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In the world of food delivery, standing out is no easy feat. The pizza delivery market, estimated to grow significantly in the coming years, is dominated by established players with deep pockets and strong networks; and armed with decades of experience, they command loyalty with ironclad brand recall and armies of delivery bikes.
For a relatively new entrant like Oven Story, carving out a distinct identity meant a combination of innovation, adaptability, and marketing strategies that go beyond the conventional.
Oven Story’s story (pun intended) has been one of continuous reinvention. Starting with a niche proposition–four cheese bases that made pizza customisation as easy as choosing a Netflix series–it soon realised the modern customer wanted more than cheese pulls and crispy crusts. They wanted standout experiences. This epiphany spurred a strategic pivot that went beyond toppings. The shift redefined its positioning, as it ventured into the realm of memory-making rather than merely meal-making.
But the journey has not been without its challenges. Competing in a space where brand differentiation often hinges on price wars or speed of delivery, Oven Story has taken a different route: focusing on how pizzas can connect with moments in consumers' lives.
By embracing digital platforms, particularly social media, it has attempted to resonate with its target demographic–digitally savvy, experience-oriented young adults in tier I and tier II cities.
Social media has been central to this approach. By blending humor, cultural relevance, and sharp observation, the brand has carved out a playful online persona. Campaigns like sending ‘emotional support pizzas’ to people celebrating or lamenting life milestones show a commitment to tapping into personal moments.
Nishant Kedia, CMO of Rebel Foods, pulls back the curtain on the brand’s playbook, revealing a cocktail of pop-culture savvy, hyper-local relatability, and an uncanny ability to ride the moment-marketing wave. The key, it turns out, lies in mastering the art of storytelling–turning a simple meal into a narrative that customers not only consume but also share.
Edited excerpts:
Could you walk us through Oven Story’s evolution as a brand? What have been some of the key touchstones over the years in terms of marketing?
Oven Story Pizza started as a pizza brand that allowed people to customise their pizza base with any of the 4 different types of cheese. Innovation has always been pivotal in this Brand’s journey. As the category evolved, we realised people wanted more from their pizza. That is when we shifted the focus to toppings, and the whole brand proposition changed to Pizzas with Standout toppings. However, when we talk about standout toppings as a brand we are essentially focussing on creating standout experiences. So what was once just about pizza has today evolved into an experience, which goes beyond just the product.
The pizza delivery segment is highly competitive with established players. What has been Oven Story’s core approach to standing out, both in marketing and brand positioning?
Oven Story focuses on innovation and consumer-centric campaigns that tap on pop-culture phenomenons, moment-marketing, and trending topics. Oven Story Pizza has carved a niche for itself in the highly competitive food delivery market through its upbeat and emotional branding strategies. We have evolved from a pizza brand focusing on quality and variety to a lifestyle-oriented brand that connects organically with its audience. This strategy shifts the focus from simply selling a product to creating an experience, turning meals into memorable moments.
The brand maintains a strong online presence with vibrant visuals, quirky captions, and a playful tone. Content focuses not only on pizzas but also on storytelling, pop-culture humour, and brand innovation (both in terms of product as well as experimental content). The audience today seeks uniqueness, personalisation and innovation in every aspect of their life, be it entertainment, fashion or a cuisine like pizza. Our limited-time campaigns leverage these aspects to drive engagement for the brand. This helps us become a part of our consumer’s lives that drive organic chatter for the brand.
We strongly believe thoughtful marketing, combined with product innovation, can turn an everyday offering like pizza into an extraordinary experience.
If you could put Oven Story’s marketing strategy into a few buckets, what would those be?
Oven Story’s marketing strategy can be categorised into four key buckets: Pop-culture humor, leveraging witty and relatable references; Hyper-local slice of life, creating region-specific content; Moment-marketing trends, tapping into current events and viral topics; and Oven Story video properties, showcasing engaging storytelling to highlight brand offerings and values.
Could you shed light on the thought process behind your social media strategy? How have you tried to build your brand persona and voice on social media?
