Domino's Admits Its Pizza Was Bad

The story

For years Domino's Pizza was known for one thing above all: getting a pizza to your door quickly. Customers were loyal, but when people rated pizza chains on taste, Domino's scored painfully low. In focus groups, where companies invite ordinary people to talk honestly about a product, customers said Domino's pizza was worse than frozen pizza from the microwave and "totally void of flavor." Online, people were even meaner.

By 2009 the business itself was struggling, with sales at existing stores flat and some locations closing. Around 2008 the company had already decided to start over. Its chefs spent about a year and a half to two years testing new combinations of dough, sauce, cheese and spices. The new pizza had a garlic-seasoned crust, a bolder tomato sauce, and shredded mozzarella cheese instead of diced cheese. Domino's didn't just tweak a few toppings. It changed the core recipe it had used for decades.

Then came the bold part. Starting in December 2009, Domino's ran TV ads that looked like a documentary. They showed real focus-group comments, including one person saying, "Domino's pizza crust to me is like cardboard," and another saying, "The sauce tastes like ketchup." Company leaders appeared on camera, admitting the criticism stung and explaining what they had changed. The ads invited people to try the new pizza, with two medium pizzas for $5.99 each as a starting deal. Comedians joked about it on late-night TV, and many experts thought it was a huge gamble.

The gamble was personal for Patrick Doyle, who ran Domino's U.S. business. In January 2010, the company announced that Doyle would take over as chief executive that March, replacing David Brandon, who was leaving to become athletic director at the University of Michigan. Doyle had led the pizza remake as head of the U.S. business. He later recalled telling employees, "If people tried (the pizza) again and they had a bad experience, we'd be done." If the new pizza disappointed people who had just been told it was better, the brand might never recover. Domino's also spent a great deal of time retraining store workers so the new pizza would be made correctly everywhere.

The results came quickly. In the first three months of 2010, sales at U.S. Domino's stores open at least a year rose 14.3 percent compared with a year earlier, a very large jump for a big restaurant chain. "We couldn't be more pleased with the success of our New and Inspired Pizza," Doyle said in the company's report. Over the following years Domino's kept investing in better food and in easy online ordering, and it grew into one of the world's largest pizza companies.

Why did admitting failure work? Customers already knew what they thought of the old pizza. When Domino's said it out loud, the company showed it was listening and gave people a reason to try again. But honesty alone would not have been enough. The new pizza had to actually be better, and enough customers agreed that it was.