How does a longstanding brand like Dominos change what you think about them after 50 years of business and over 5,000 stores???? First, I can say that while I truly dislike the vast majority of advertising, Dominos has done an incredible job in the recent past. With a string of ads and campaigns focused around raw honesty, customer response, high interactivity, completely untraditional thinking and transparency they have accomplished the near impossible of changing people's minds.
If you don't follow the world of pizza quite as closely as I do, here are a few landmarks to get your bearings:
- Early last year Dominos launches a new campaign focused on past product quality. Basically stating, "We know it was bad before so we revamped everything and try us now." They describe this strategy as 'blowing up the bridge' and truly thought there was no going back if it did not work (As an example they said it would be as if "New Coke" came out by saying that Coca Cola was terrible).
- Ads were then focused on getting their toughest critics to try the new recipe (they even did a secondary underground campaign called "Taste Bud Bounty Hunter" that allowed customers to nominate people to try the pizza with incentives like a free year of pizza)
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All ads were documentary style to bring home the transparency and raw honesty vibe. They received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Sales boost almost 15% in the first quarter.
- Dominos incorporates interactive tools such as the pizza tracker (one of my personal favorites) which allows you to not only watch your pizza's progress but see WHO is making it and comment accordingly.
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Continue to aggressively advertise the campaign showing real stories from real people (meet the chef, meet our team, words from the CEO and user submitted responses)
- "Show us Your Pizza" campaign commercials are to follow, including submit photos of your pizza directly upon delivery to ensure quality. Over 13,000 people send in photos and Dominos responded in ads to bad photos that were received.
- The second most impressive move (saying your 50 year recipe was crap is most impressive) was integrating a live streaming billboard in the middle of time square to display user submissions. REAL TIME TRANSPARENCY from user submissions, the good the bad and the ugly. You can see this here http://more.dominos.com/wp/2011/07/times-square/ as well as in some follow up advertising they did.
So why do I care? Well...
- I think so often advertising is a waste of time because it doesn't really change your opinion about something (especially my non-believer generation) and re-branding is the only key to changing someone's opinion/making the product itself better. This campaign serves to define their rebranding AND tell people about it in an interesting way.
- SO many times in branding/rebranding efforts people always try to push for the safest of all options. The bigger the company the harder they push back on drastic changes or 'lines in the sand' due to fear of alienation of current or potential customers. For an organization as big as Dominos, this is one of the gutsiest shifts in marketeering I have ever seen. Drastic times call for drastic measures and Dominos sales had become so abysmal that they knew an enormous shift was necessary to keep the company afloat, or better yet extremely profitable. I have to say hats off to CP+B (their advertising firm) who I am sure had many sleepless nights in the beginning of this campaign.
- A brand doesn't exist in a single point in time. Instead a brand evolves over time to gain a much deeper meaning for the customer. So many times valiant efforts in rebranding fall short within the minds of the consumer because after an initial push, they don't grow, enhance or communicate the story in new ways. As you can see from the bullet point timeline above, the beautiful plan of action of the ads really extend the new Dominos brand to so much more. They have done an outstanding job of not being a 'one note song' of 'try the new formula' but rather drawn an entire picture for themselves as a transparent company that has direct communication with their users. If they can do this with 5,000 stores, what is your excuse?
- Non-traditional interactivity is what new generations of users are looking for. If I have been asked once, I have been asked 1,000 times "Can we get on this Tweeter thing," but so rarely is there a great strategy put forth on HOW to utilize each of the unique benefits these tools provide as well as a solid process to actually grow those communities themselves. Typically big companies use these in the most traditional of senses and use these tools to talk TO their customers vs talking WITH these customers (a great example however of interesting usage is Jack in the Box....but this is a conversation for another day). Dominos has used connectivity of Facebook with the pizza tracker, Twitter feed feedback for users and SEVERAL online competitions and campaigns to receive the most real time and honest feedback they can. They are truly using each of these tools in tandem with each other vs looking at them as individual components then RESPONDING based on the information they receive (for instance, they were receiving several requests for "In Store Pickup" because of the recession and they tied in a new campaign to solidify the 'we are listening' message along with the transparency of 'come in and talk to Pam who just made your pizza')
At the end of the day, I think so many times we try to convince ourselves of the safest path possible for so many reasons. We try to believe that if we yell loud enough that our product is high quality without ACTUALLY changing anything that people will believe it. However, Dominos knew this wasn't the world we live in. If you NEED to make a change, do it and back it up. Doesn't mean hide the bad it means make things better and then really listen to users and try to respond. Everything won't be right every time, but for Dominos honesty was simply the best policy.
I think one of the most important things to walk away with is....during branding exercises I try to help people define the one word they want associated with their brand. The best defined brands simply have a feeling or singular word that users can articulate (Southwest - friendly, Countrytime Lemonade - summer, etc.) so just think about the one word shift that happened for Dominos because of their concentrated efforts from 'cardboard' to 'honest'.....not a bad move, eh?