Pizza Hut
No EVP, just truth
Focus:
Employer Brand Transformation & Value Strategy Development
Key Elements:
Decision-Dynamics Research, Creative Direction, Content Strategy, UX Design, Career Site Reinvention, Storytelling.
Challenge:
When the pandemic hit, pizza became the comfort food of a nation in lockdown. Demand surged. And fulfilling it required delivery drivers — not at normal levels, but at ten to twenty times normal levels, almost overnight.
Every restaurant chain, every grocery service, every gig platform was competing for the same pool of people at the same moment. The competition for delivery drivers became, by some measures, more intense than the competition for nurses. Pizza Hut was facing store closures not from lack of customers, but from lack of people to serve them.
Finding the Insight
We couldn't go into the field. So we surveyed thousands of crew members and delivery drivers and ran decision-dynamics analysis to understand what actually drove their choices.
Money and safety were expected. What wasn't: manager empathy ranked as the single biggest decision factor, ahead of pay, ahead of flexibility, ahead of everything else. It hadn't been part of Pizza Hut's employer brand before the pandemic. But the research made clear it was already part of Pizza Hut's reality. The company had exceptional people-leaders. Managers who loaned personal vehicles when a driver's car broke down. Managers who were the only consistent human presence in a crew member's week. The research didn't reveal a gap. It revealed an asset no one had thought to use.
The stories that came back were extraordinary. Tips that blew people's minds. Being the only face someone had seen in weeks. Sorrow and joy in equal measure, often in the same shift.
The Strategy
What the research made clear was that there was no single EVP that could speak honestly to all of those people. The workforce was too varied, the experiences too individual, the reasons for staying too personal to compress into a positioning statement.
So we didn't write one.
Instead, we built a wall of Hut Stories: real employees, real days, unfiltered. Great days. Hard days. The moments that made the job worth it and the ones that tested them. The value wasn't in a brand promise. It was in the honesty of the telling, the specificity of the experience, and the implicit message to every candidate who read them: this is what it's actually like, and these are the people you'd work with.
The Result
The strategy shifted Pizza Hut from closing stores for lack of staff to building the driver workforce the business needed. The work itself became the most-cited reason people applied. Candidates felt seen before they'd filled out a single form.
Recruiting costs fell while competitors watched theirs climb. That's what happens when the story you tell is the same story people find when they show up. No gap to close. No promise to walk back. Just the truth, told well, and a candidate who already felt like they belonged.