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CreaTive DeConSTruCTion
Domino’s do-over

Companies that come clean honestly earn points with consumers l BY mark Brandau

It didn’t have the Tiger Woods candal’s sex appeal or the corporate comeuppance of Toyota’s recall, but Domino’s Pizza’s mea culpa came at a time when Americans were getting attuned to and cynical of the public apology.

While Domino’s never hurt
anybody with its former recipe,
the 8,886-unit pizza chain still
felt compelled to reformulate
its core product when consum-
ers persisted that it “tasted like
cardboard.”
“We had a focus group web-
cast to our team,” said Brandon
Solano, vice president of brand
innovation. “When somebody’s
saying something terrible about
your pizza, you never get used
to it, but for the first time all
our executives were face to face
with it. They couldn’t believe it.
We all said: ‘We can’t just go to
the next meeting. We have to do
something.’”
the criticism enough to believe it.
To do so would require acknowl-
edging that many consumers
thought the old product’s taste
fell below Domino’s standard for
service, Solano said.

Brian Solano, right, vice president of brand innovation, says the 8,886-
unit Domino’s Pizza rolled out a new pizza with a more robust sauce and
a garlic crust when consumers said the old one “tasted like cardboard.”

Gut check

So when Domino’s needed
to show consumers what it was
made of, it changed the makeup
of its pizza. “[Former chief execu-
tive] Dave Brandon challenged
me,” Solano said. “He said,
‘Make it way better.’”
Domino’s tested 36 different
combinations of crust, cheese
and sauce until it arrived at the
reformulated pizza. After about
18 months of research and de-
velopment and consumer test-
ing, it rolled systemwide on Dec.
27, 2009, the new pizza, with a
new cheese blend, a more robust
sauce and a garlic-heavy crust.
Rather than tweaking the taste
to fit the lowest common denomi-
nator, Solano said, Domino’s
swung for the fences.

“It’s an old model to have mid-
dle-of-the-road food,” he said. “You
can’t be acceptable to everyone;
you have to be people’s favorite.”
The trick then was to reintro-
duce Domino’s and its new pizza
to customers who either agreed
that the old one tasted like card-
board, or who’d at least heard

Sharing their shortcomings

That agency, Crispin Porter + Bogusky — which also handles the creative for Burger King’s edgy, sometimes controversial advertising — felt credibility was key to Domino’s gamble.

“There has to be a reason to believe advertising,” said Andrew Keller, a Crispin partner and co-executive creative director who developed the campaign.

“It made sense to let
people know that we
knew there were is-
sues with the old piz-
za, and that’s why we’re making
changes. Honesty would create a
pathway to allow for communica-
tion around the new pizza that
would not be disregarded.”
Advertising the pizza honest-
ly meant putting the chain’s new
chief executive, Patrick Doyle, in
front of the camera to admit that
he’d heard what focus groups
had to say and that he took it
to heart. Those 30-second spots
then pointed viewers to a special
website, www.pizzaturnaround.
com, featuring a four-minute
documentary which chronicles
Domino’s employees’ reactions to
negative focus group comments
and their quest to develop a
better product.

products. The world’s evolved
with the Internet and social me-
dia, and it’s crossed a line where
everything’s out in public. …
There’s really no way to manage
public opinion in that respect,
so you’re better off making use
of it.”
“We wouldn’t make a film
like this because we can, but
we thought it was compelling,”
Keller said. “We wanted people
to get to know Domino’s em-
ployees … and at the same time
know that this sort of criticism
hurt them personally, and they
felt responsible to do something
about it.”
The website also ran viewer
comments and tweets linked
from Twitter — positive and
negative.

The importance of being earnest

In Domino’s case, that ad-
vertising honesty was useful, at
least according to data from Ace
Metrix, the marketing analytics
firm whose “Ace Score” combines
an advertisement’s persuasive-
ness and “watchability.”
The chain’s 15-second and
30-second spots, which debuted
the last week of December, had
respective Ace Scores of 586
and 665, besting the pizza seg-
ment’s average Ace Score of 579.
The 30-second commercial is the
best-scoring restaurant ad in
Ace Metrix’s system, said Jack
McKee, vice president of market-
ing, who added that a follow-up
commercial, where Solano and
another R&D chef surprise for-
merly critical focus group par-
ticipants with new pizza, also
scored a 626.