Momizza Pizza Case Study
Turning Negative Blog Attention into a Win
Client and Challenge:
Momizza Pizza, a family pizza restaurant in Northeast Portland, had received negative backlash on a Portland Food and Drink blog when one of the employees responded "anonymously" to a blog post about the restaurant's pizza. The employee's post impacted brand awareness immediately. Potential customers who had been interested in trying the pizza responded online that they were now going to shun the restaurant.
Solution:
The Nereus team recommended that Momizza talk directly to the community, owning up to the fact that an employee had tried to appear as an anonymous blogger on the site. Nereus also recommended that Momizza hold a focus group to give the bloggers an opportunity to try the pizza for free as well as give Momizza's owners honest feedback on the quality of their pizza. Nereus worked with the Momizza Pizza owners to set up a blog account to interact openly in the online community and to invite the bloggers to the focus group.
Results:
The blogging community reacted positively to the online interaction with the owner of Momizza Pizza and a few even signed up to join the focus group. The focus group included volunteers, college students and bloggers all from the local community. The focus group attendees had the opportunity to sample offerings from the menu including, pizza, salads, garlic knots and calzones. The evening of the focus group, one of the bloggers posted the following in response to the critical thread in question:
"Prices are about the same as the crappy commercial pizza chains, but Momizza is serving a vastly superior product, using fresh rather than frozen ingredients wherever possible.
Some will like Apizza or Ken's better because of the style of pizza, but the overall quality just is as good, IMO.
It's strictly personal taste, but both my wife and I liked Momizza's pizza better than either Apizza or Ken's. We just like Momizza's "style" of pizza better..."
Due to the positive review, bloggers began to post about checking out Momizza rather than shunning it as they had originally discussed.
"We might have to go check out the Sicilian for Jill-O."
"OK, it's on my list to try now. Even if it is your personal taste, to say you liked it better than Scholl's or Ken's is quite an endorsement."
Momizza Pizza was thrilled with the efforts by Nereus to engage the blogging community: "You really hit this one out of the ballpark!! You have made my day, week, and month."
