Dominos: The turnaround that was not on the cards

In 2009, Domino's was the fastest pizza company in the world and customers hated the pizza.

In their own taste tests, people rated identical pizza lower the moment they were told it came from Domino's. The brand itself had become a flavor and it tasted like punishment.

Most companies bury feedback like that. You rework the recipe, keep the cameras off, and hope nobody remembers how bad it got.

Admitting the product is broken feels like handing customers a reason to leave.

Domino's did the opposite. They put a camera in front of focus groups and let people say it on record: that the crust tasted like cardboard, that microwave pizza was better, that this was the worst pizza some of them had ever eaten. Then they put those lines on a billboard in Times Square.

Then the CEO went on national television and read them out loud, in his own voice, with his own name attached.

Did it work?

Apparently, it did and here’s the reason why: those complaints weren't really about cardboard crust. Customers don't insult something casually. They insult something they expected more from.

Underneath the cardboard joke was a customer who had ordered from Domino's for years, recommended it, defaulted to it and felt stupid for doing so.

Domino's read the insult correctly. They didn't hear "this customer is being dramatic about pizza." They heard "this customer is still emotionally invested enough to be furious instead of indifferent" whereas an indifferent customer just switches to another pizza chain without telling you why.

So the company did three things almost nobody does after a bad review:

They treated the complaint as a product audit, not a PR problem, and rebuilt the recipe from the crust up.

They made the failure the marketing, instead of hiding the failure from the marketing.

They removed their own exit ramp.

As CMO Russell Wiener put it, by airing the complaints publicly, the company "blew up the bridge" - there was no retreat if the new pizza didn't land either.

The results were not a soft win. Same-store sales grew over 10% the following year and the company that once tied with a children's arcade chain for worst-tasting pizza in America became, by stock performance, one of the great long-run growth stories of the decade.

The lesson here is not to hide for public negative reviews: Infact, you should be grateful that your product/service has done enough up to this point to make that customer care about the poor experience they received.

So, stop measuring your ORM team on how fast a complaint gets closed.

Start measuring how often a complaint gets escalated upward - to product, to ops, to the person who can actually change what broke.

A fast resolution makes one customer feel heard.

A complaint that reaches the right team in your org fixes the experience for hundreds of thousands of others!

P.S. If you haven't seen the actual video, watch it here: https://lnkd.in/gze2bTQM