Toppers Pizza in QSR Magazine

Toppers Pizza in QSR Magazine

We were featured in QSR Magazine. The article talked about our innovating or making decisions around packaging. Scott Iversen, Toppers vice president of marketing, talked about the new packaging currently in the mix including how the Toppers changed the boxes to convey main points to consumers so that they make sure all of our brand messages/touchpoints were delivered in a fun way.

Read the full article here. 

Toppers featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article in Nation's Restaurant News titled "Toppers Pizza debuts first-ever TV commercials." This article discusses the reasoning behind producing the company's first ads for television, and what it means moving for Toppers as a brand moving forward. Click here for the full article, or begin reading below.

Toppers Pizza debuts first-ever TV commercials

Toppers Pizza has debuted its first TV commercials in the chain’s 21-year history, completing its “three-screen” advertising strategy after years of laying the groundwork in social media and mobile ordering.

The 42-unit brand’s first foray into television advertising represents a significant shift in its marketing spending, though its overall marketing budget remains unchanged, said vice president of marketing Scott Iversen. Over the past two years, the chain has transitioned away from print ads and direct mail to free up money to invest in producing TV commercials and buying time in their markets.

(Read More)

Toppers featured on AllFacebook.com

Toppers Pizza was recently featured on AllFacebook.com in an article titled "Restaurants Compete With Major Chains Through Facebook," which was based off of the recent NRN Article. The article discusses the engagement-driven initiatives that have helped fans and customers have a say. Click here for the full article, or begin reading below.

Restaurants Compete With Major Chains Through Facebook

Smaller chain restaurants may not be able to compete with major chains in terms of volume, but they do have a vital way of bringing in business and keeping customers happy: Facebook. A story in Nation’s Restaurant News illustrates how restaurants are reaching out to customers through social media.

The story details how regional chains Lenny’s Sub Shop and Toppers Pizza have used Facebook and other forms of social media to grow their businesses. They have one advantage over larger companies such as Subway and Pizza Hut: fans per unit. Nation’s Restaurant News cites statistics from No Limit Media Consulting, showing that Lenny’s Facebook page had more than 84,000 likes for its chain of 147 locations — roughly 578 fans per unit. Subway, by comparison, may have 15 million likes, but they’re also more spread out, with 469 fans per location. Toppers recorded 1,228 fans per location.

(Read More)

Toppers featured in Nation's Restaurant News

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article in Nation's Restaurant News titled "Maximizing the value of the social media fan." The article talks about the success Lenny’s has had with its social media and how the brand has been clever with its social media initiatives. The article also includes information about some of the new product launches and promotions. Click here for the full article, or begin reading below.

Maximizing the value of the social media fan
Smaller restaurant chains share Facebook strategies that have helped them grow sales and units

Upstart restaurant brands like Toppers Pizza and Lenny's Sub Shop have to compete against industry giants like Pizza Hut and Subway for sales, and while they acknowledge that they can’t match their rivals’ size, they can punch above their weight in terms of marketing through social media.

Executives at both brands said they concentrate less on the total number of “likes” they earn on Facebook compared with much larger chains than they do at their likes per store. Though the number of restaurants in their systems do not approach the same league as the competition, often their stable of Facebook fans per unit far exceed that of their peers.

(Read More)

Toppers featured in QSR Magazine

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article titled "The Art of the LTO" in QSR Magazine. The article features Toppers' focus on social media as a driving force in promoting limited-time offers. Scott Iversen shares the secrets of timing and volume that help with their success in these types of promotions. Click here to read the full article, or read the Toppers excerpt below.

The Art of the LTO
Limited-time offers are a fundamental part of the quick-serve industry. Here’s how to do them right.

Toppers Pizza, with 41 locations in the Midwest and South, is another operation that focuses heavily on social media, primarily Facebook, to promote its LTOs. With more than 50,000 fans following it, the company will regularly put out aggressively priced, short-term deals, such as a large one-topping pizza for $5, good for three days only.

“You’ve got to be ‘in the know’ to get these kinds of deals,” says Scott Iversen, vice president of marketing for Toppers. “It’s a matter of building up exclusivity. But it’s crazy when it happens; we do them generally at the end of a quarter, and our Facebook page goes wild, the stores are filled, people are telling their friends to get down here.”

With all those people buying $5 pizzas, it would be understandable to think the company wouldn’t make a profit on that particular LTO. But Iversen says it all works out in the end if the offer is good enough. “We end up doing double the amount of transaction counts during an LTO compared to a normal week, and the volume we do makes up for the lower margin,” he says. “And of course you’ve got ancillary sales in drinks and sides.”

