Digital Transformation is a buzz word which is least understood by most enterprise. While most organizations are in nascent stages of their digital evolution, Domino Pizza re-invented its brand image and user engagement through unique and immersive digital strategies. Their transformation journey is truly remarkable…

Battling the “Cheap food” brand image:

In the mid-2000’s, Domino’s was struggling with both brand image with an all time low stock value of $3. Consumers viewed them as cheap food and their brand image was further tarnished with tweets suggesting Domino’s crust tastes like cardboard. While Domino was taking massive steps towards improving their product quality, they recognized the need for rock solid digital strategy to improve customer engagement and overall brand image.

Steps to Digital Transformation:

In an interview wtih Forbes in 2018, Kelly Garcia, Domino’s SVP eCommerce provided insights into their digital transformation journey.  The vision of Domino’s building an ubiquitous and omnipresent ecommerce platform that happened to sell pizza’s was a massive shift in mindset and required Board level support. Once the vision was endorsed by the Board, then the team quickly secured the technology and resource funding it required.

As Domino’s was trying different digital strategies, tracking and mesauring results results across each process and experiment was critical. This helped in figuring out what’s working and what not working to make the right business decisions.

Marketing and IT had to be closely aligned to communicate Domino’s digital transformation story very effectively to the users. To improve the brand image, it was crucial that there was a strong feedback loop through a well devised social listening strategy to improve product ideas, custoemr service and user engagement. This led to the development of their social listening platform Think Oven

Domino’s Digital Marketing Strategy:

Recognizing the industry shift towards the mobile, Domino’s adopted a mobile first approach. They created mobile native and iOS clients that were user friendly and highly responsive. Mobile ordering quickly became the dominant revenue stream for the company. In addition, this platform allowed Domino to generate rich user profiles to build highly personalized engagement.

With a successful mobile strategy, Domino implemented their next gen ordering platform, Domino AnyWare to allow users to order from anywhere, anytime. Today, customers can order from plethora of devices including Amazon Echo, Google Home, Siri, Smartwatches, Smart TV’s, Slack, Facebook Messenger, Twitter and more. Looking to the future, Domino is planning to invest in conversational AI and cognitive technologies (NLP) to further enhance the user experience.

In 2017, Domino Pizza overtook Pizza Hut to become the largest pizza company in the world generating $12B in global revenue.

Domino uses AI to identify Pizza for Super Bowl Campaign

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Domino’s use of Cloud Computing

To deliver a truly global digital strategy, Domino had to rely on public cloud to be successful. Initially, Domino used Amazon Web Services (AWS) for Infrastructure As a Service (IaaS). However, as the need for scale, agility, elasticity and global presence increased, Domino switched from AWS to Microsoft’s Azure Platform as a Service (PaaS).

With the PaaS model, organizations do not need to manage the servers which allows them to use time for what really matters – delivering Customer Value. With a growing customer base globally, Domino needed to scale their infrastructure quickly which was easy with Azure. This also helped them continue their focus on innovation. In fact, they delivered a pizza to a customer via a drone in New Zealand!

References:

https://www.retaildive.com/ex/mobilecommercedaily/dominos-pizza-ordering-reduced-to-seconds-with-emojis-on-twitter

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pizza-delivery-real-competition-over-110045918.html

https://cloud.google.com/customers/dominos/