Pizza Hut Hong Kong and IKEA are dishing up a special-edition pizza topped with IKEA’s popular meatballs and promoting the pie with a life-size version of a pizza saver. Dubbed Säva, the white circular table has three legs and its top features the Pizza Hut logo.
Pizza Hut is selling the tables in store as add-on specials to customers’ meatball pizza orders. Like all IKEA furniture, the table must be assembled. Its five parts are packaged in an actual pizza box, on which there’s a step-by-step animation of assembly instructions, which hints at what to do after you’ve finished building: call Pizza Hut and order the new meatball pizza.
The companies announced the pizza-inspired furniture in two social media posts on their respective channels, Facebook and Instagram. One post shows a Pizza Hut delivery guy asleep at an IKEA store and the other shows an executive’s “aha moment” when he came up with the meatball pizza.
The tongue-in-cheek approach worked: three days after, Pizza Hut saw 67 percent more units sold than expected. According to Pizza Hut’s Q4 2019 earnings report, China is the company’s second-largest market after the US and accounts for 17 percent of sales.
The campaign comes as Pizza Hut struggles to redeem itself after Domino’s stole the pie spotlight in 2017—Pizza Hut’s same-store sales in the US declined in three of the last four years including a one percent fall in 2019. Now its parent company Yum Brands is counting on former KFC executives George Felix, Pizza Hut’s new chief marketing officer, and David Graves, new chief brand officer, to make a turnaround. Under Felix and Graves, KFC sales grew for 13 consecutive quarters through Q3 of 2017.
