» HADOUKEN « customers won't bite (unless provoked)
In 2010, after years of stagnant sales and watching their competition--particularly disrupters in the frozen food space--eat their lunch (never literally, because it tasted like shit), international pizza chain Domino's did the unthinkable: they lambasted themselves in their own television commercial. Repeatedly. For years. It was the beginning of a brutally honest marketing campaign; a campaign that would go on to win numerous awards, become the subject of a Harvard Business School case study and later be seen as the harbinger of today's ubiquitous rallying cry among Millennial marketers: radical transparency.
Some context: at the time, Domino's stock was trading at a paltry $8.76 a share. Almost a decade later, Domino's has been on a rocket ship trajectory and currently sits just shy of $270. If you were wondering whether they eat pizza on the moon, the answer is yes, apparently they do.
This was a 360-degree initiative. Honesty was merely a catalyst in propelling Domino's forward on a multi-year turnaround plan that included renovating stores, tinkering with its recipe, shoring up its supply chain and incorporating state-of-the-art technology into its delivery protocol. As legendary CEO and architect of this bold effort Patrick Doyle so elegantly identified, Domino's is not only in the the pizza-making business, it's in the pizza-delivery business as well, so of course it made sense to custom design a "purpose-built pizza-delivery vehicle" complete with temperature controlling ovens and to enable customers to directly chat with those actually preparing their orders in real time. To this day, when Doyle gives one of his "How to Transform a Legacy Company..." speeches, he's always sure to mention that even during the earliest days of Web 2.0, he saw Domino's "as much of a tech company as [it is] a pizza company."
Yes, it took a certain level of clairvoyance (and a steel pair of you-know-what) for Doyle to execute such a visionary plan. But it was necessary. He was ahead of the curve. All those buzz words--omnichannel, experiential, gamification--Doyle was all over that when most American retailers and services were debating whether or not to launch a Twitter account.
Doyle pulled no punches. He ripped off the bandaid, amputated the gangrenous limb and found the best partners in the world to manufacture for him the most bad-ass prosthetic money could buy all while maintaining heritage and brand integrity (well, whatever was left of that).
Eight years later, retailers are still plodding along, talking about Millennials as if they came from another planet (let's not even get into Gen Z) and cracking jokes about how "flat" is the new "up 10%." Stuck in their ways, they benchmark vertically, department stores compare themselves to department stores, not realizing that the world has changed and consumers do not draw comparisons the same way. They don't care that Awful Retailer X fails to delight and deliver in all the same ways as Awful Retailers Y and Z. What they do care about is that their experiences with these retailers are downright terrible in comparison to calling an Uber, transferring money over Venmo or even ordering a Domino's pizza (d'uh).
Short term shareholder expectations be damned, you just have to take the plunge. It's like jumping in the pool on the first relatively warm day of summer. Sure, the water might be chilling at first touch, but submerge yourself for a while and it only gets better--especially when equipped with the right gear and in the company of quality people. Don't like that analogy? Fine. It's like waking up early to go to the gym: those first 5 minutes are hell, but once you start seeing results, you wonder how you ever lived another way.
I often warn retailers not to follow the path laid by the music industry in the late 90s and early aughts. While Napster was disrupting, they were busy complaining. Well, maybe if they didn't complain so much and instead focused their energy on innovation, the old guard could have created Spotify, SoundCloud, Pandora etc. And we are (read: have been) seeing that now with retail. Luckily for these legacy institutions, with Web 3.0 looming just beyond the latest blockchain, AR and AI innovations, we're still only in the middle innings and there's plenty of time to correct course.
The starting pitchers are still in the game, throwing the same ol' sequence of pitches they've been hurling for the last however many years. There are some young flame-throwing studs on the bench raring to give it a rip. They know all the batters tendencies and have been practicing a few new techniques. There's really not much to it.