Pizza Anywhere, Data Everywhere
Have you heard that Dominos now delivers anywhere? That’s right, I’m sure you are now imagining those situations where you were in desperate need for a pizza: either that time you went on a Netflix binge, or that time you only made it halfway home after a night out and you just needed to sit somewhere in a random park or even just the footpath. I’m sure we have all been there.
Domino’s has launched a new online ordering platform called Dominos Anywhere allowing you to order pizza without needing a specific home address. Instead, all you need to do is put your location services on and drag on the map where you are to have your pizza delivered to you at the park, the beach or even many more unusual locations. Customers have been able to take advantage of the new platforms ultimate convenience, while Dominos are able to take advantage of learning more about their target locations.
Now that you can have pizza anywhere, Dominos is not only changing your eating experience, but your purchasing habits. Most importantly, with customers ordering pizza anywhere, Dominos can collect data everywhere.
As a matter of fact, the CEO of Dominos Patrick Doyle has shared countless times that they consider themselves a tech company that sells pizzas. The innovation behind their transition has been remarkable. Domino’s retail sales in 2017 achieved more than 50% of all global retail sales thanks to digital technologies and the modern platform that gave them a competitive advantage over other pizza companies.
The answer to why a pizza company would adopt these various digital platform elements and begin extracting data is that data is now a vital resource for non tech industries as much as tech related industries as it is the source for economic power. Yes, Dominos is improving its services for customers, which is something to be grateful for because nothing is worse than being hungry and waiting any longer than you have to for food.
However, it is important for customers to understand that we are providing ways for Dominos to increase their predictions for when and where to market themselves directly towards us. As of a result, Dominos encourages platform capitalism: they see data as crucial for capitalist gain among competitors and are willing to converge and share your privacy information. Consequently, this data could even be shared with third parties in order to contribute to a greater capital gain for those in the tech industry.
Dominos is very open about their advancement in the world of data collection, and they are increasingly successful as they continue to innovate. With information from 85,000 data sources, both structured and unstructured, providing enormous amounts of information on customers and global operations, it makes you consider the effects of data driven businesses.
As I have watched Facebook buy out companies and collect data from a range of platforms, the notion that one company can have so much money and power, specifically a tech company, is very intriguing.
It’s likely we will see a dominos effect (pun intended) and watch many food chains and delivery services begin to catch up and incorporate similar decisions made by these tech companies.. The competition between these companies will grow to be more aggressive till one has the most data and therefore they will have their own monopoly.
I am a big fan of pizza, hence why I wrote this article, and of course I’m willing to try getting pizza delivered to me wherever I am because if I was to head to the beach for the day I would forget to even organise food and having Domino’s Anywhere solves that problem.
The collection of data and its effects can come across as a sceptical thought on privacy concerns and capitalist nature. However, the future of non-tech and tech related industries coming together opens a business such as Dominos to a new world of competition, while consumers are still left in the dark on where their data is going. Although in the meantime at least we can get a pizza anywhere we like.
