Domino's Pizza's Social Media Marketing: A Half-Success?

I am finally on vacation. Yeah~

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Today's topic is Domino's Pizza. I ate it yesterday, and it was very delicious as usual. What happened to Domino's Pizza? Let us check it out.

 

A few weeks ago, an e-mail came in. The title read "You can eat Domino's Pizza for free." I clicked an e-mail hurriedly so as not to miss a chance to eat it free of charge. The e-mail turned out to be an advertisement, not so surprisingly...

The advertisement featured its newest model, Girl's Generation. (Yeah~ I should eat it more frequently.) The advertisement said that I can get a 1000 won discount per 100 followers. If you have more than 20000 followers, you can get a pizza for free because you will get a 20000 won discount. This advertisement was invented in order to encourage customers to follow a Domino Pizza Korea's Twitter account. I thought this advertisement was very ingenuous and was sure this one is going to succeed. Yet... it went against my expectation.

This picture illustrates the process by which messages are propagated via Twitter. If one twitter user posts a 140-words tweet, the message is directly sent to his or her followers. If followers like this message, they can retweet it so that their followers also can share this useful information. It is like a cell division. Messages can be spread to a huge number of people in an amazingly short period of time. This is the dynamics of Twitter, and this is the very reason why many people are addicted to it. Moreover, this is the core reason why enterprises keep their eyes close on Twitter.

The outcome of this advertisement was disastrous. People were only interested in increasing their followers so that they can get their pizzas for free. People did whatever they could do. This phenomenon only ended up increasing the number of zombie accounts. Domino's Pizza tweeted an apology for creating this huge chaos.

 

What did Domino's Pizza miss? The very purpose of Twitter, as I repeatedly said, was communication. However, when marketers designed this advertisement, they excluded communication factor. They should have designed the advertisement in a way that people can communicate with Domino's Pizza. However, by its mistake, the only incentive given to its customers was money: eating pizzas for free. Avid Twitter users castigated Domino Pizza's for violating Twitter rules and honor codes.

 

The lesson corporate marketers should learn from this incident is that social media is all about communication, not profit maximization.