Pizza Hut had always created specially designed boxes for promotions and tie-ins that were fun, engaging, and unmistakably from Pizza Hut. But in between promotions (their “evergreen” boxes), the box design was pretty plain, containing just the Pizza Hut logo in the center of the box tops. Pizza Hut wanted their evergreen boxes to have just as much energy, spunk, and playful attitude as their promotional boxes.
Starting with an audit of other large pizza companies’ boxes and an overall look at packaging design trends, *Trace Element set out to give Pizza Hut something that would satisfy the four major requirements that we identified in helping us judge potential design solutions. First, the design had to delight customers and have the spirit and playfulness our client was after – they had to entertain to a certain degree. Two, the solution needed to allow consumers to not tire of it too quickly since these were our evergreen, every day boxes. Three, we wanted each different size of Pizza Hut box (large, medium, small, sides, cups, etc. – several dozen in all) to be unique; we knew that finding one design we could slap on every size of box would not cut it. And four, we needed a solution that allowed for some tactical ability – a way that Pizza Hut could encourage customers to engage with the brand without feeling too corporate or marketing-heavy. All in all, a pretty tall order. We presented a wide range of design solutions, over 20 in all, but one solution quickly rose to the top and showed itself to be the best answer for everything we were needing it to do.
Our solution was to create a not-so-small army of “stickers” that could selectively be applied to different sizes of boxes. The stickers were a wide mix of content: some worked both tactically, encouraging customers to download the Pizza Hut app or join the Hut Rewards program, and some worked whimsically (many stickers were visual jokes about types of crusts, ingredients, or just eating great pizza). In this way, the stickers created a unified system so that each box unmistakably belonged to the whole, but allowed the boxes to be different from one another, always giving the Pizza Hut customer something fresh to look at.
