As ordering and fulfillment models go, there isn’t much more basic a concept than pizza delivery. Pick up the phone, place your order, and a driver brings the pie to your door. Simple, right?
Wrong.
As quick service restaurants struggle to find audiences among health conscious consumers, a rather unlikely chain is riding high: Domino’s Pizza. With a market cap of $7.2 billion, its stock is trading higher than ever, up about 400% from four years ago. This is isn’t because the company introduced some fantastic new pizza topping or figured out how to instantly zap pizza into homes.
Domino’s is a smash hit with Millennials because it knows how to reach them where they are. Hungry twenty-somethings can order a pizza through the company’s mobile app. Or use their Apple watches. Or by tweeting out a pizza slice Emoji. Domino’s receives more than half its orders on digital channels and chief digital officer Dennis Maloney says the company is no longer a restaurant – it is an ecommerce company.
The digital impulse purchase
This is an appropriate case study for what is happening across digital channels today. Today’s consumers are always-on omnishoppers, expecting the companies they do business with to be ready to handle their conversions whenever and wherever they decide to buy. Digitally native Millennials expect that every digital impulse be closely followed by equally “instant” fulfillment. This is true whether the purchase is pizza, shampoo (consumer packaged goods e-commerce is exploding), groceries, or just about anything else.
For manufacturers that do not always deal directly with consumers – like CPG brands – building a short bridge to the retailers that sell their products is a great way to bring speed of light fulfillment at the point of digital desire.
Mobility makes the difference
Omnishoppers make decisions at such speed that companies that aren’t at their fingertips at a moment’s notice lose their interest. For Domino’s, this meant having a killer mobile app and enabling sales on Twitter. For consumable or durable good manufacturers, it means turning every social media post, video, tweet and banner ad into a direct-response loop, making it seamless to drop the item into an online cart for delivery or in-store pick-up.
Conversely, brands that lag in their ability to convert intent into transaction at the necessary moment will lose out on the opportunity – sometimes forever. Whether ordering a pizza, a pair of shoes, or a pack of gum, always-on shoppers are also always-on converters. They’re ready to buy all the time and do so with the brands and retailers ready to serve that need.
That’s what Domino’s so successfully tapped into, and you can too.
This article originally appeared on RIS News.
