🍕 Success Story Of Domino’s Pizza
A remarkable story in the corporate history!
While most of us know Domino’s for its famous 30 minutes free delivery policy, not many know how its stocks have outperformed in the last decade. It’s stocks have even surpassed most of the big companies like Amazon, Netflix, including Apple. The best part is that this incredible boom in its stocks is neither a bubble, nor did a billionaire tweet about you. It was the result of one of the most strategic and boldest moves made in the corporate history. Personally, this is my second favourite business case study after Nike’s marketing strategy.
This is the story that leads us back to 2009, when the brand image of Domino’s was utterly shattered. By 2010, the complaints about Domino’s pizza and the lacklustre flavour had gotten too loud to ignore — even at the company headquarters. Instead of suppressing all the negative comments and ignoring the critics, Domino’s featured all the negative comments in a national advertisement and promised to do better. This was one of the boldest moves in corporate history, and they faced all its critics head-on.
It wasn’t like they had to add a bit of salt or spice in the recipe. They had completely change the recipe and start working from scratch all over again after nearly 50 years. They revamped their entire pie, “from the crust up.”
Back Story: Domino’s pizza
Domino’s is an American multinational pizza restaurant chain founded back in 1960 in Michigan, USA by Tom Monaghan, a college dropout. Tom Monaghan’s father died when he was just four years old. His mother could not look after her kids independently, so she sent Tom and his brother to a Catholic orphanage for six years. After barely graduating high school, he was last in his class; Tom tried to go to a college in Michigan. He pursued architecture at the University of Michigan but could not pay his own tuition fees, so he dropped out and founded a small pizzeria.
Now, in the past 60 years, Domino’s has grown to become the leading pizza restaurant chain on this planet.
The story behind its logo:
Monaghan put three dots on the Domino’s logo to represent the three restaurants he owned at the time, and he planned to add a dot for each new location. He jokingly said in an interview back in 2003, “As you can see I wasn’t thinking of a national chain back then 😂”.
Domino’s released The First Car Designed by a pizza company.
Domino’s estimates that their 100,000 deliverymen drive a combined 10 million miles a week, and Domino’s believes that you should do it with some style when you deliver 400 million pizzas a year. Hence it unveiled its DXP, the first car designed by a pizza company back in 2015.
Domino’s Boldest Move
Coming back to the case study, Patrick Doyle, Domino’s CEO back in 2009, started taking a closer look at why their shares were dropping so much and to their shock, they discovered that there were multiple blog posts criticising Domino’s.
Some said that the crust tasted like cardboard, while others said that their sauce tasted like ketchup, and if you take a look at the situation back then, it was very delicate; stock prices were at rock bottom, the American economy was recovering from the 2008 crisis.
Now, in this case, what a company generally does is:
- ensure all the bad reviews are overshadowed.
- engage in paid ranking.
- maybe give out a few pizzas to get positive reviews.
In contrast Patrick Doyle, with brutal honesty, admitted that his company wasn’t doing well, apologised on national television, and called a few critics, asked them to taste their pizzas. The staff members and the chefs faced all the criticism, and took notes diligently.
What followed next was nothing but an adventure, every single chef at Domino’s worked day in and out without taking an off for 3 entire years, tried out every single combination to make the best pizzas they possibly can.
On top of that, they launched a campaign called “Oh Yes, We Did”, where they documented their journey from making terrible pizzas to making the best pizzas in the US. There is an adorable video wherein the head chefs personally went to the critic’s houses after three years and made them taste their new pizzas with entirely different ingredients. Each critic was mindblown that the head chef himself came to deliver pizzas. Most of them couldn’t even believe that a billion-dollar company would even take their feedback seriously.
This is how Domino’s reinvented itself to making the best pizzas in the world, well the results? The camping has earned 2 billion media impressions till date, and the stock prices kept growing and growing, and now it increased by 2000% compared to that during 2009. This is how Domino’s set a benchmark for other businesses to learn how to embrace criticism and how to turn it into a business opportunity
Five Major Lessons To Learn
- Customer criticism is a part of the business.
- Cost of rectification of a mistake is far lesser than the cost of damage.
- You can’t simply rely on clever and flashy campaigns without making any improvements in the product itself, in this case, it’s the ingredients.
- Advertising should never receive complete blame for a business’s failure or credit for it’s success. Advertising does play a huge role, but there are many other factors too.
- The future of marketing is not about discounts and fancy packaging; but instead, the brand needs to connect to their customers at a personal level. Thanks to social media, it has become easier than ever.
- The moment customers realise they are a part of the journey and their contribution matters, the business will achieve an extraordinary level of brand loyalty, which is by far the most powerful asset. The best way is via storytelling and, in this case study it’s the ‘Oh Yes We Did Campaign’.
