Sbarro CMO Eyes Pizza To Go Beyond The Mall
Sbarro has long been known “as the only pizza player in the food-court setting,” but with mall traffic declining, CMO Annie Pritz realized it was time to change “the consumer’s understanding of our brand and how they’ve used us for the past 60 years.”
You probably know Sbarro as the Italian place in mall food courts—that has been the brand’s main identity for much of its existence. “The food court had its heyday starting in the late ’70s,” said company CMO Annie Pritz. “Sbarro became known as the only pizza player in the food-court setting.”
But as it became a more generic Italian eatery over the years, “we were playing in a very vague space,” Pritz said. So about two years ago, the company focused on rebranding the business to once again make it famous for the slice of New York-style pizza that gave it its start. “With our pizza, we always had an incredible ingredient story—we just haven’t done a good job of telling it,” she said. “We took this rebranding opportunity to do that.”
Sbarro is also looking to move outside the mall. “Mall traffic is declining,” said Pritz, “and we’ve also had guests say they wanted our pizza but didn’t want to have to go to the mall.” Starting last September, the company began testing outlets that offered delivery and carry-out of whole pizzas, and promoting them through various forms of grassroots and social marketing. “The greatest challenge that we faced in going off-mall was changing the consumer’s understanding of our brand and how they’ve used us for the past 60 years,” Pritz said.
Highlights from this week’s Marketing Superstars podcast include:
- How Sbarro got its start in a small Brooklyn market (3:25)
- The benefits and perils of expanding beyond a core product (6:04)
- The 5 P’s of positioning (8:00)
- A strategy for transitioning a brand into a new space (14:34)
- The need for a discount approach in QSR (18:05)
- Importance of engagement on social media (21:24)
Click here to listen to previous episodes of Marketing Superstars.