Domino’s Pizza, Inc., now branded simply as Domino’s, is an American quick service restaurant (QSR) chain founded in 1960. Through a then little-known format, now called franchising, Domino’s enabled other people to invest in opening their own store. Domino’s came to the UK in 1985, where it now has more than 1,200 stores, the biggest Domino’s market in Europe. 

In the mid-2000s, Domino’s was a faltering competitor in a global chain pizza landscape dominated by Pizza Hut. Customers complained about Domino’s product quality, sales were falling and the chain’s stock price hovered at an all-time low of $3. When Patrick Doyle came on board as CEO of Domino’s Pizza in 2010, he vowed to transform the struggling pizza company into a ‘technology-enabled, nimble, category-disrupting machine’. The radical action Domino’s then took included publicly admitting that its pizzas were bad, in the unusually frank ‘Oh yes we did’ campaign, with executives reading brutal customer comments on camera (Campaign 2017). By 2018, it offered 18 different ways to order, and 65 per cent of all orders came through digital channels. Domino’s turnaround had achieved spectacularly successful results, with the company being declared the ‘largest pizza company in the world’, having generated $12.3 billion in global revenue and the share price reaching a high of over $300 (Rogers 2018). 

But, by 2019, the on-demand economy sparked by Uber, Netflix and Amazon Prime had spread to the restaurant industry, and Domino’s appeared to falter in the face of aggressive third-party delivery competition from aggregators including Deliveroo, Just Eat, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Seamless, DoorDash and Ritual. ‘Deliveroo has replaced the high street,’ lamented one of the many restaurant owners, who were obliged to pay between 15 and 35 per cent of the total cost of the order in commission to delivery apps. 

Then, in 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic quickly spread worldwide, with social distancing and lockdowns hitting the restaurant industry hard. Takeout and delivery became the new go-to options for many consumers, both by necessity (‘stay at home’ orders) and because the great majority of restaurants were jumping on the food delivery service bandwagon, with pizza of course being one of the most popular foods. 

Domino’s cutting-edge technology, data-driven decision-making and strict policy of only using its own in-house delivery services enabled it to push back and keep growing during the pandemic.......

Questions

1. Discuss how Domino’s has reinvented the brand using integrated marketing communications. 

2. Suggest how digital communications have enriched the communication process during the transformation. 

3. Debate the extent to which the on-demand economy is impacting Domino’s takeout and delivery business, and how this may evolve. 

4. Explain the characteristics of all the promotional tools used by Domino’s and then suggest which are the most significant in driving the brand forward. 

5. Imagine you own a regional chain of Chinese/Indian takeaway restaurants; explain what you have learned from Domino’s transformation that could help you grow this business.