How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Fact: 74% of people in Oxford who tried Dodo Pizza once placed an order at least one more time since the day we opened. So logic says that in order to boost sales, we need to prompt Oxonians to sample our pizza. The chances that a person trying our pizza will remain Dodo Pizza customer are pretty high. Initiating first try might sounds like a piece of cake—just get your coupons and discounts ready! But we find that boring. And old-fashioned. And annoying. So, we’ve come up with something better. Here’s what we have in mind (and actually have started working on).

You might remember that before we launched our pizzeria in Oxford in March this year, we created a webpage to find 500 beta-tasters. Any Oxonian had a chance to sign up and get their first Dodo Pizza for free and leave their honest review on Facebook—if they wanted. It worked well for us and created a buzz in town.

Now we’re ready to go even further.

• We create a webpage with a provocative but funny URL address
• On this webpage, we explain the core idea of our business: our focus on the quality of the pizza and our determination to get rid of everything that doesn’t help improve it. We don’t do promotions because we believe that our product must speak for itself.
• We ask Oxonians who have never tried our pizza before to sign up for one free pizza. We identify them using a unique cell phone number. (If someone ever decides to abuse this system, it’s alright. We believe in honest people in Oxford!)
• While filling out the form, the person is asked to pick a pizza of his/her choice (out of the seven we have on the menu) and provide contact details.
• Once the form is ready to go, the newcomer might share news of their participation with their friends on Facebook.
• We collect the requests and start sending out text messages with unique personal links to everyone daily (not all at the same time, of course). People follow those links to complete their free orders on our website.
• We hope that many Oxonians will love our pizza and become our loyal customers. Bingo!

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Whether Oxonians will want to post their reviews on our Facebook page or not doesn’t really matter that much. Of course, we’re flattered every time we read warm words about our pizza, but that’s not the key point.

The most important thing here is to get everyone in town try our pizza and also show people that ordering pizza online is EASY. Warning: don’t do that if you can’t be sure in the quality of your product and service.

And yes, this experiment is gonna be expensive for the business, but after all the years of hard promotion, offering coupons and discounts has become pricey too. So we decided to give it a try.

If you’re a pizza fan living in Oxford, MS, follow us on Facebook so you won’t miss the party. If you’re in the fast casual business, subscribe to this blog’s newsletter. The results of our unprecedented project will be shared and discussed in future posts.