Today, I’d like to talk with you about pizza.
Before market research, I was in the pizza business. The Naked Pizza business, to be exact, working to use America’s favorite food as a conduit for improving gut health. Instead of a processed, white flour crust, we made our dough with a diversity of grains, pro-and pre-biotics.
The theory is that our microbiome is an often ignored but important piece of our health story. Appetizing, isn’t it?
When we launched, the US stores grew slowly, while the stores in Dubai were an instant hit. Why were consumers abroad embracing the brand more quickly, and how could we translate their success to the US market?
We narrowed our thoughts down to one fundamental question: Were we selling healthy pizza to people who eat healthily, or were we selling healthy pizza to people who eat pizza?
If we were selling to “pizza” eaters, we might need to be at a totally different price point, in totally different locations, and with a totally different marketing strategy than if we were selling to “healthy” eaters. We measured our most frequent menu items, devised metrics on customer service like a number of rings to answer the phone, and studied the impact of couponing on new orders. We built models to determine what kind of market were we dealing with in Dubai, and what kind(s?) we had in the US.
Turns out, it didn’t matter. In the US, there was a pre-existing service expectation that a delivery pizza would arrive at your house in 30 minutes or less. In Dubai, this was yet to be the case. There, the 30-minute delivery guarantee was introduced with a fleet of motorcycles that made it possible to get in and out of high-rise apartments faster than had been done before with standard car delivery.
Today, I think, “Are we offering automated sample to people who want sample, or are we offering automated sample to people who want automation?” This question may not make as much sense in our case, but the answer is still about the variety of factors that we already know make a difference to you. Though we, too, have changed the delivery vehicle to increase speed, our core values remain untouched.
We know price is important. We know quality is important. We know simplicity is important. It doesn’t matter whether you prefer pepperoni or lactobacillus, we’ll make sure it gets delivered.