Dominos: New positioning

Here is a brief description of how Dominos’ evolved as a brand over the period of time. Dominos’ call itself to be in Food Services sector but not as a pizza player. The very definition of Marketing is that it is discipline of optimally allocating company’s resources for fulfilling consumers’ needs so as to ensure a balance of consumers’ subjective profits and the company’s long term financial profits.

Over a period of time, customers’ perception about Dominos changed and hence the subjective profits also varied. To sustain the long term profits in the market Dominos’ had to work hard in redefining its positioning in the minds of the customers.

For any business the first thing to do right is to choose a right segmenting variable. Segmenting variable could be anything like demographic parameter like age, region, sex etc. Or attitude behaviour like lifestyle, culture, belief, habits etc. Most of the people would be surprised to see that age, disposable income and family size are not the segmenting variable of Dominos. Infact the segmenting variable of Dominos’ is OCCASION. They have segmented the market on the basis of occasion so that people want a meal replacement for change in mood, party, spending time with family and kids, spending time with old friends, formal meeting with colleagues, clients and so on and so forth.

So dominos business is providing a high quality tasty food in meal replacement sector. When Dominos entered into Indian market, they tried to establish in a pizza category. First of their communications and tag line was based on the attitude that whenever and wherever you are hungry just call dominos. “HUNGRY KYA?” in one of the initial advertisements Mallika sherawat was the model. So some of the advertisements did fairly well and they established points of parity with other players.

Soon they realized that for home delivery model, time is the parameter which most of the customers value so they created a points of difference by new value proposition that is “30 Minutes or free”. Paresh Rawal featured ad in monsoon of Mumbai was a real hit and got many national and international awards. So after some time, when dominos’ business was not growing as fast as they expected they did lot of in depth and focus interviews where they found that it is not fast service which is the value driven parameter for customers, it is Taste which people want to pay for along with value for money. So once again as per the customers’ expectations Dominos’ introduced pan size pizza worth rupees thirty five and it all along changed the perception of people that Domino’s is a value for money.

So now responding to the customers’ reactions of valuing taste as the foremost reason to order pizza at home or office. They spent huge amount of money in R&D, hired new chefs on Dominos’ payroll and introduced various new variants in the Indian market like Cheese crust, Chinese pizza, other regional flavours etc. Some of them were instant hit and some could not do well. But one thing was very clear that constant innovation in product would only make your company better.

So now company has established three core values namely “30 Minute, free delivery”, “taste” and “Value for money”, with once again new positioning. “KHUSIYON KI HOME DELIVERY” is a new tag line and by virtue of this proposition, they could incorporate any of the core value in a same tagline. This is a beauty of any successful brand “CONSISTENCY”. The brand which is consistent over a period of time across product line is there for long time. Recently Dominos’ have introduced new series of commercials featuring sawant. Dominos is a smart company and they kept on this advertisement for quite a long time because of the recession in the market so they are banking upon the value proposition.

Hope to see brand dominos there for long time in the market with new brand proposition.

Videos of Dominos can be watched at the following link

http://www.dominos.co.in/advertising.jsp

Thanks to Dominos senior management for above piece of information.