There’s A Reason There Are 4 P’s To Marketing…
It seems I might have to eat a little crow. My last post celebrated Domino’s Pizza Turn Around promotional campaign for its innovative use of TV, Web and social media to launch a new pizza recipe aimed at restoring the Domino’s reputation on taste. And while I still believe that the promotional effort is incredible, the pizza (at least for me) was not. Having 3 pieces of 2 different pizzas, I feel I can reasonably conclude more work still needs to be done for the brand to improve its taste issues. This reminded me of just how important it is to address ALL aspects of marketing–Promotion, Price, Place AND product. Or as a Ogilvy has recently evolved them the 4E’s of marketing (Experience, Everyplace, Exchange and Evangelism).
So why the discrepancy? How can all these people claim that there’s been an improvement in the pizza and yet so many comments on pizzaturnaround.com indicate otherwise?
My guess is that the Domino’s didn’t really want to rock the boat too much and alienate their core customers my making significant changes to the product (though as I understand it, you can still get the original pizza recipe), or the abilities of the corporate kitchen do not reflect the executional capabilities of the chain. Either way in my experience, the product didn’t match the promotion. This is a rare case where an agency out did the client–in other words the campaign (what the agency is responsible for) brought customers in the door but the product (what the client’s responsible for) probably isn’t good enough to create a meaningful following.
