This is a story about a brand journey in social media. It is about a highly visible brand whose experience within the social media space had a tremendous impact to consumer perception about their brand, their operations, and ultimately revenue.
Dominos Pizza. This is an interesting social media example because of the strong media coverage that resulted from the events that have preceded Dominos in the last year. Chris Brandon of Dominos Pizza is here today to give us his company’s view and how it has changed the way they do business.
Q: Welcome Chris! Could you please tell us about your role within Dominos?
CB: Hi…appreciate the opportunity to talk with you guys. My role within Domino’s, among some other event-related responsibilities, is management of our entire PR effort – including consumer PR, media relations, social media, local outreach, etc. The only facets of PR that I am less involved with are investor relations, and for the most part crisis communications. We have people on separate teams that are full-time dedicated to that.
Q: Now let’s take you back a few years to 2008! Prior to the boom in social media
What did Dominos do to initiate engagement with its consumers? Either online or offline?
CB: We have been engaged with customers through social media for about a year and a half now…certainly our new pizza launch has taken things up a notch – as we are using social media more so than ever before – but we have been active in the spectrum for about a year. We were on Twitter, on Facebook, monitoring blogs, etc. Much of that led to hearing what customers were saying about our pizza, and realizing there was room for improvements – which is exactly what we eventually did!
Q: In 2008, how would you have rated yourself as a Marketing Company in terms of audience engagement? 1 being poor vs. 5 being strong
CB: A rating like that is difficult to say…but we have always been in tune with what our consumers have had to say – as recently demonstrated by our “thanking” them for inspiring us to continue to improve, and by how we communicated our new pizza launch. We have only gotten better. Social media has helped that, as we can communicate with them directly in ways that were not available before.
Q: Let’s take you back to spring 2009 when a video appeared in Youtube: revealing a Domino’s employee in a NC franchise assembling sandwiches and inappropriately handling ingredients before putting these same ingredients on the bread. It didn’t take long for that video to go VIRAL and soon that video was encroaching on one million plus views.
Tell me about what was happening within Dominos at that time? What was the immediate reaction? [Read more…]
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