Thanks for reiterating the critical feedback you received from customers in a $75mm ad campaign and subsequently not making the necessary changes to satisfy your customers taste buds. It's a great example of how not to go about finding product market fit.
When I first saw Domino's video ad (no, not the one from a few months ago where employees blew snot rockets on some very unlucky customers' food) I gave immediate props for taking on their “harshest critics” and was interested (and hungry) enough to place an order for delivery. Result 1: Domino’s counts a $16 incremental sale, directly attributable to the campaign. The delivery smell quickly brought me back to my late-night, freshman fifteen and I was as excited as ever to try the new recipe. A few bites later, and the verdict: slightly spicier sauce, maybe less-greasy cheese and the same tasteless, cardboard crust. Domino's ad campaign had tricked me into believing they had actually made a good pizza, but upon taste instead lived up to being a “sad excuse for real pizza.” Just about everyone I’ve asked has voiced similar sentiments. Result 2: Let down customer.
Where does this seem to leave Domino’s? In the short run their execs may clap for any incremental sales (Result 1). But in the long run some of those incremental sales may turn out to be forever lost customers, like me (Result 2). And as for measuring how viral the campaign was… well, let’s just say customers liking the product seems to have been an overlooked but critical element.
The campaign shines a nice spotlight on one of my favorite learnings from Sean Ellis and core to what we’re focusing on here at Pinyadda: the importance of the customer in achieving product/market fit. If customers were more involved and engaged in creating and taste testing with the chefs to create the new Domino’s recipe, I bet we’d see different results – like brand enthusiasts (“hey I helped create the new recipe!") and a product that lives up to the new branding (“wow this is yummy enough that I want my friends to try!”).
And so ensues Pinyadda’s 2010 focus – the customer.
After months of ramping up features and then stripping them down to minimum viable product, Pinyadda is focusing on achieving product/market fit. We want to test our hypotheses of what the product is, what problem it solves, and who is using it. So our focus is iterating on who exactly our customer is and how we can build the product to best meet this customer’s needs.
As part of this effort we were recently brainstorming homepage language across a spectrum of market segments (we’ll then move to A/B testing these). We ended up with 5 sets of taglines, each set emphasizing different Pinyadda value propositions. Check them out below:
Set 1: RSS readers aren’t meeting the needs of their most prolific users.
- Better than your RSS reader.
- The smarter, social RSS reader.
Set 2: Popular information sharing platforms contain non-threaded conversations, suffer from information overload, are too hard to organize/filter, and have character limits.
- The easiest way to find and share articles and blog posts.
- The news you want from people you trust.
Set 3: It’s getting more and more difficult to find the news and information that’s most interesting to me personally on the web.
- Your personalized information assistant: articles and blog posts delivered just for you.
- Spend less time finding news, and more time reading news.
Set 4: News is meant to be discussed, but emailing links to people clutters inboxes and takes too much effort.
- A better way to send and receive links.
- A separate inbox for discussing links.
Set 5: I wish there were one place to see and discuss what’s happening in my industry instead of subscribing to loads of newsletters, trade publications and large portals.
- Free, real-time news on your industry.
- Recommended industry news from peers and colleagues you trust.
Did we miss anything? How do you use Pinyadda?
(As we strive for product/market fit over the next several months you can be assured we are listening intimately. We will be building the product – from taglines to new features – in tandem.)
