How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

As mentioned in previous posts, we’ve challenged ourselves to develop a super simple website where you can order a pizza in just two clicks. But since our business model is new to the market, the website also plays the role of a platform where Dodo Pizza clients can learn more about our company. Our business is all about teamwork, transparency, great value for fair prices, simplicity, and IT. How do you keep a website simple and at the same time let it speak for the company without getting too serious?

Well, that’s a call for creativity. While trying to answer that question, we’ve come up with a few unusual solutions.

1. Daily, weekly, monthly sales

“How are you doing?” It’s the first question you ask when greeting someone. And when we’re talking about a business, sales figures might be the answer to this question. Dodo Pizza’s business has never been something we’ve kept secret—we publish the monthly sales of every one of our pizzerias online. Why change this approach for the US? Just scroll down the main page and you’ll see our sales figures and number of orders. Want to dive deeper into our business? Well, you can take a look at the data from previous weeks and months.

2. Hard stuff turned into entertainment

Nowadays, the whole world wants to be entertained no matter what. Nobody cares about these long, dull paragraphs companies publish to describe how they do their business. So if we really want to hook people and make them learn how we operate, we should come up with a story that is fun to read. So let’s play a little game! Here’s a box—now attach the quality control sticker to it. What, you can’t? No wonder. First, you need to learn a little more about Dodo Pizza. We’ll check in on your progress along the way.

3. Principles that shape us

Just like people, companies have different principles. We are eager to share ours with clients to help them decide whether they like Dodo’s personality or not, even though there is nothing we can really do about it. It’s just who we are.

4. Dough making: step by step

Every day, we make our dough in-store from scratch. We claim that our dough is crispy and light. But how exactly do we make it this way? In this case, photos probably do the job better than thousands of words. Just take a look at the dough-making process. Someone might say we have to be out of our minds to reveal our secrets. None of our competitors do that. Isn’t this just the same as if Coca Cola posted the Coke recipe on its website? But should pizza-making really be a top-secret affair? We don’t think so.

5. Dodo kitchen goes online

What will normally happen after you click “Order Now” on any other pizzeria’s website? In most cases, you will see the status of your order and its number. But that’s no fun! We want you to be able to see your pizza being made online. Here we go. Observing real people making your Pepperoni or Supreme is way more interesting than just knowing your order’s status! Learn some pizza acrobatics, see what’s going on in the kitchen during rush hours, or just substitute your favorite TV series with our pizza reality show. Caution: watching other people making your pizza online may be addictive.

6. Real pizza heroes

You watch these people making your pizza online all the time. Do you want to know who they are? They might be your university friends that you’ll hardly recognize from the back. :) We let our pizza heroes tell the world anything they find important about their job. Right on the main page, you will find photos of all the people working in the kitchen at any given moment. Now it all becomes personal. You know exactly who is in charge of your delicious pizza.

7. Uncensored feedback

People get our pizza, give it a try, like it or don’t, and then share their opinions with the world. They can use Yelp for that, but we truly want to let you know what other people think right on our website. The most popular question at this point is usually “What if people post negative feedback? Would you consider showing that on the website?” Oh yes. Sometimes, we can make mistakes—and we don’t want to hide from them.

We’ve tried hard to make our website simple, informative, and entertaining all at the same time. Don’t forget that we don’t have a phone. So the website is all we’re left with. Was that a smart move or a terrible disaster? Will all these distinctive things really matter? We’ll see.

Alena Tikhova,
Product and Marketing Director
at Dodo Pizza Franchising.
You can reach me on my Facebook page.