(Read More)

Toppers Pizza featured in 1851 Magazine

Toppers Pizza was recently featured in an article in 1851 Magazine titled "'Young At Heart': Toppers Pizza and the advantages of having a brand that rocks." The article discussed Toppers Pizza and embracing a fanatical culture that rocks. Scott Gittrich spoke about the advantages that Toppers Pizza has over competition by being able to embrace a culture that might normally be considered risqué. Click here for the full article, or begin reading below.

“Young At Heart”: Toppers Pizza and the advantages of having a brand that rocks

“Everyone at Toppers Pizza is young at heart” sums up the environment of the Whitewater, WI based pizza brand. While many brands might shy away from risqué branding and marketing, Toppers Pizza embraces living on the edge.

If you need an example of this unique culture, simply look at the franchising video that Toppers Pizza CEO and founder Scott Gittrich created with his staff. The video starts with Scott speaking directly to the camera dressed in a business suite. 20 seconds into the video, Gittrich stands up and reveals that he is wearing Zubaz, the popular zebra sweatpants that everyone might remember from the 90s.

(Read More)

Q&A with Toppers' Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler

Recently, we sat down with our Marketing/Social Media Manager, Bridget Keeler, and asked her a few questions about social media. This revolutionary tool gives us the power to consistently interact with our following and also continues to grow our brand. See the full transcript of the interview below:

Can you describe some of Toppers goals and initiatives with social media? Why and how are you using social media to accomplish these goals?

Toppers Pizza puts an extremely high value on listening to what our customers are telling us. Our goal with social media is to give customers what they want. Recently, we were looking to add another House Pizza to our menu. We developed a crowd sourcing contest, Spank Your Pizza, which challenged fanatics to come up with the next pizza for our menu – then paired down more than 100 submissions to 64 finalists who battled it out for three weeks to make it to the top two. The contest generated some delicious pizza ideas and grew our Facebook Fan page by 62% over the course of contest.

Future goals and initiatives include creating apps that will engage our fanatics and continue to build our loyal community. We believe our fanatics are truly interested in the Toppers brand and want to be a part of shaping its success. To further measure that passionate loyalty, we will also be heavily promoting our mobile food truck via social media and will be eventually looking for fanatics to dictate where it shows up to next.

The cool thing about social media is that Toppers has the ability to change the conversation in the pizza industry by engaging and listening to our fanatics. Anyone with an idea worth sharing has the ability to influence the conversation at anytime.

With over 1,000 fans per location, how do you consistently interact and engage your fanatics?

We make it our goal to engage our fanatics multiple times during the day through our posts. These posts can range anywhere from asking them to comment on their favorite dipping sauce, to posting relevant pop culture trends. We like to believe that our fanatics see our page as being similar to hanging out in a room with their friends and having a good time.

We also have a weekly promotion, called “Toppers Tuesdays”, that gives our fanatics exclusive deals on Tuesdays only at any Toppers location. These deals are only found on our social media pages and build specials bonds with us and our fanatics. Deals can range from buy one get one deals to special pricing on regular menu items.

Local Toppers stores also dive into interacting with fanatics on our pages by offering specials to fanatics in their area. Between national and local specials, Toppers is continuously thanking and rewarding our fanatics.

How do you measure social media? (Try and think Return on Engagement – ROI is difficult to measure, etc.)

Toppers is dedicated to making our fanatics happy. We measure social media through return on engagement. Measurement comes in the form of comments, impressions, @mentions, repeat posters, popular posts, and overall brand awareness. Our first and foremost goal is to post content that captures our fanatics attention and gets them talking. While it’s easy to count the measurements mentioned above, our measurement is a constant work in progress as we decipher and understand how social media engagement affects us at every level. Our ultimate goal is to find the connection and balance between social media and our P&L to help determine and set expectations to our social media strategy prior to engagement.

If you could give one piece of advice to business looking to take the jump into social media, what would you say?

If you are looking to take the jump into social media, my advice is to take a big running leap and continue looking ahead. I believe that social media has replaced face to face conversations and is quickly becoming the norm for communication, especially among Toppers’ demographic. The key is constant, consistent, engaging communication. Social media is changing the world by the hour, while you don’t need to be the star on the conversation – you at least need to be part of it.

Toppers Pizza featured in the Wall Street Journal

Toppers Pizza was just recently featured in the Wall Street Journal in an article called “Industry Sees a Strong Rebound But Growth Will Be Uneven,” which published on February 14, 2011. In the article, which focuses on franchise trends for 2011, Toppers Pizza is showcased as a brand taking full advantage of Social Media. Toppers has blown its competition out of the water in utilizing Social Media to engage fans with the brand and further establish brand loyalty. Scott Iverson, Director of Marketing for Toppers, discusses that social networking is the best way to connect with Toppers core target market of 18-24 year olds. It connects fans with pizza recipe contests, weekly specials, a blog, twitter account and YouTube videos. As a result of its strong presence, Toppers has over 27,000 total fans and about 1000 fans per location while its competitors have around 50 per location. Toppers continues to be an industry leader in Social Media. Check out the article here or view the article below!

