Dominos Pizza Evolves and Wins: Part II

On February 3, 2010, I wrote an article about how Dominos Pizza utilized transparency in their advertising to turn around the public’s perception of their products. I pointed out that they are effectively combining social media and traditional advertising to tell an apologetic, “we promise we’ll do better” story. Furthermore, I addressed how this campaign was not only making people do a complete “opinion 180″ but also how it was positively impacting Domino’s bottom-line, most notably their stock prices; at the release of the article, their stock prices were up and valued at $11.20 per share.

While in a meeting yesterday, designer Adam Kopec pointed out that Dominos “Pizza Turnaround” campaign is continuing to pick up steam. This was not a total news flash to me, as I was aware that they were still incorporating the home-grown tactics that had worked well thus far. However, when he showed me their Facebook campaign, something I was not familiar with, it became very evident that Dominos was taking things to another level.

In their current television ad campaign, Dominos harps heavily on what they call “Holdouts”. These are people that have not tried the new Dominos pizza and they make a show of putting up billboards, ads, commercials, etc. targeting them by name; the ads are actually quite brilliant. Seeing the great response they got from turning the footage of their “Holdout” stalk-fest into prime-time commercials, Dominos went a step further and made PizzaHoldouts.com, a Facebook-driven campaign where people can suggest that their friends try the new pizza. After connecting your Facebook profile to the page, you are prompted to “Place a Bounty” where you supply the “Fugitive’s” (your friend’s) name and email. The company then sends that person a “buy one pizza, get one free” coupon and you get a small side-order for free (for example, I recieved a coupon for free chocolate lava crunch cakes, a coupon I will battle not to use). Once the pizza coupon is redeemed, the company considers the bounty “fulfilled” and you are able to acquire more rewards and climb the ranks of the leaderboard. All of your statistics are viewable within your profile, including “Taste Bud Bounty Rank”, “Unfulfilled Bounties” and “Captured Taste Buds”. The person with most captures by June 27, 2010 will win free pizza for a year.

Even before I was shown this, it was my opinion that Dominos was crushing it; the new television ads served as a great follow-up to an already powerful initial website. In Pizza Holdouts, they capitalized on the competitive aspect of Facebook and they did it in the most effective way possible: they combined the competition of a game and tangible rewards in a contest where someone redeeming a coupon is a prerequisite to your success. It’s a fantastic idea that, along with the rest of their turnaround campaign, is really working for them. Don’t believe me? As I mentioned, when I released the initial article about Dominos on February 3, their stock was at $11.20 per share. In late April, it exceeded $16 per share; that’s a 30% increase in under 3 months.

As I said in my first article, I am ecstatic that a company embraced transparency and honesty and is seeing fantastic results. The money is nice, but I’m sure what is really making Dominos’ Board of Directors do backflips is the fact that they were able to reverse a rock-solid stereotype in just a few months. It’s a great lesson that keeps getting better. I hope Part III is just as good.