The value of transparency.

A couple of months ago I posted this piece about Business and Honesty — and I picked up on the curious story of how Domino’s Pizza ran an ad campaign which in effect admitted that their pizza was pretty bad, and that their customers were not pleased with it.  But the ad then indicted “we listen to them” and “we changed the formula”.  Domino showed that they loved their customers more than they loved their old recipe for yucky pizza.

Traditional critics were concerned that this exposure was a horrible idea.  After all, why air the negative stuff and leave that impression?  Why not just announce a new and improved product and sweep the past under the rug?

Turns out that Domino’s got it right.  I thank Hutch Carpenter for his Tweet pointing to this little blog post.  The gamble paid off in cash.

When trust erodes due to poor quality, you cannot just fix the quality issue.  You have to regain trust.  The Domino ad addressed the core issue by saying “we are listening now”.  This means that it’s not just about the pizza, it’s about the feeling that the voice of the customer counts.  Customers respond favorably, resulting in more sales.

I take this story as a great lesson.  Not just for you, but for me too.  As I’m ramping up in my new job (did you know I got a job a few weeks ago?) I find that I’m inheriting a process that has had a mixed history.  Sometimes it worked well, other times not so well.  My role includes improving the internal process, but I see it also means rebuilding the trust that the services my group provides will be reliable and timely.   It’s a bit easier for me, since I don’t feel the need to defend the past — it was not my past.  But I also have to be sensitive to the fact that there were reasons that some things did not works so well.  And some of those remain in effect.   So I’m neither defending the past, nor attacking those who allowed things to slip up.  Rather I’m looking at it frankly and saying “I can tell that things were funky in the past.  Sometimes this process worked well, sometimes not.  We’re here to improve things so that they are getting better and more reliable.  How?  By reaching out and finding out what you think we we need to hear.”

A former colleague of mine used the following formula: “Start, Stop, Continue”.  Ask

• What should we start doing?
• What should we stop doing?
• What should we continue to do?

You don’t have to do everything that your customers ask for.  In fact, they know you can’t.  But you have to listen and incorporate their feedback into a response.  This is the reason I have an internal blog — not to be a blogger, but to invite comments.  And this is the reason we put all out proposals on a wiki.  But these tools are only part of the solution.  I also have to meet people face to face, or on the phone.  Real human interaction has to reinforce the digital message.

I’m not a customer of Domino’s pizza, so I cannot tell first hand if the following is true — but I suspect that the ad campaign worked by also having the in-store experience reinforce the message.  Did it?

As I write this I just saw another tweet:  ”an Ad is a recommendation from someone you don’t trust”.  Brilliant and almost always true.  What Domino’s did was to create an Ad that starts to restore trust.  And that was pretty clever.

And there again we see value in transparency and honesty.  And this is the foundation for the social enterprise.

Tagged as: behaviors, collaboration, leadership, success story, tip, trust, workplace