How to reinvent franchising with tech and transparency

Some people say nobody watches TV anymore. No use advertising your brand on national channels—go online! Yet this spring, Dodo Pizza launched its first nationwide TV campaign in Russia.

Three months later, Misha Chernyshev, the company’s marketing director, took the stage at Dodo Pizza’s yearly meetup to report on the results of this promo. Here is a recap of his keynote.

The campaign lasted for 42 days, and Dodo Pizza invested $1.6M in it.

67 million people saw our promo at least once, and 56% of them saw it more than 5 times.

For the first time in our history, our...

A few days ago, a video went viral on the Russian web. It showed an employee of one of the world’s most respected pizza chains while he was receiving a dough shipment. At one point, a tray falls, and a few dough balls roll out on the road. The employee picked them up, shook the dirt off, put them back on the tray, and carried it to the pizza shop. The camera rises, and we see the company’s slogan promising the best ingredients. The curtain falls.

It’s a true story, and it’s my scariest nightmare. How can we be sure that something like that will never happen with our chain?

Companies grow when they focus all their attention on their customers. Companies grow when their founders are hell-bent on making the best product on the market and try to win every customer. Then, they make some money, open fancy offices, go public…. The founders change aprons for expensive suits and forget about their customers. And then companies start dying.

We don’t want to become one of these companies—and we have a big idea that should help us avoid such a destiny. This week, Ivan Tikhov presented it during our annual Dodo Pizza Partners and Managers Meetup. This year, we’re going to create a tool that won’t allow us to ever forget about customers, no matter how big we become.

It’s a simple tool. But it takes some courage and transparency to implement it. So, what will we do?

40% of our sales already come through our mobile app. Soon, it will start accepting orders not only for delivery but also for dine-in, and this number will increase. We’re also working on our pilot pizza shop in China where there will be no cash desks and cashiers at all—all our orders will go through our app on WeChat. Overall, our team expects that in some not so distant future, 100% of our orders will go through our app—all over the world.

The mobile app allows us to communicate with our customers directly. So we’ll start asking them about every order they placed at Dodo Pizza and encourage them to rate it. We’ll make sure that the vast majority of our customers will be giving us feedback. And this feedback will become the most important metric for our business. It will be more important than sales, profits, or stock value.

We’ll also burn our bridges and make this feedback public. Accumulated in a ranking system, it will be shown on our website and in the app for every pizzeria in our chain—even if for some pizza shops it happens to be not that great. This approach won’t give us any chance to do a poor job when serving our customers. It will allow us to never forget about the main goal of this business—serving people the best way possible.

We now receive requests for our franchise from all over the world—from Germany and Nigeria, Canada and Australia, Switzerland and the UAE….

These emails prove to us that people from different countries have started to see the same value in what we’re building (our cutting-edge IT system, up-to-date branding, and agile business culture based on radical transparency).

The question is: what should we do with these requests? The Dodo Pizza brand is already present in 10 countries, from the United States and China to Lithuania and Romania. And to an outsider, our choice...