23-Cent Breakdown

There are days when the business pages are all full of old, boring crap that no one would ever been interested in, and I have to search far and wide to find something to rant about. And then there are days like today, when it seems like this blog practically writes itself…

A story in today’s Los Angeles Times illustrates the concept of a public relations gesture gone wrong so well that I’m not sure I could make up a better one out of whole cloth. It seems that Papa John’s Pizza had run afoul of the NBA fans in Cleveland by giving away t-shirts that were critical of the local team’s leading player, calling him a “crybaby” for complaining about unusually hard fouls during some of the playoff games. This might have endeared the company to fans of the opposing team (from Washington D.C.), but it was definitely having a negative impact on the company’s sales in Cleveland.

To try to get back in the good graces of the Cleveland fans, Papa John’s decided to run a special promotion in the Cleveland area this weekend: pizzas for only 23 cents, or effectively free. They probably figured the stunt would cost them a few thousand dollars worth of pizza, but would win back a lot of their marginal customers and might even get people who had not previously tried their product to do so. I mean, for 23 cents, why not?

Anyone who has ever worked in customer service can probably see at least one hole in this plan, and anybody who has ever worked in a low-end pizza operation would be able to tell you just by looking at it that this was a bad idea, but apparently whoever is actually running the Papa John’s operation these days knows even less about consumer behavior than they do about sports fans. What happened next was what almost always happens when you offer any consumer product for free: mobs of people showed up to get their 23-cent pizzas. Some Papa John’s locations in Cleveland were reporting waits of up to 90 minutes to get a pizza, which may not sound that bad, but consider that the normal time to cook one of these marginal pies is usually between 8 and 12 minutes…

Needless to say, the crowds got restless. People began cutting in line, shoving people out of their way, and generally misbehaving. Tempers frayed, fights broke out, and several locations had to call the police to restore order. But as bad as that was, things didn’t really go into the crapper until some of the Papa John’s locations began running out of pizzas, and had to start turning people away and closing. Within a single day’s badly conceived stunt, the company had managed to anger even more customers and potential customers than they had with the original offensive t-shirts, and make themselves look like complete idiots into the bargain.

Now I’m not going to suggest that all product give-away offers are foolish. Many companies use “loss-leader” sales every day, and most of these are completely uneventful; some of them even result in increased sales for the company. But in this case, offering what was effectively free food without adequate crowd control or supply was worse than futile; it was actually counterproductive…

In the future, I imagine Papa John’s will be a little more selective about such stunts, requiring people to call ahead for a pick-up time, or putting firm limits on the number of pizzas to be given away, or limiting the offer to specific locations that have enough room to park a large truck full of extra pizza ingredients, or perhaps just not giving away promotional items that alienate customers from another part of their operating area…

In the meanwhile, I hope everyone out there will take this episode to heart, and try to avoid being the next company to have a loss-leader or product give away blow up in your face. I can always find other things to write about, but not every company is going to survive a screw-up on this scale…