After serving the same pizza for 50 years, Domino’s was in trouble–sales were declining, the stock price had hit an all-time low, they were tied for last place in taste with Chuck E. Cheese’s, and hundreds of franchisees were in danger of going out of business. It was going to take unbelievably bold action, not minor course correction, to get customers to give them a second chance. While at CP+B, our team's approach led to years of relentless actions and exponential growth for Domino's. WorkInProgress became AOR of Domino's in 2021.
We could no longer ignore the fact that people thought our pizza tasted like cardboard. So we completely reinvented the recipe from the crust up, and admitted our pizza sucked on national television in an act of radical transparency.
People think TV commercials inaccurately portray the food they buy, ours included. So we stopped leveraging food photography tricks and used customer photos in our advertising to prove it. When some negative photos were submitted, we used them to further improve the quality of our pizza.
Ordering pizza should be as fun and appetizing as the pizza itself. That’s why we leveraged the iPad to create the most intuitive and beautiful way to order pizza ever, including a hyper-realistic 3D pizza builder.
3 years after a PR nightmare was sparked by a video taken by an employee in a Domino’s kitchen, we returned with cameras of our own and streamed live and uncut for 30 days to prove we had nothing to hide.
Ordering online is more enjoyable and profitable. So to grow the digital business, we created eight new ways for customers to order our pizza, including simply texting or tweeting an emoji.
We wanted to deliver pizza in the best condition possible. So we worked for over five years to create a fleet of 150 purpose-built pizza delivery vehicles with built-in warming ovens.
We have found ourselves describing the ‘new’ domino’s as a technology company disguised as a marketing company disguised as a pizza company, and recent years of dominant outperformance, even embarrassing peers, probably bears that comment as true.
- JP MORGAN ANALYST