WSJ - Industry Sees a Strong Rebound But Growth Will Be Uneven

Toppers Pizza mushrooms in area

Scott Gittrich, president and founder of Whitewater-based Toppers Pizza Inc., visits the chain's Kenilworth Place store on Milwaukee's east side. The chain has seven Milwaukee-area locations, the newest of which opened this month in Fox Point.

Chain's growth accelerates beyond college-town beginnings
By Doris Hajewski of the Journal Sentinel

Whitewater - Some people get into the restaurant business for the love of good food. For Scott Gittrich, it was the Mercedes driven by his 25-year-old boss at the pizza restaurant where he worked during college.

"It was a very exciting time to be in the pizza business," Gittrich said of his job as a delivery driver for Domino's Pizza in Champaign, Ill. He dropped out of the University of Illinois to pursue his dream.

Now Gittrich owns Toppers Pizza Inc., a $19 million franchise chain based in Whitewater.

For most of the years since Gittrich opened his first restaurant in Champaign in 1991, the business has grown slowly. But lately Toppers has picked up the pace, despite the downturn in the economy.

The 26th Toppers location opened May 16 in Fox Point. Gittrich has ambitious plans, aiming for 100 stores by 2013 and 500 by 2020.

Gittrich said he's succeeded by targeting a demographic that the big pizza guys don't go after: 18- to 24-year-olds.

Part of that mission stems from the company's start in college towns. After Champaign, Gittrich moved to Whitewater, where he opened a restaurant in 1993. The next two were in Eau Claire and Stevens Point, in 1997. The first franchise store opened in 2000, in La Crosse.

"The big pizza places, they get all the business, but nobody's really that happy with them," Gittrich said. "We have a fantastic fan base."

Toppers lets customers know that it doesn't take itself too seriously. The Toppers guarantee: "We unconditionally guarantee that your order will be fresh, delicious, satisfying, hot, sexy, mouth-watering, well-read, intelligent, responsible, fun-loving, and prepared exactly the way you ordered it."

Toppers' growth is against the prevailing trend in the restaurant industry.

For the quarter that ended in February, food service traffic declined by 1.5%, according to NPD Group, a research firm in Port Washington, N.Y. The quick-service restaurant segment, which includes carry-out pizza stores, experienced its first decline this quarter since the winter of 2003, down 1%.

Technomics Inc., a Chicago food industry research firm, reported slower growth rates for restaurants in 2008. The 500 largest chains in the United States posted a 3.4% growth rate for the year, compared with 5% in 2007, Technomics said in its annual report released in March.

Toppers isn't large enough for the top 500, which includes companies with sales of at least $35 million. That group accounts for 80% of all fast-food restaurants.

Independent operators dominate the pizza restaurant business, making up 65% of sales as of last July, according to a report in PMQ's Pizza Magazine, citing data from InFoUSA. Pizza Hut, the largest pizza chain, made up nearly 10% of the market, followed by Domino's with 6.8% and Papa John's with 3.6%.

Darren Tristano, executive vice president at Technomics, has a home in Elkhorn and is familiar with Toppers. He believes there are several reasons why Toppers is finding success.

"They not only have what's been considered to be by many very good pizza," Tristano said. Toppers also serves up variety - chicken wings, sandwiches and breadsticks with flavored toppings.

Toppers' cost of entry for franchisees is relatively low compared with some other restaurants. Toppers franchisees can expect to invest $272,000 to $495,000 to open a location.

Toppers' revenue has increased by 30% for the past two years, mainly because of new store openings, said Scott Iverson, director of advertising and franchise development. On a comparable-store basis, revenue increased 7% last year.

But the economy is showing some effects on individual store results, Gittrich said.

Lower prices this year for ingredients have helped profits, Iverson said. Toppers has been able to maintain its prices, so profits are holding up even with a decrease in the number of transactions, he said.

The bad economy has reined in the pace somewhat in the past year, Gittrich said. Two planned stores haven't been able to open because the franchisees couldn't get financing. The new Toppers in Fox Point brings the number in the Milwaukee area to seven.

The Fox Point restaurant has the look of Toppers' upgraded prototype, which includes four plasma-screen TVs and a soft-seating area with a coffee table.

Even at the helm of a fleet of pizzerias, Gittrich never did buy a Mercedes like the one he coveted back in the 1980s when he was a student/pizza delivery guy.

Gittrich did eventually finish college, earning a degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater in 2000, when he was 37. But he drives a Ford Expedition with 276,000 miles on it.

"I just never bought a new car, and this one is as good as new. I would rather open another store a little earlier than buy another car," he said.



Read it online at the Journal Sentinel