Marketing Restaurant Online

In response to  control the damage by Youtube hoax video made by two of the Domino’s employee President Patrick Doyle of Domino’s USA, apologizes for the incident and reaffirms that Domino’s will take every measures to not let such thing happen again in the future.

In the video he goes on to say, in his own words-
“It sickens me that the actions of two individuals could impact our great system,” “There are so many people who have come through with messages of support for us and we want to thank you for hanging in there with us as we work to regain your trust.”

To rectify the flaws in their restaurant system he states that Domino’s is going to conduct a complete review of hiring practices to ensure he says “people like this don’t make it into our stores.” He also said that the restaurant where the employees worked, located in Hanover, North Carolina,was completely shut down and is being sanitized.

Domino’s in their wildest dream had never thought that this was coming. This incident though was a hoax there is no doubt that it has done a considerable brand damage as accepted by Domino’s President Doyle himself.

I also saw the video where one of the employee was putting the cheese into his nose and rubbing the salami at his back. It is one of the disgusting scene that one can see of a restaurant on Youtube. Though they blocked the video now by taking out from Youtube there were already 750,000 views worldwide. That means those many people had seen and told to you know how many other friends and families. The compounding effect of  word of mouth bad  marketing didn’t work that well here this time for Domino’s. It is sad but this is the reality of digital world.

Though they stopped the video by taking out of Youtube I believe the wound might be gone or possibly  forgotten but the scar will still remain for years to come. The visual effect is so  powerful that it is hard to erase from any one’s mind. Like for me the visual that I have of Blimpie brand sandwich is wilted tomatoes as that was my experience with couple of Blimpie restaurants that I visited in Atlanta. So I have never eaten the sandwich there after. Like wise with the Domino’s it was little different because I didn’t see it myself at the store. It was someone who made the video. But still human minds can not forget things even it was hoax. It is the perception that gets built into customer’s mind that determines the value of the Brand. This time customers and friends that I have talked to so far don’t seems to have that good perception of the brand.

Smart restaurants are those who learn from their own mistakes. Smarter restaurants are those who learn from other restaurants. Hope you draw some lessons for your restaurant.

Lessons that can be learnt from this incident at Domino’s

1. Hiring And Screening Process
2. Team Building & Internal Policing Mechanism
3. Brand Monitoring System

Hiring And Screening Process - Lots of restaurants cut corners in this process just to save some money. But I believe one should take all the necessary steps from criminal back ground check to hospitality IQ test internally at the HR department. At Least if you do the rigorous screening process you will make sure that you are not mixing bad apples with good ones. I have also seen some restaurants hiring high school kids without any background check or hospitality IQ tests with the lure of cheap labour. I am not against saving money on labour but please don’t compromise your brand for 50 cents per hour on bad employees. The result you will get is like the one that happened with Domino’s. You never know what kind of stunt those unprofessional and wild mannered employees will come up with when they are bored to death at work.

Team Building & Internal Policing Mechanism - Even after the best practises of Hiring and Screening process there is no guarantee that you will end up with the employees without any flaws. Nothing is 100%, however you can take some measures to minimize that risk to virtually zero. I call it Internal team building and Policing Mechanism. This is how it works. You will will create 3 or so different groups in your whole restaurant. You will create an incentive program where by,the group who performs well with the sales number and also without any stupid acts or any complains from the customers will get rewarded with some cash prizes. Cash is the king and motivates workers and keeps their mind free from thinking such stupid thing.The program should be designed in such a way where only if all the team members succeed to achieve those points then only would the whole group would win. This creates environment for every one to help each other because cash is the motivation here at the end of 2 weeks or a month. This is also good as it
also acts as a policing mechanism because if one of their team mate made stupid moves the whole
team is punished by not letting them get their cash prizes. This will naturally help the employees  police themselves than you trying to police via web cam from your home which is realistically impossible. You would have better things to do than just watch via webcam to see if any one makes stupid move at your restaurant.

Brand Monitoring System - In the video the president Doyle of Domino’s told that some of  their customers alerted them. That is why it took so long to respond and control the damage in much earlier stage lets say may be when it had merely views in 100. I still think you should  be faster than that. I am surprised Domino’s given their size and so much marketing budget they have at their disposal they couldn’t control in much early stage. I thought that with those big corporates they have one or more dedicated person to handle all the digital brand monitoring for the mother ship brand.I envisioned that as the minute they uploaded the video on Youtube with the tags like Domino’s  it would alert to them via some sophisticated brand monitoring software. Then the dedicated digital pr person would dig into it to find out whether it was good or bad thing. If it was good then pr person could engage with them and nurture the relation further. If it was bad one then they would go straight to investigate more and report it to the main head quarter and then follow  their standard emergency procedure that they might have set up in case some one attempted to damage their brand online. It seems apparent that even if they had one there were some flaws in the system or they were slow in reacting to this brand damage control.

I hope all the restaurants whether it is fine dining, fast casual, or pizza restaurants have learnt a dear lesson. It is critical to have your brand monitoring system in place to deal with this kind of brand damage
attempts that occurs some time online.