For Domino’s Pizza, everything is on the table in 2024 and 2025: From relaunching loyalty programs to boost traffic, and trying out promotions that garner more buzz and traffic than sales, to fully embracing the new Uber partnership and looking to expand to more delivery platforms in the future. On Monday at the ICR conference in Orlando, Domino’s CEO Russell Weiner and CFO Sandeep Reddy broke down the company’s new “Hungry for More” strategy, which was just announced last month and included the launch of a proprietary operating system.
The appropriately named 2024 strategy has Domino’s saying “yes, more” to everything, including loyalty participation, pizza delivery options, tech innovation, and marketing innovations like the emergency pizza promotion, which is an upgraded “Buy one get one free promotion” that lets customers buy a pizza and get a promotion for another free pizza to use at a later date.
“You will see emergency pizza [customers] again, because it's a positive order count driver and people will add items when they when they come back for the free pizza, especially if they’re a delivery customer,” Weiner said. “It’s a good marketing innovation.”
Domino’s has also made a complete 180-degree turn from its previously long-held position on being the only major pizza chain that doesn’t do third-party delivery partnerships. What was once a distinguishing feature became a handicap, leading Domino’s to break its rule over the summer with the announcement of an Uber Eats partnership in July. But now, the company wants to expand its presence on third-party delivery marketplaces. Although Domino’s has an exclusive deal with Uber Eats through the first year of its partnership, once that exclusivity ends in July of this year, Domino’s expects to eventually launch its brand on all the delivery platforms.
Sandeep Reddy said that incremental overlap between consumers on the Domino’s platform and consumers ordering from Uber was relatively slim at only 35%, which would help the brand get to $1 billion in sales over the next three years.
“The question is, ‘are the customers going to be incremental?’ and we know they are, and that DoorDash is going to have different customers from Uber, especially folks within their loyalty program,” Weiner said. “For us, is pays to break that exclusivity.”
Another focus for Domino’s moving forward is its loyalty program. The Ann Arbor-based pizza chain revamped its loyalty program last fall, offering newly tiered rewards and faster opportunities to earn points and rewards. Weiner said on Monday that the new loyalty program is an especially crucial opportunity to rein lapsed loyalty customers back in, and to appeal to lower income potential customers as well.
“The minimum order to get points in our program used to be $10 and our national offer on carry-out is $7.99, so all of these value-oriented carry-out customers weren’t getting points,” Weiner said. “So, we lowered that threshold to $5… Essentially, for this lower income customer, we've made the brand more accessible. That means more transactions in a time that they're looking for value.”
Both Domino’s executives pointed to the revamped loyalty program, Uber partnership, and marketing innovations like the Emergency Pizza promotion as reasons behind increased traffic for the brand, which had been struggling for a few quarters after the pandemic.
“If there's a good business opportunity for Domino's, this team's gonna be looking into it,” Weiner said. “And if it's the right thing to do, we're going to do it.”
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