With its creamy cheddar cheese sauce and salted soft pretzel crust, Little Caesars’ Pretzel Crust Pizza is certainly not for everyone — but those who like it freakin’ love it. Of all the Little Caesars products, this one had the biggest cult following. And ever since it left our menu, Pretzel Crust fanatics have gone to great lengths to bring it back.

The thing is, we had brought it back in the past, and it didn’t change the world. We’d bring back Pretzel Crust. People would thank us. Sales would be okay. And then everyone would forget about it.

This time we needed a new approach. We wanted to show people that Little Caesars is a company who listens, and they’re bringing back Pretzel Crust because fans are asking them to. If we could do that and sell a bunch of Pretzel Crust pizzas along the way, then mission accomplished.

We live in the age of the influencer, where every product launch is accompanied by overpaid D-listers shilling the latest “it” thing. So to launch the return of Pretzel Crust, we created an influencer campaign of our own.

But instead of hiring dozens of influencers with thousands of followers to promote our pizza, we completely flipped that on its head, getting thousands of Pretzel Crust die-hards with dozens of followers to do it for us.

And by giving fans a chance to #UnlockPretzelCrust, along with unique pretzel-themed prizes, all before the pizza was even back, we knew they would talk about it, tweet about it, and obsess about it 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Who are these influencers, you ask? We lovingly call them the “Pretzel Crust Fanatics.” And instead of marketing this pizza to the masses, we set out to create something just for them.

They weren’t hard to find. They’re out there making Change.org petitions to bring back Pretzel Crust and trying to be the first comment on literally ANY post about the product. But what exactly did they want? Yes, of course, they wanted Pretzel Crust back. But more than that, they wanted recognition of their dedication to the cause. They wanted to be able to point to Pretzel Crust’s return and say, “I did that.”

With that in mind, our strategy was to leverage these fanatics and give them what they ultimately wanted: a platform to bring back Pretzel Crust. In turn, they would help us show the rest of the world the awesome-ness of this unique product.

We began by hiding secret codes across both the digital and real worlds — codes that would inevitably #UnlockPretzelCrust and awesome pretzel-themed prizes. Over the course of three weeks, we hid codes in crop circles. At hockey games. In our commercials. We hid codes in our code. In our posts. Heck, we even hid them in the middle of nowhere.

And once fans knew these codes could be anywhere, suddenly they were talking about them everywhere — on their feeds and even deep within the threads on Reddit. And once we saw that, we decided to go where few brands dare to go, and hid them there, too, inside a billion-pixel Pretzel Crust photo hunt.

By giving them a mission, we had officially turned our Pretzel Crust fanatics into unofficial Pretzel Crust ambassadors, even offering one of them a completely ridiculous but totally real job as our “Chief Pretzel Officer.”

So, did it work? Well, let’s just say that after 72 million social impressions, a 700% increase in conversation, and over 3 million pizzas sold, Little Caesars enjoyed their highest four-week sales period in company history. And it was all thanks to a group of “influencers” as unique as our pizza itself.