Pizza Hut Exec Explains How His Military Background Trained Him For A Marketing Career

This post is sponsored by CMO.com by Adobe.

Everyone loves pizza, right? But all that delicious, cheesy goodness doesn't sell itself. A global brand like Pizza Hut puts careful thought into its marketing campaigns, from connecting with customers on social media to reinventing the way people think about ordering pizza.

As part of its "CMO Interview" series, CMO.com by Adobe caught up with Kurt Kane, Global CMO of Pizza Hut. Among other topics, he talked about his military background and how it prepared him for marketing, the many ways Pizza Hut leverages digital media (mobile in particular), and his roots in Chicago, which he proudly proclaims the "center of the pizza universe."

This interview originally appeared on CMO.com and has been edited for length. To read the full interview, go here.

CMO.com: Working for a pizza giant like Pizza Hut must get you into a lot of discussions about the best pizza. Why is it a food that resonates with so many and is so important in the culture of American society?

Kane: I come from Chicago, which, as far as I'm concerned, is the center of the pizza universe. People are very passionate about pizza there. For me and a lot of families out there, it has been a center of bringing families and friends together for a long time. My role here at Pizza Hut is an opportunity to continue that tradition going forward in fun and memorable ways.

CMO.com: How do you think West Point and the military prepared you for the marketing world?

Kane: I think this type of role is all about helping people connect - being able to connect with people both inside and outside the company is incredibly important. Having gone to West Point, in my experience, it teaches you to understand a very servant/leadership-type model. It's all about taking care of people working for you first to get to a more positive result. It's a really effective approach I found in being able to build great teams.

CMO.com: How do you use social media platforms to your advantage?

Kane: For us, we have a program that we call "Hut Lovers," which was initially an email program. We changed our mindset around that, and it still plays an incredibly important role through email. But Hut Lovers connects people who are passionate about the Pizza Hut brand. [The program] brings them together consistently with relevant topics and conversation points and gets them involved in the discussion with Pizza Hut.

This Hut Lovers mindset ... has carried over into social media and paid huge dividends, in that we were named one of the most engaged brands in social just this year. We have over 11 million Facebook fans active on our U.S. page alone, and 26 million worldwide. Our engagement approach and our customer-first approach around social have been incredibly effective and continue to build strong relationships with customers through interaction.

CMO.com: What do you consider to be the future of your position and marketing, in general?

Kane: I think the future of marketing for this job will continue to be reinventing itself, with more one-on-one connections with customers. Along with that, marketing is going to go from an opt-out medium to an opt-in medium, whereby consumers have options to choose to engage with you. What we have to really focus on is creating content and messaging that's interesting enough that people opt in [rather] than walk away or change the channel.

Read the rest of the interview with Kane to learn how the "10 dollar any pizza" helped Pizza Hut reach its goals.

Find out more about Sponsor Posts.