Un-Innovative Pizza Technology
I’d previously written and complimented Domino’s Pizza Tracker in a post entitled “Innovative Pizza Technology“. While skeptical at first, I did find the Pizza Tracker to be a pretty useful little technology.
For the exact opposite in pizza technology, we have Papa John’s Order Online Widget which they’ve created for Facebook. This technology marvel has 34 users so far. As Caroline Waxler points out in her Nov 2008 Fast Company article entitled Social Misfits, the widget “lets customer place their order upto 21 days in advance of their preferred delivery date or pickup date and time.” She goes onto to appropriately state this functionality is great if you just sit back and “Remember that time you got a pizza craving for two weeks from next Tuesday @ 7pm and couldn’t act on it?”
Building a Facebook, iPhone app or using Twitter doesn’t make you current or cool if you’re not doing anything to actually help you enhance your brand and ultimately sell more stuff. These attempts are just as misguided as the me too social networks which were cropping up regularly but which the current market malaise seems to have squashed a bit. Technology for technology’s sake, no matter how cool, is a bad investment. These gizmos must help people actually do something they want to or might be interested in doing and ideally help them do it better.
Here’s the Papa John’s widget. I’m going to get going now and order a pizza for Nov 23rd now.
Tags: caroline waxler, dominos, facebook widget, Fast Company, Papa John's, pizza tracker
November 19th, 2008 at 7:08 pm
[…] In his blog, my colleague has been closely covering the internet pizza innovation wars taking place between Domino’s and Papa John’s. However, in a deal with Tivo, Domino’s has shifted the battlefield back to more traditional television-based advertising – with a twist, of course. Tivo will enable their broadband customers to order Domino’s pizza via their set-top boxes via two touch-points: 1) the main Tivo screen and 2) pop-up ads that appear when Domino’s commercials are either viewed or past over. […]