Pizza Hut Taiwan taps Gen Z to build hype
It is part of a strategy that ditches traditional marketing in favour of virality.
After making headlines with stinky tofu and ramen pizzas, Pizza Hut Taiwan is tapping Gen Z to create buzz from gaming, music, sports, and co-creation to connect with the next generation of consumers.
“We used to have no differentiation between McDonald’s and Domino’s in the consumer’s mind,” Antony Leung, managing director at Pizza Hut Hong Kong, Macau, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Myanmar, told the QSR Media Asia TabSquare Conferences & Awards 2025. “Now, we are a unique, local, and culturally relevant brand.”
The shift marks the evolution of a strategy that Pizza Hut Taiwan started six years ago, when it ditched traditional food marketing in favour of controversy, virality, and buzz.
Since 2019, Pizza Hut Taiwan has been serving up dishes that sound more like dares than dinner, and it’s been a strategy rooted in one goal: to create controversial discussions.
“Thanks to this strategy, our revenue grew 1.5 times and our profitability doubled,” Leung said.
He also emphasised that in the neo-social digital world, the more controversial you get, the more you get talked about. “And this is the game of rules.”
That rule has produced durian pizza, stinky tofu pizza, crust pizza, and ramen pizza.
Whilst most food brands chase efficiency through ads and influencer campaigns, Pizza Hut Taiwan has built its marketing model almost entirely on earned media.
“All of this was done with zero advertising spend,” Leung said. “This is how the magic works.”
The “magic” means having key opinion leaders unbox bizarre pizzas on social media, getting picked up by TV news stations, and sparking digital debates.
Internally, they call it the TTT Model: talkability to traffic to transactions. Every viral product drives massive online chatter, spikes traffic to Pizza Hut’s website where 83% of their transactions happen, and boosts overall sales.
Now, Pizza Hut Taiwan is empowering its next target audience—Gen Z—to lead the creative charge.
In 2023, the pizza chain dropped its own “HOT Together” music video, which targeted younger audiences by leveraging insights into Gen Z preferences to increase appeal and engagement.
On the gaming front, the brand has teamed up with Genshin Impact, one of the biggest role-playing games in the world, to launch a campaign that includes in-store experiences and limited-edition merchandise.
“We are the first players in the market to create our own world and thrive,” Leung said. “Whilst time has been limited, we've leveraged culturally relevant local ingredients to produce content—video, dance, and music—that deeply resonates.”
