The Domino’s Disaster
An online video of an employee prank in a Domino's Pizza kitchen ended up in a major public relations crisis for the restaurant last week.
You’ve no doubt heard about this by now, as it’s been one of the most popular stories in the media for the past week.
If you haven’t, here are the bullet points, excerpted from the New York Times article.
Two Domino’s employees made a video in the restaurant’s kitchen. In the video, one provides narration while the other performs gross violations of health-code standards. Within days:
- The video had been viewed more than a million times on YouTube.
- References to it were in five of the 12 results on the first page of Google search for “Domino’s.”
- Discussions about it had contaminated Twitter.
- The perception of Domino’s quality among consumers went from positive to negative, according to online surveys at YouGov.
In just a few days, Domino’s reputation was damaged. “We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” said Domino’s spokesman Tim McIntyre. “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.”
This is an interesting practical situation. Unlike in the case of Virgin Airlines, this incident does not seem to be as clearly attributable to the brand itself. Indeed, the analysis of the Domino’s incident (and the recent similar one at Amazon, although that one may be slightly less apropos to my point here) has almost exclusively addressed damage control strategies for incidents of this type, treating them as rather more like a hurricane than as a symptom of endemic organizational problems.
I wonder, though, if there isn’t something even more interesting to be found by treating them as the latter. If we can justly do this, and we do, then perhaps we can comport ourselves to the disease, rather than the symptom. I’m thinking about this now, and I’ll try to write about it next week.
| Tagged with: | Design Ethics, Dominos, Food, Social Media, Surveillance, Transparency, YouTube |
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Comments on this post
1.
What pigs. I hope they rot in jail.
2.
I think its really stupid how these two individuals are being punished for the ignorance of the public and not their own. Does it really take a rocket scientist to differ between a parody and and a real statement commercial?.. Many times I watched Coach hines from MadTV and that didnt influence me into thinking the coach at my school was absolutely crazy. Embrace reality people. Stop living in the fantasy world where tweety scapes the cat all the time.
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