What Ritual Has in Common with a Vintage Tootsie Pop Ad
One of my favorite ads growing up—yes, I’m severely dating myself here—was a television spot for Tootsie Pops called “How Many Licks.” It brilliantly plays on the fact that, try as we might, most people do not have the will power or the patience to lick their way to the Tootsie Roll prize at the center.
The ad is structured like an allegory. A young boy first approaches a cow and asks how many licks it takes to get to the center of the Tootsie Pop. The cow admits that he doesn’t have the answer because he always ends up biting right into it. He recommends that the boy ask Mr. Fox, who’s much cleverer. Mr. Fox also confesses to being a biter and suggests that the boy ask Mr. Turtle, who’s been around much longer. Mr. Turtle, too, says that he has never made it to the center without biting and suggests that the boy ask Mr. Owl, who’s much wiser.
The scholarly Mr. Owl, intrigued by the boy’s question, grabs the Tootsie Pop from the boy, licks it three times, then bites into it to get the Tootsie Roll. “Three,” he says, handing the bare stick back to the boy. The boy turns away and grumbles “There’s nothing I hate more than a smart aleck.”
The ad concludes with one of the more memorable lines in advertising history—“How many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? The world may never know.” It’s both a provocation to find out for yourself just how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop as well open permission to bite right in.
What’s this got to do with a food ordering service?
I’ve become a quick fan of Ritual, the food ordering app. Our office in Chicago’s West Loop lacks food options in the building. That often means a last minute scramble to pick up lunch nearby. Depending on the time of day, that can also mean long waits in line. Ritual solves this problem by allowing me to order ahead and pick it up just when it’s ready, saving me time and hassle. It’s exactly how Ritual solves this problem that has me hooked. Like all such services, the devil is in the experience details.
Ritual knows that it’s not enough to simply enable a mobile order-to-pickup service if you want to create an experience that customers will return to over and over again. That’s not to suggest that that’s an easy thing to do. Solving for all of the variables on the retailer side are mindboggling to think about—fitting into different order-ticketing and payment systems, getting retailers to allocate separate pick-up space in the store, balancing in-store customer demand with potentially limitless virtual demand, to name a few. However, it’s a baseline that a well-heeled competitor could achieve with relative ease.
There are several valuable dimensions to the Ritual customer experience, such as food discovery, which introduces me to nearby food options I didn’t even know existed, piggybacking, which allows me to throw my order in with someone else’s from our office, and points and rewards, which give me a way to save on orders or earn rewards I can use outside of the Ritual system, among others. Despite the value of all of those features, it’s the re-order process that relates most directly to the topic at hand.
Ritual knows that convenience is king in a use case like this. So is habit—AKA “ritual.” We don’t always have the bandwidth in a busy workday to wonder at lengths about what to eat for lunch or where. We all have the three or four goto dishes from reliable spots that pop into our head when hunger strikes and time is short. Ritual makes it incredibly easy to re-order your faves, including those dishes that offer customization, like one of my personal faves, Roti. In fact, Ritual has honed the process down to, you guessed it, just three taps.
Just as our allegorical beasts lack the will power and patience to keep licking, we often lack the time and attention for anything more than a count of three.
The home screen features restaurant recommendations, current promotions, and quick access to “favorites”—the restaurants I order from most frequently. Tap one of those favorites and up pops a few dishes I recently ordered from that location. Tap one of those dishes and into the cart it goes, along with all of the side dish selections and personalizations I entered last time. With Apple Pay turned on, or a credit card on file, I’m just a third and final tap away from completing my order. Ritual then lets me decide if I’d like to offer a piggyback to someone else in my company and gives me an estimated pick-up and departure time, replete with estimated walk time. The app sends me an alert when it’s time to go. When I arrive, I skip the line, grab my order and go.
It’s a simple, helpful experience that’s born from a true understanding of why its customers use the app in the first place, and return to it time and again. Like our ad for Tootsie Pops, Ritual doesn’t judge us for having little time or patience. It allows for a lengthy perusal of all of your food options should you have the time. But for those who don’t, Ritual respects the human context in which its customers operate and seeks to remove as much friction from the process as possible.
