Comparison Between Pizza Hut and Dominos
Domino's, Pizza Hut use delivery and dine-ins to whet the taste buds of demanding Indians
A pizza for most of its consumers is a round, flat piece of hand-tossed dough topped up with sauces, cheese and meats (or veggies). And the marketers of Domino's and Pizza Hut in India will tell you that although their pizzas sell like hot cakes, differentiating one brand from the other is not quite a piece of pastry.
"As the ability to change consumer tastes is extremely limiting, we have no choice but to innovate consistently," says Sandeep Kataria, chief marketing officer at Yum! Restaurants, which owns Pizza Hut along with other quick service restaurant (QSR) brands like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell.
Domino's has emerged category leader on the back of its core differentiator of timely delivery after launching the 'khushiyon ki home delivery' campaign in 2008. It claims a 55% share of the Rs 1,700-crore organised pizza market. But America's second largest pizza maker -- after Pizza Hut -- which is essentially a pizza delivery chain in the West, has now realised this positioning may not be enough to ensure leadership in India in the longer run.
Reason: Pizza Hut has carved out its delivery business as a separate entity to give it a sharper focus and thereby eat into Domino's core proposition.
That's one reason why Domino's has made a shift from the home delivery platform to a more generic 'yeh hai rishton ka time.' At the same time, Indians have few qualms about lapping up pizzas at the delivery centre itself. Explains Harneet Singh Rajpal, VP, marketing at Domino's: "We can't ignore the dine-in segment anymore; we need to have a positioning that is neutral enough for both delivery and dine-in."
To take the fight back to Pizza Hut, Domino's is upgrading its dine-in stores, allocating larger spaces for them and foraying into new cities. Almost all the 100 new stores it will set up this fiscal year will operate both as delivery and dine-in stores. Rajpal says
A pizza for most of its consumers is a round, flat piece of hand-tossed dough topped up with sauces, cheese and meats (or veggies). And the marketers of Domino's and Pizza Hut in India will tell you that although their pizzas sell like hot cakes, differentiating one brand from the other is not quite a piece of pastry.
"As the ability to change consumer tastes is extremely limiting, we have no choice but to innovate consistently," says Sandeep Kataria, chief marketing officer at Yum! Restaurants, which owns Pizza Hut along with other quick service restaurant (QSR) brands like Kentucky Fried Chicken and Taco Bell.
Domino's has emerged category leader on the back of its core differentiator of timely delivery after launching the 'khushiyon ki home delivery' campaign in 2008. It claims a 55% share of the Rs 1,700-crore organised pizza market. But America's second largest pizza maker -- after Pizza Hut -- which is essentially a pizza delivery chain in the West, has now realised this positioning may not be enough to ensure leadership in India in the longer run.
Reason: Pizza Hut has carved out its delivery business as a separate entity to give it a sharper focus and thereby eat into Domino's core proposition.
That's one reason why Domino's has made a shift from the home delivery platform to a more generic 'yeh hai rishton ka time.' At the same time, Indians have few qualms about lapping up pizzas at the delivery centre itself. Explains Harneet Singh Rajpal, VP, marketing at Domino's: "We can't ignore the dine-in segment anymore; we need to have a positioning that is neutral enough for both delivery and dine-in."
To take the fight back to Pizza Hut, Domino's is upgrading its dine-in stores, allocating larger spaces for them and foraying into new cities. Almost all the 100 new stores it will set up this fiscal year will operate both as delivery and dine-in stores. Rajpal says