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The Great Pizza "Bailout"
The Great Pizza "Bailout"
By Dan Mitchell
Posted Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 12:17pm
If cincy007's Internet comment can be believed, he or she has a freezer full of free Domino's pizzas after the company left its Web site vulnerable to an abandoned promotion that was revealed by accident on Monday night and spread quickly across the Net.
Somebody, somewhere discovered that if you typed the promo code "bailout" into Domino's order page, you'd get a free medium pie. (Some reports say it all started at slickdeals.com, where users share and rate Internet deals.) Ultimately, Domino's outlets were forced to give away 11,000 of its substandard pizzas before the company was able to stop the madness on Tuesday morning.
Rick Broida at CNET's Cheapskate blog offers an amusing, real-time accounting of the sequence of events, starting with his notifying readers of the offer and ultimately explaining what happened.
He wrote: "Spoke to a Domino's rep, who told me the free-pizza code was created internally for a promotion that was never actually green-lit. A customer happened to enter the code (Domino's has been heavily advertising their "bailout" promotion), told the world, and here we are. Apparently the company honored nearly 11,000 of the coupons before pulling the plug."
A franchisee put a positive spin on the fiasco, telling the Cincinnati Enquirer that at least customers got to try out the online ordering system.
Domino's says it will reimburse franchisees. This isn't a good time for the company to be giving away thousands of free pies. Profits were down 32 percent in its most recent quarter.
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Comments
or it's exactly the right time to be giving away free pies
This is perfect example of what branding expert John Tantillo calls "adpublitzing"--an ad becomes an issue and ends up being written about in the media, increasing exposure exponentially. Tantillo pointed out on his marketing blog that although it probably wasn't an interest of planned guerilla marketing, it would have been a pretty brilliant one.
Whatever Domino's will have to shell out to reimburse the franchises will likely be far less than they would have spent for a campaign to promote their online ordering system. (I had no idea you could order Domino's online...). And the particular franchises hit will probably see more business in the future, too--without having had to spend (okay, only loan) any of their own money on marketing or other local discounts/offers. Tantillo's full post.