What Gung Ho (and Annie's) excels at is brand awareness.
Curious about including Annie's in this statement. How have they excelled at brand awareness? They rarely advertise, never have participated in our pizza cup events, they rarely have sales promotions that I know about, and they have very little social media presence that i am aware of.
Seems to me that they excel at is making people enjoy their meals.
Gung ho is much more savvy on the marketing front and i'd agree with you that there are better tasting pizzas out there, but there's no amount of marketing that will overcome bad food / service etc.
I'd attribute gung ho's victory to a winning combination of food, service and marketing. There's no shame in that ... in fact there's probably two dozen pizza places on this list that could stand to learn a thing or two from Gung Ho.