By 2009, Domino's had a problem it could not advertise its way around. The company was known for getting pizza to your door fast, but plenty of customers did not think much of the pizza itself. When the company asked people what they thought, the answers were brutal. Some said the crust tasted like cardboard. Others said the sauce tasted like ketchup. The stock, which had been around $30 not long after the company went public in 2004, had sunk into the single digits.
Patrick Doyle had been running Domino's U.S. business since 2007. He was not a founder or a pizza-industry lifer. He had worked at Gerber and in banking before joining Domino's. In January 2010 the company announced that he would become CEO that March, succeeding David Brandon. By then he and his team had already committed to the riskiest move in the company's history: throwing out the core recipe and admitting publicly why.
The work started well before any commercial aired. The company spent many months rebuilding its pizza from the crust up. The new version had a garlic-seasoned crust, a bolder sauce, and a different cheese. Changing a recipe across thousands of stores is not like changing it in one kitchen. Domino's put about 200,000 hours into retraining its U.S. pizza makers so that the new pizza would actually taste the same in every town. It also had to bring franchise owners along on the cost and the risk. By some accounts, roughly a year and a half of work went into the product, the stores, and the systems before the public saw a single ad.
In December 2009, Domino's launched a campaign it called the Pizza Turnaround. Instead of hiring actors to rave about the food, the ads showed real customers criticizing the old pizza in harsh terms. Then Doyle and the company's chefs appeared on camera and agreed with them. The message was not that the critics were wrong. It was that they were right, and that Domino's had listened and done something about it. The campaign cost about $75 million and came with a money-back guarantee.
Doyle understood the danger. If people took the company's invitation, tried the new pizza, and still did not like it, there would be no second chance. He later put it bluntly: if customers came back and had a bad experience, “we'd be done.” Admitting that your main product has been disappointing is the kind of thing most companies avoid at almost any cost. Domino's decided that customers already knew, and that pretending otherwise would only cost more trust.
The bet paid off quickly. In the first quarter of 2010, Domino's reported that domestic same-store sales rose 14.3 percent, an enormous jump for a restaurant chain. In the earnings release, Doyle credited not just a better pizza but “our honesty in how we told consumers about it.” People who had written Domino's off came back to see if the company meant it, and many of them stayed.
Doyle did not stop at the recipe. Under his leadership Domino's invested heavily in technology, building online ordering, an order tracker that let customers follow their pizza from oven to doorstep, and saved profiles that made reordering nearly instant. It let people order through their cars, smartwatches, televisions, voice assistants, and social media. By the time he stepped down, digital channels accounted for nearly two-thirds of the company's U.S. orders. Some observers have argued that this technology work, along with better franchise economics, mattered as much as the famous ads.
The long-term numbers were remarkable. Same-store sales rose for many years in a row. U.S. system sales nearly doubled, from about $3.1 billion in 2009 to about $5.9 billion in 2017, and average sales per store climbed from about $621,000 to over $1 million. The stock, which had traded below $10, rose to well over $200 a share. Doyle stepped down as CEO in June 2018, leaving behind a company that had become a case study in how to come back from a weak product.
The lesson is not that every leader should air their failures in a national ad. It is that the people you serve usually know exactly where you are falling short, long before you are willing to say so. Spin and silence do not hide the problem from them. They only tell customers, and your own team, that leadership either does not know or does not care. Domino's chose to name the problem, fix it for real, and then tell everyone what it had done. That order matters. Confession without a fix is just complaining in public, and a fix without honesty leaves people wondering whether anything changed.
You can do a version of this on Monday. Ask the people your team serves what is not working, and ask in a way that makes it safe for them to be blunt. Write down the worst comments word for word. Read them aloud to your team, without excuses or blame. Then pick the most important one, fix it, and go back to the people who complained to show them what changed. Owning a failure is not the end of the job. It is the start of it.
Your customers already know where you are falling short. The only question is whether they hear it from you first, with a plan to fix it, or keep saying it to each other without you. Honest leaders do not wait for the problem to disappear. They say it out loud, and then they go to work.