ve thru for fast food pizza and pasta; and non traditional sites (Lee, 1996, p. 12). The last category encompasses more than 300 kiosks and carts in venues such as airports, stadiums, hospitals, and colleges, plus participation in some 2,000 school feeding programs, a strategy which builds up future customers from a young age.
Pizza Hut has one of the strongest franchises in the pizza business. The company has maintained a good relationship even as it has expanded onto college campuses and into malls in order to build its delivery/take out business. By continuing to build on this relationship with its franchisees, and by providing strong marketing support to its local operators, Pizza Hut is likely to maintain a good relationship with its operators, which is critical to the company's long term success in the full service restaurant concept. Other pizza companies have suffered deteriorating relationships with their franchisees (particularly Domino's) as they have sought to expand into existing territories or have tried to restructure their franchising programs.
Franchising is also used at the delivery/take out level, where Pizza Hut has sometimes gained franchisees who were formerly associated with Domino's. The challenge here has been to change the Domino's mentality of providing pizza fast without much regard to quality to one where quality has come before speed. The company has accomplished this through several programs, but it has been particularly successful in building a computer program which tracks customers by phone number. In this way, the local outlet is able to track the patterns of customers and to use the address list for direct mail pieces. It is through programs such as this that the company is able to build strong loyalty among its franchisees and encourage a high level of customer service that is critical to the company's success (Hollis, 1994, p. 46).
Pizza Hut's challenge in its full service re...