Most immediately, there are plans to open an outlet each at Hyderabad, Mysore, Pondicherry and a clutch of outlets in Delhi. The Chennai-based company is also tying up with Kwality Walls for its delivery business. This will first be done for Chennai and then inBangalore.

Aggressive expansion plans, however, are being supported extensively by a slew of management and marketing initiatives, the backbone of which is the ``Wow'' philosophy. According to Pizza Corner CEO and co-founder Antoine Bakhache, ``Our mission is to WOW every guest.'' This philosophy is given tangible aims and objectives through a series of management programmes running at the company.

Slice of Life

The tag line of Pizza Corner reads, Experience a slice of life! This according toBakhache is because the key differentiator between others and Pizza Corner will be the Pizza Corner Experience. Ensuring a unique experience every time a customer walks in hinges on maintaining a high decibel of brand activity and the Slices programme.

Brand activity revolves around constantly creating excitement: workers at each outlet break into orchestrated dancing on a make-shift stage every hour -- if you are lucky, you may even find Bakhache shaking a leg in the evening's show. The Slices programme is meant to ensure that each Pizza Corner employee knows all about the aspects of the business -- from service to actually making pizzas.

Says Bakhache, ``Slices is our multifunctional training programme and links in with another programme called Echo which stands for -- Every Contact Has an Opportunity.'' Pizza Corner's penchant for euphimisms has it naming its operational behaviour programmer as the Bonzer programme -- this is a straight take-off on Sir Don Bradman's comment for Sachin Tendulkar! WhatPizza Corner tries to achieve with each employee is to instill the feeling of ``I am a Bonzer.''

Topping with marketing

While in 1997, the company was the sole organised pizza business in Chennai, today it has multinationals like Domino's and Pizza Hut fighting for every slice of dough possible. The future expansion strategy in fact become more challenging as Pizza Corner plans to operate in all the four categories of the quick-service hospitality business.

These include the super dine-in restaurants with a seating capacity of upto 160; the medium-size dine-ins with a seating capacity of upto 80; the home dine-ins which are outlets meant exclusively for deliveries; and the mobile pizza parlours stationed at shopping malls, airports, event centres and even beaches.

The aim therefore is to consciously build a high-activity-in-your-face kind of image which runs parallel to competitive pricing and tactic marketing activities. Take for instance its delivery service offer of reaching a pizza in 39minutes in Chennai, failing which it will be free.

It also does regular promotion scheme with movie theatres. Pizza Corner also has a marketing tie-up with Coca-Cola Co. for an exclusive arrangement of serving only Coke brands in its outlets -- and has a common marketing fund to that end. Clearly, with a solid product base and generous lashings of service initiatives, all that Pizza Corner needs is a dash of pizazz to top off its aggressive competitive thrust.