What you need to know:

• Don Meij, Domino's Australia CEO has built a global fast-food powerhouse by focusing on product and innovation, and by parlaying a successful strategy that saw Domino's stores dominate in each town they opened in into an international expansion.
• Some of the markets where the company opened were so challenging that Domino's in the US gifted him the territories for free.
• In the early days, he used the low relative cost of regional TV advertising to present the brand as a market leader.
• When the world shifted beyond TV and print into digital channels like search and social, he learned to dominate the algorithms even of the platforms he considered "frenemies"
• Econometrics has helped the companies tame channel complexity and a willingness to interrogate and trust data, then take risks and aver incrementalism also drove growth.
• And for the NPS-obsessed brand, there have also been important and counter-intuitive lessons along the way.
• Finally, its Crispy Chips are not only delicious (thanks to the pizza salt) but also highly profitable.

Domino's Australia was able to parlay a strategy of dominating every regional town and suburb where it opened a new store, into a global quick service restaurant (QSR) giant that now dominates in markets like France and Germany. In the early days, it utilised the relative affordability of regional TV markets to build its brand at a fraction of the cost of competing in markets like Sydney.

It was one of Domino's Australia CEO Don Meij's smarter insights when he began the 20-year mission to build a global QSR brand.

Media markets today, however, are very different with the rise of digital channels, the decline of print, and the ongoing fragmentation of TV away from Broadcast into a wider variety of BVOD and SVOD channels.

For Meij, a data addict and the company's number one user of PowerBI, analytics is the key to success, but so is an ability to circumvent analysis paralysis, a willingness to take risks, ignore excuses, and overcome challenges quickly.

Speaking to the recent Mutinex's Marketers & Money conference in Sydney, Meij told delegates, "If I look at where we are today as a business, especially in the post-Covid world, the whole media industry in particular is so fragmented."

"We were literally TV and print, TV and print." 

Then came search and social media.

"So then we were big into what we call the frenemies, who were getting our data and marketing it against us. How do we beat those algorithms? How do we make sure that we are dominating in search and so on?"

"Where we are today, with the new entertainment platforms like TikTok and Reels and then SVOD and so on, it's such a fragmented industry."

That creates a lot of complexity for brands that want to understand the impact of the media and market mix and it's why he describes the shift into econometrics – Domino's is a Mutinex customer – as a breakthrough.

"I remember that we would sit there and look at these models every two years. You would get an insight from the media mix. And then two years you're working on that 'insight'. And by the way, as we learned really quickly, it was out of date within 30 days."

"Not writing off creative, not writing off offer, because Mutinex is still a media mix model. But today we are able to sit there and it's improved our business so much."

He said the approach was especially powerful given the unique vagaries of a franchise organisation. "Our franchise partners get emotional about certain things, and we can just bring logic back to the 'this is why and how.' "

Cringe factor

Per Meij, "I always cringe when we put our TV ads into TikTok and into Reels because we know it doesn't work. It's lazy, but it's obviously expensive to build all of this individual content constantly."

He contrasted the challenges with what he called "a magical moment" in the market where the customers are in the mood to reward entertainment, excitement, and interest.

"It's allowed us to create whole new segments."

"[We have] the ability to tell a story in reverse, grab people's attention quickly. When we do it right, we really grow this business. It's a top part of our business strategy today."

Meij called out a culture of speed, innovation, and risk-taking which has driven Domino's success in the almost 20 years he has been at the helm.

"I constantly ask our team, 'What business are we in', and usually people go, 'Well, we're in the people business. Look how many people employ, train, and develop.'

As a career tip, if you ever find yourself working for Domino's – that's the wrong answer.

"We're just retailers," says Meij.

"When you get down to it, we're in the business of creating inspired products and inspired services. For the last two decades, we have been amazing at creating all of these things, like Order Anywhere, GPS Drive Tracker, Pizza Tracker, and Pizza Mogul."

"These were services where we would get consumer insights, and we conquer those insights, and the customer would reward us. In the industry today it's pretty hard to blow people away. In a society where we can do anything, there's still a magical moment for inspired product."

He conceded Domino's had not invested enough in that idea in the last two decades.

"Today we're spending a tonne of money and investing in inspired products, looking at new segmentation, new day parts, and it's just lighting our business up. We predominantly dominated dinner, and predominantly we're a shared meal occasion. Now for the first time in our life, we're getting individual consumers."

Of course, Domino's wants to continue to lead the delivery category. "We want to be the dominant, sustainable delivery QSR in every market by 2030."

He breaks delivery down into two parts.

"One is the premium service when we send one of our drivers to you, or the other is when you as a customer choose to be the driver. But what we're really obsessed about is that our meals are not eaten in a restaurant. Our meals are eaten in a home, in an office, in a park or something like that. So how does our food perform when it's five to 15 minutes old?"

Fries with that?

That mindset informs not only customer experience at the goal face but also innovation and he offers the example of Domino's Crispy Chips.

"The number one takeaway food consumed in QSR is chips or fries. And we'd never really sold fries."

The company spent two years working on the design of a Crispy Chip. 

"It was made from a by-product of potato, which was very sustainable. But why should Domino's sell chips?  Well, because we create pizza salt and it tastes freaking awesome. And now Crispy Chips has a 40 per cent higher retail price than the rest with QSR, and because it's designed to be delivered, it performs on delivery so we kept running out of the product on launch around the world."

Two minute pizza

Delivery is also a powerful driver of net promoter scores, though not necessarily in ways you might expect, he suggested.

"We are we're obsessed with NPS. And for nearly all of our life, we were obsessed with the delivery time."

The underlying assumption was always that really amazing delivery times improve the product because it arrives fresher and hotter, he said. However, Dominos has learned that that when it comes to the correlation between product and delivery time, the product and how it executed is are materially more important.

The Dominos app lets customer rate their experience on a five-point scale and it treats 4 as a neutral rating.

"Our job at the company is to create inspiring products, it's the role of our team members in our stores to make them inspiring. And it's really amazing.

"As soon as we start breaking away from four we hit this amazing J curve, and at 4.5 stars in our product, it's just nirvana. We see stores getting 70, 80, even 100 NPS," added Meij.

"We have a world record where a store in Japan delivered an order in an average of two minutes and 38 seconds."

He said the tech in the app allowed Domino's to determine what the customer was going to order so it was already in the oven baking before the customer hit enter.

There was a problem though – and it's not the one you might expect – such as customers changing their mind or suddenly behaving very differently.

Instead, customers applied the 'Too Good to be True test', he suggested. "Is it microwaved, it can't be any good."

Beyond that, it is hard to do and expensive for Domino's.

"It's really not a good thing to deliver in 2 minutes and 38 seconds," he conceded.

Instead, Domino's has discovered the optimal time is about 18 minutes.

"There's not much benefit in driving it down below that, " said Meij.