Feature
Adding apps to pizzas spells pizzazz One in eight people in the UK have a Domino’s Pizza app on their smartphone or other mobile device and, unsurprisingly, the company’s mobile sales are booming – but it’s not being complacent, John Porter finds
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he World Wide Web – the modern internet – notched up its 25th anniversary last year, while the start of 2015 marked the 30th anniversary of the UK’s first mobile phone call. Both those developments, reliant on the most advanced technology, have dramatically changed the way that brands communicate with their customers. So it is almost ironic that one of the companies in Britain at the spearhead of the revolution in business-to-customer communications, not simply to talk to customers, but to develop new sales channels, is making a product almost as low-tech as could be – pizza. Domino's Pizza's ten-year sponsorship in the UK of the Simpsons on Sky TV, which began in 1997, used pioneering technology to allow viewers to order a pizza via the red button on their remote control. Domino's franchisees soon had to start gearing up for the "Simpsons effect", when high volumes of orders would come in during the programme’s first ad break. The sponsorship was ultimately undone by tighter advertising rules aimed at preventing certain foods being promoted to children, despite the Simpsons largely appealing to an adult audience. However, with the UK pizza delivery market underdeveloped compared to the high penetration levels in countries such as the United States and Australia, Domino's successfully introduced a generation of consumers to the
ordering habit, and, crucially, did so during a period when its franchisee numbers grew substantially. Nor has the business rested on its digital laurels since. The UK company's results for 2014 showed the business on the brink of an important tipping point. Orders accounting for 69.4% of all delivered sales in the UK and Ireland were placed online – a figure which includes website, mobile phones, tablets and other digital channels such as the Xbox One games console, for which there is a bespoke Domino's app, to go alongside the free iPhone, iPad and Android apps the company has released from which customers can place an order, and which a staggering one in eight of the UK population has downloaded. In all, 8.2 million customers had one or other of Domino's apps in 2014 on their devices, up from 3.2 million at the start of the year.
Online shift Unsurprisingly, then, of Domino's digital sales last year, close to half – 44.2% – were placed through mobile devices, a rise of almost 50% on 2013. Domino's head of digital, Nick Dutch, is confident that with the year-on-year growth rate of sales through apps running between 150% and 200%, sales through mobile will be Domino's dominant sales platform by the end of 2015. Meanwhile the whole business is on an increasingly upward ▲
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