Pizza Hut Case in Thailand

Introduction

Pizza Hut is an American restaurant chain and international franchise that offers different styles of pizza along with side dishes including pasta, buffalo wings, breadsticks, and garlic bread. It is a subsidiary of Yum! Brands, Inc.(the world’s largest restaurant company) with approximately 34,000 restaurants, delivery/carry-out locations and kiosks in 100 countries.

In Thailand 1981, Minor Food Group, Thai company, owned by Minor International (one of the biggest food service operators in Asia) bought Pizza Hut’s franchise and operated successfully by opening up many branches in shopping malls and stand alone shops. Pizza Hut was a blast and it was new in Thailand as one of the first movers in pizza category. If people think about pizza, they will go to Pizza Hut. However, Minor Food Group had terminated the franchise contract after year 2000, since they decided to operate pizza restaurant on their own because they had gained a lot of experiences in the business. Therefore in 2001, Minor was apart from Yum!, and found a new company named The Pizza Company built up on the same locations as they owned Pizza Hut earlier. By this resource in hand, with aggressive strategy, they could open the pizza under the name The Pizza Company 80 branches in just one day. However Pizza Hut still has competed in the market as Yum!’s representative.

The aim for writing this paper is to discover and understand more on how Pizza Hut built the brand in Thailand and operated successfully, then after the golden period, Pizza Hut market share began to shrink due to the new competitor “The Pizza Company” coming in, who seemed to have expertise in doing business in Thailand and understand the taste of Thai people, moreover they also got the advantage on their current store locations.

Literature review

To look into Pizza Hut brand communication, we can first look into their global corporate which is Yum! Inc. Yum! Brand was created on October 7, 1997 from Tricon...