Yeah, it's a bit of a puff piece. The app, the social media push, none of that would have worked if their pizza still tasted like unwashed feet. The biggest thing Domino's did to turn the company around was to start making better pizza.
The article mentions something that always fascinates me: the extent to which branding and presentation influence taste perception:
"As complaints got louder, this became more obvious. Domino’s ran consumer tests and discovered that people actually liked pizza less if they knew it was Domino’s than if they thought it was a random unbranded pizza."
They 100% absolutely did start using better ingredients, etc. but if they'd failed to rehab their brand I wonder if it would have taken off.
I was just talking with my wife about this the other day. I've had Domino's a few times in the last ~2 years, and it's okay pizza, but I would never go out of my way to purchase Domino's pizza.
It's not 'taste perception' that is affected. It's literally taste. People aren't lying or tricking themselves, the pizza literally tasted worse if they knew it was Dominos in those studies. They've done similar studies with wine. They took professional sommeliers and gave them cheap wine in bottles with expensive labels, and expensive wine in bottles with cheap labels, and had them try them while lying in fMRI scanners. The bottle it came out of had monumental effects on the taste centers of the brain.
The book 'How Pleasure Works' goes over a lot of this sort of research and is quite interesting. The 'American Association of Wine Economists' (which isn't what it sounds like) also does tons of research on things like this. It's thanks to them we know that people can't actually tell the difference between expensive patte and wet dog food.
Taste perception would be "I like this, it tastes good", the opinion the person has of their taste experience. The taste itself is the actual experience. It's the taste itself that is very heavily determined by context and unrelated to objective reality.
Yeah, it's noticeably better. Then again, the bar was so low that this isn't much of an achievement.
It's not my favorite pizza, but if you live in an area with a Papa Johns, a Pizza Hut, and some local crap-pie joint, then it's going to be your best option.
They still sell "cheap" pizza, so there's an upper limit to how good it can get. Their cheese quality can only be so high (since it's such a large portion of the cost) and their offerings need to appeal to like 90% of customers.
They honestly made it worse. The crust is like bad bread. I didn't used to mind eating Domino's if someone ordered it, but now I won't touch it. It's the only type of pizza my son actually won't eat.
That opinion really depends on where one grew up. Those who didn't grow up in Chicago or a similarly-benighted locale know that even though pizza crust may be arbitrarily thin, there is a definite maximum for pizza crust thickness.
I kind of disagree with that though. They knew their core product was bad and that it was severely hurting their business.
That's a lot less difficult to find the courage to take a risk on changing than when your core product is decent/good but not as great as it "could" be.
There's always risk in changing a product that has more than zero existing customers. You risk losing them and not getting any new ones. And the change itself costs money, which may be lost.
It depends on why you have those customers. They kept some things constant. If you like Domino's because they're cheap or because they have fast delivery at decent hours, then maybe changing the pizza recipe is not so much a risk.
Plus, they did A/B tests across the nation [0] to further reduce the risk.
The app, the social media push, those things DID begin making a difference, even when their pizza DID taste like unwashed feet. But I agree that a better product was the most significant innovation they made.
