," she says.

She says Dubey's character is an "over the top" character which goes well with the `role reversal' (Westernised Mom, still-Indian daughter) effected in the TVC, which was a twist that went with the mood and goals of the advertisement, she said.

"It's all about making the brand more `relatable'," says Subroto Pradhan, Vice-President (Client Servicing), JWT. The brand began adapting itself to Indian tastes two years ago with masala pizzas. Since the largest selling item on the menu was the Pan Pizza, the company used this as a base to make inroads into the market with its Pan Hindustani range, which now accounts for 30 per cent of the mix.

Along with the chicken tikka and spicy paneer pizzas which are not part of the Pan Hindustani range, the Indian portion of the menu accounts for two-thirds, says Batra. Pizza Hut constantly endeavours to develop new stuff, and Chettinad was the obvious choice because that cuisine has been the flavour of the season in recent times, he adds.

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