Uploaded by Jayfive
Eric at the local Domino’s just placed my pizza in the oven. At 8:10, to be precise. How do I know? Because at Domino’s website, I can track my pizza using their nifty Pizza Tracker feature. It tells me the pizza’s stage of preparation and exactly who’s working on it.
A pause to acknowledge the comedic potential here, e.g, “Eric hocked a giant loogie on your pizza at 8:04.”
Naturally, the Pizza Tracker received quite a bit of media and blog attention when it was rolled out this January. And a lot of snarks as well, usually to the tune of, “Great. Now if only they could create a palatable pizza.” But on a more serious note, the feature was panned by industry and academia. From an article in USA Today:
Sadly, there are probably a bunch of people who will be enamored of this, says Christopher Muller, director of the Center for Multi-Unit Restaurant Management at University of Central Florida. “I guess they’ll sell a ton of pizzas to people with no social life who are sitting in front of computers.”
“It’s technology in search of a problem,” says Brian Kardon, chief strategy officer at Forrester Research, a technology researcher. “I don’t know how many consumers are twisting and turning over the state of their delivery pizza.”
And of cource, the competition had to chime in with some sour-grapes commentary. Also from USA Today:
PizzaHut.com already provides an estimated time when customers will receive their orders, says Bob Kraut, vice president of marketing.
The last comment doesn’t surprise me. Pizza Hut had no choice but to put the best face on things. But the guys at UCF and Forrester must be living on another planet. Apparently they haven’t had the experience of ordering online with, say, Papa John’s only to find out an hour later that the order had been lost in the ether.
In this writer’s view, the Pizza Tracker is a piece of marketing (and operational) brilliance. In a marketplace that is saturated with pizza restaurants, any point of differentiation is meaningful. In our house, for example, we happen to like most of the major and minor pizza joints in our locale. So, what determines our purchase on a oh-so-rare night (ahem) when mom and dad are too lazy to cook? The kids. And having just witnessed my kids (who have healthy social lives, Mr. Muller, thank you very much) spend a half-hour watching the computer to see what’s up with our pizza, I have to wonder if they won’t ask for Domino’s next time it’s pizza night.
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