How does a brand which prides itself on feeding great conversation smoothly incorporate smartphones – which famously stop people talking – into its restaurants offering?

“We actually considered making Pizza Express a mobile-free zone,” revealed Emma Woods, marketing director at Pizza Express, speaking at the Mobile Retail Summit this afternoon. “Our ad agency at the time even advised us to put a pot in the middle of the tables to drop your mobile phone in for the length of the meal. That was two or three years ago – I think it shows how fast things move.”

Thats certainly true. Since then, Pizza Express has launched free wi-fi in its restaurants, a mobile-optimised site, and an iOS app.

Its logic for developing an app was all too familiar – “customers thought it was cool and sexy”, according to Woods – but the app itself offers a good range of functionality, including the option to pays bill via PayPal, and its seen good numbers, with 250,000 people using it every month.

The wi-fi is even more popular – 300,00 customers log on, and use it for an average 38 minutes – but not every mobile initiative has been a success.

“We have had a very poor experience of putting QR codes on literature in our restaurants, and no one scanning them,” said Woods. “With Instagram, though, people want to take photos of the food and menus. Its a case of working with customer behaviours instead of trying to force it.”

To that end, Woods laid out a recent campaign pushing its new calzone pizzas, which encourage users to Instagram pictures to give it their seal of approval, with the best post winning a holiday.

“We were expecting maybe a 100 responses,” she said. “In the end, 3,000 people took photos of the calzones, 13,000 liked the pictures, and we reached 300,000 through their networks. And all it cost us was the price of a trip to Naples.”

Whats next?

“Just because we can do things doesnt mean we should do them,” said Woods. “Weve got lots of phone numbers on our databse, but we dont want to overwhelm people with SMS promotions, and Im very anxious about push notifications.”

Going forward, Pizza Express are intending to redevelop their entire site, starting with a focus on mobile and then rolling it out to desktop, rather than the other way around.

When asked what she predicted beyond that, Woods said that bookings were a major focus: “A few years ago, only 10 per cent of people make bookings for restaurants like ours, but that numbers moved to 25 per cent, and we suspect that it will continue to grow. So a system which somehow enabled customers to pre-book, pre-order, even pre-pay for their pizzas.”