J. Patrick Doyle was appointed CEO a year later to oversee a turnaround with a ballsy premise: publicly admitting that their pizza sucked and showing customers that they were improving their pies. “I used to joke that if it didn’t work, I would probably be the shortest-tenured CEO in the history of American business,” Doyle told Bloomberg.
Transparency became Domino’s modus operandi. They aired ads in which Doyle and others issued mea culpas for their crummy pizza and released a documentary about revamping their recipe. They shared footage of people visiting the farms that grew Domino’s tomatoes. They used real photos sourced from customers – even of pies mangled during delivery.
For the next decade, Domino’s stock rose like dough in an oven. On his show, Stephen Colbert praised the campaign’s honesty, took a bite of a Domino’s slice, and asked, “Is that pizza, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”
Few companies have copied Domino’s “we suck” strategy. Instead, it’s another bit of transparency from Domino’s struggle era that is the great legacy of its turnaround: the pizza tracker.
You know the pizza tracker. You’ve likely used it to follow your pizza’s journey from a store to your home. But even if you haven’t, you live in the world the Domino’s pizza tracker built. Because in marketing, product development, and user experience, the pizza tracker is an icon. An inspiration. A platonic ideal that has been imitated across industries ranging from food-delivery apps to businesses where the only grease is on the hands of auto mechanics.
Show them the sausage
I enjoy restaurants with open kitchens: line cooks slicing entire carrots in a blink, chefs sipping broth and nodding approvingly, all in an elegant ballet of speed and craftsmanship.
But the business world doesn’t have many open kitchens. We receive our sneakers in the mail without ever seeing a Nike factory floor or Adidas brainstorming session. We receive cash from an ATM without any sense of the impressive technology under the hood.
Tami Kim thinks that’s a shame. An associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, she’s an advocate of an open-kitchen approach called operational transparency that she believes can increase customers’ appreciation of a product or service – and employees’ motivation and productivity too. Here’s how:
A wrinkle in (pizza) time
For designer Shuya Gong, though, the magic of the pizza tracker isn’t its window into Domino’s operations. It’s how it manipulates time.
“I think the pizza tracker essentially speeds up time for you,” says Gong, formerly a design director at IDEO, a design and consulting firm.
Gong points to the return trip effect: When you go somewhere and come back via the same route, the way back feels faster. One study of the effect found that it’s likely caused by people underestimating the duration of the first leg. So when Domino’s sends its customers (slightly high undergrads, parents who promised a pizza night) lots of updates, it feels like a return trip, and therefore a shorter wait. (...)
“People want a stress-free lifestyle,” he says. “Communicating progress gives people a sense of feeling in control, because they're aware of what's going on… If you don't feel in control, you'll never be able to relax.”
by Alex Mayyasi, The Hustle | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Truth, transparency, customer engagement (control). Seems like a no-brainer. So why don't more companies do this?]
Transparency became Domino’s modus operandi. They aired ads in which Doyle and others issued mea culpas for their crummy pizza and released a documentary about revamping their recipe. They shared footage of people visiting the farms that grew Domino’s tomatoes. They used real photos sourced from customers – even of pies mangled during delivery.
For the next decade, Domino’s stock rose like dough in an oven. On his show, Stephen Colbert praised the campaign’s honesty, took a bite of a Domino’s slice, and asked, “Is that pizza, or did an angel just give birth in my mouth?”
Few companies have copied Domino’s “we suck” strategy. Instead, it’s another bit of transparency from Domino’s struggle era that is the great legacy of its turnaround: the pizza tracker.
You know the pizza tracker. You’ve likely used it to follow your pizza’s journey from a store to your home. But even if you haven’t, you live in the world the Domino’s pizza tracker built. Because in marketing, product development, and user experience, the pizza tracker is an icon. An inspiration. A platonic ideal that has been imitated across industries ranging from food-delivery apps to businesses where the only grease is on the hands of auto mechanics.
Show them the sausage
I enjoy restaurants with open kitchens: line cooks slicing entire carrots in a blink, chefs sipping broth and nodding approvingly, all in an elegant ballet of speed and craftsmanship.
But the business world doesn’t have many open kitchens. We receive our sneakers in the mail without ever seeing a Nike factory floor or Adidas brainstorming session. We receive cash from an ATM without any sense of the impressive technology under the hood.
Tami Kim thinks that’s a shame. An associate professor of business administration at Dartmouth College, she’s an advocate of an open-kitchen approach called operational transparency that she believes can increase customers’ appreciation of a product or service – and employees’ motivation and productivity too. Here’s how:
1. Open windows: Franchises like Starbucks have replaced many drive-through intercoms with cameras and video displays. In an experiment that used iPads to give students a view of cafeteria cooks fulfilling their hamburger and hot dog orders (and chefs a view of the students), Kim and her coauthors found that diners’ satisfaction increased without sacrificing speed in the kitchen.
2. Price transparency: Some e-commerce sites break down the price of their shirts or wallets by the cost of materials, labor, transportation, and tariffs – and compare their markup to the industry average. One study showed this transparency boosted sales by ~26%.
3. The “Labor Illusion”: Many AI models show a breakdown of the steps the chatbot is taking to answer your question. In another study, researchers found that travel sites like Kayak revealing their behind-the-scenes work (“Now getting results from American Airlines… from JetBlue… 133 results found so far…”) led to increased perceptions of quality and willingness to pay.
The pizza tracker came out in 2008, around when Kim and her colleagues started studying operational transparency. Domino’s declined an interview, but according to a case study on Domino’s, the tracker’s creation was spurred by the insight that online orders were more profitable – and made customers more satisfied – than phone or in-person orders. The company’s push to increase digital sales from 20% to 50% of its business led to new ways to order (via a tweet, for example) and then a new way for customers to track their order.
“With technology, it's just so much easier for companies to reveal parts of their operations without a ton of effort,” says Kim. Domino's was already tracking the status of orders on their back end, so they could show that progress to customers without disrupting operations.
“Every time we present this [research on operational transparency], we predominantly use that example because it's such a neat and successful example,” she says. (...)
“With technology, it's just so much easier for companies to reveal parts of their operations without a ton of effort,” says Kim. Domino's was already tracking the status of orders on their back end, so they could show that progress to customers without disrupting operations.
“Every time we present this [research on operational transparency], we predominantly use that example because it's such a neat and successful example,” she says. (...)
A wrinkle in (pizza) time
For designer Shuya Gong, though, the magic of the pizza tracker isn’t its window into Domino’s operations. It’s how it manipulates time.
“I think the pizza tracker essentially speeds up time for you,” says Gong, formerly a design director at IDEO, a design and consulting firm.
Gong points to the return trip effect: When you go somewhere and come back via the same route, the way back feels faster. One study of the effect found that it’s likely caused by people underestimating the duration of the first leg. So when Domino’s sends its customers (slightly high undergrads, parents who promised a pizza night) lots of updates, it feels like a return trip, and therefore a shorter wait. (...)
“People want a stress-free lifestyle,” he says. “Communicating progress gives people a sense of feeling in control, because they're aware of what's going on… If you don't feel in control, you'll never be able to relax.”
by Alex Mayyasi, The Hustle | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Truth, transparency, customer engagement (control). Seems like a no-brainer. So why don't more companies do this?]
