#361 2015 · Domino's (AnyWare / emoji ordering) · Food deliveryenter-their-reality
Domino's let loyal customers complete a pizza order by tweeting a single emoji, trading a dedicated app for the shortest possible confirmation gesture on a channel they already lived in
the problem
Repeat customers wanted to reorder without opening an app
background
By 2015 Domino's had spent several years rebuilding itself as a technology company that happened to sell pizza, with online and mobile ordering already driving a majority of US sales and a 'Pizza Profile' letting customers save a default 'Easy Order.' The natural next move for a digital-forward chain chasing more repeat orders was the standard one: refine the app, add push notifications, shave taps off checkout.
Instead, under the banner 'AnyWare,' Domino's spent 2015 rolling out ordering through channels it did not own or control at all — Ford Sync, Samsung Smart TV, Amazon Echo, Slack, smartwatches, and, launched May 2015, Twitter itself. A customer with a saved Easy Order on file could tweet the pizza emoji, or the hashtag #EasyOrder, to @dominos and get a direct message back to confirm, completing a transaction without opening the Domino's app or website at the moment of order.
the move
Domino's let any customer who had already saved a default order in a Domino's Pizza Profile trigger a full repeat order by tweeting a single pizza emoji, or the hashtag #EasyOrder, to the company's Twitter account; Domino's replied by direct message asking for confirmation within a time window, and confirming completed the purchase — no app, login screen, or menu required at the moment of ordering.
the payoff
The launch and the emoji-heavy teaser campaign that preceded it won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2015 and were widely reported to have generated on the order of 1.2 billion earned media impressions. Contemporaneous tech press coverage was more skeptical of the mechanism in practice: ordering by emoji only worked for customers who had first created a Dominos.com account, built a Pizza Profile, and placed at least one order through the website to set up 'Easy Order' — the tweet was a confirmation gesture layered on top of an already-established relationship, not a cold-start way to buy pizza. Neither Domino's nor independent reporting appears to have published a hard order-volume figure for the Twitter/emoji channel specifically, which is itself evidence actual usage was small next to the media reach; this was substantially a media-and-brand-perception win built on top of a real, narrow-but-genuine convenience feature for existing repeat customers.
what came after
Became a widely cited marketing-industry case study for treating an existing social platform and a single character of input as the entire ordering interface, and helped normalize single-gesture reordering as a retention play across delivery and subscription businesses, independent of how many orders the emoji itself ever carried.
references
- [1]Domino's Tweet-To-Order System Isn't As Great As It SoundsTechCrunch, 2015techcrunch.com
- [2]It's Simple: Tweet Emoji. Get Pizza Delivered. Win Grand Prix.Ad Age, 2015adage.com