The social media strategy for OS is pretty simple, no running behind viral gimmicks, instead building a meaningful community of pizza lovers that come here for moments of joy & laughter. We are consistently focusing on light-hearted, relatable laughter-inducing moments. It’s like having an entire stand-up comedy set about what goes inside the mind of a pizza lover! It is fun, shareable, emotional and cheesy.
Striking a balance between maintaining a consistent brand voice and personalising content for diverse audiences can be challenging. How does Oven Story achieve this balance on social media?
Oven Story uses Instagram creatively, showcasing vibrant visuals and quirky captions to maintain engagement. The page reflects its playful tone and ties campaigns into trending themes. The audiences may vary but their longing for Pizza and Fun content is what brings them to this social page of Oven story. The thumb rule to follow when posting something for this brand is - make it interesting, make it funny and serve it with some standout pizzas!
Another key strategy is most brands on social media wait for their audience to come to the brand page, with Oven story we break this norm and instead we reach out to our audience when they put out a standout content, standout post or just a standout life update.
We recently did a campaign where we randomly picked a few Twitteratis who had posted standout life updates like clearing exams, engagement, visa approval, heartbreak, emotional breakdown etc. We reached out to them, asked for their address and sent them an emotional support pizza. This led to the organic discovery of the brand and it generated a lot of chatter online. The bonds that are formed over such life experiences help build a stronger brand community. It also helps in making the brand a part of people’s daily lives.
Oven Story’s Instagram features quite a few trendy meme and reel templates. Which demographic do you aim to target with your content?
Oven Story’s Instagram content targets individuals aged 20 to 35, comprising young men and women from tier I and tier II cities. The focus is on engaging a digitally savvy demographic with trendy memes and reels that resonate with their lifestyle, humour, and preferences.
What have been the key learnings that you have observed as you have built your social media presence and engaged consumers?
A key observation here is our biggest competitors are not any other pizza brand! In fact, people are not interested in brands, people want to connect with other people on this platform. Hence, we realised we can’t just operate like a brand instead we need to do a lot more story-telling, we need to be friendly, approachable and authentic. Just like any other human, brands too need to have and show a spectrum of emotions. That is why, if you look closely, Oven Story is not just all fun and happy, it is also bloopers, it is also BTS, and it has multiple shades of other emotions.
The latest kiddy pizza campaign was hence a good mix of fun and nostalgia, which made it more authentic for our community.
While other brands are active on social media, their focus is often on promoting deals and discounts. Oven Story focuses on storytelling, creating an aspirational and relatable brand image.
As more and more brands adopt a social-first approach to marketing, where do you see the place of social media marketing in the larger marketing envelope? How much emphasis in terms of resources should a brand put on social media marketing vis-a-vis conventional methods?
Oven Story Pizza differentiates itself through creative marketing that goes beyond traditional strategies. By focusing on emotional connections, playful innovations, and a digital-first approach, it appeals to a younger, experience-oriented audience. This unique positioning allows Oven Story to stand out in a competitive market where most brands emphasize price and convenience.
Oven Story’s transition from celebrity collaborations to a more experience-focused marketing strategy has been a pivotal move, significantly enhancing its brand identity and customer engagement.
Celebrity endorsements often create surface-level appeal, relying on star power to attract consumers. By moving away from this, Oven Story has focused on creating campaigns that resonate emotionally with customers.
Modern consumers value experiences over mere endorsements. By prioritising customer-centric campaigns, Oven Story has aligned itself with this trend, moving beyond traditional advertising to deliver something unique. Social media thus remains at the core of our marketing strategy, because it gives people real-time access to the brand and vice-versa. Today when the whole world is on the gram either making reels or watching it, social media definitely remains our core focus.
Finally, what are your long-term and short-term marketing goals?
Long-term marketing goal is most certainly to build more and more experience that will help us widen our community and in-turn create more loyalists. This strategy will eventually reduce the marketing cost and give higher return on investment. It is more like building your own distribution channel that gives you a fertile ground to seed in more innovations.
Short-term marketing goal currently for 2025 is to create brand first IPs, events that bring alive the product experience even on social and vice versa. Our aim is to create a larger Oven story universe where different aspects of standout life can be experienced by our community. These can also be very well extended to the AI world!