Pizza laid bare

If you manage to meet Ian Ohan, the CEO of NKD Pizza LLC, and not secretly hope he offers you a job, you’re a stronger person than me. Apart from the obvious perk of free pizza, Ohan and joint CEO Colin de Bruin are so enthusiastic about their company it hurts.

And who can blame them for being excited? What started as a one-off pizza joint in New Orleans has soon grown into a coast-to-coast franchise business.

“The first store was opened in the summer of 2006, just after Hurricane Katrina,” explains Ohan. “It was founded by two partners, Randy Crochet, a local businessman who wanted to do something to help revitalise New Orleans, and Jeff Leach, an evolutionary anthropologist who wanted to come up with ways to make people eat more healthily after his daughter was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes.

“What they did was come up with was a concept that they initially called World’s Healthiest Pizza – it was a branding disaster, but the product was good. The product was a healthy, all-natural pizza, and they chose pizza because it is where they could make the most amount of change.”

Impressive stuff – and investors in the US thought so too. Dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban and the Kraft family backed the business, and things began to skyrocket. It was already big on Twitter (this is how the Krafts came across the store), but with the involvement of Cuban, social media became a cornerstone of NKD Pizza’s business plan.

“They were really pioneers of the development – they took down the sign on the outlet that had the phone number on it and put their Twitter name on it instead,” Ohan explains. “Now Naked pizza is one of the top 10 case studies on Twitter of how to use social media to get ahead in business.”

Peeking into the kitchens of the Dubai outlet, there is a Twitter feed on the wall, Ohan and De Bruin both respond to tweets from customers, and there’s a real community feel. They aren’t using social media to push a PR message, they’re using it to really get their customers involved.

“We use it really well — first of all we had a tone and a voice that was different than other people – it’s not a marketing tone, it is a human being,” Ohan says. “At our firm here there are only a few of us who are authorised to respond to the social media side and what we did differently to other folks is make it real – and witty. Our tweets were sharp and about creating a relationship with the customer. We weren’t tweeting at people, we were engaging with people and that’s the main difference.

“For social media to be effective you actually have to have an opinion and you have to have something to say. So we have strong opinions on everything including organic food. We don’t want to preach at people but we’re not scared to lead with our chin and say, ‘this is what we think,’” he adds.

And as business heats up in the Dubai Marina outlet, I am hanging on every word he says. And I promise it’s not just because I got free pizza!