Domino's Crisis Communications

In April 2009, Domino’s Pizza faced a huge problem, two employees at the companies Conover, NC store posted videos of themselves doing grotesque things to the food and other things in the restaurant to the popular video-sharing website YouTube.  The video received over a million views before being taken down.

Within 48 hours the company responded to the situation by utilizing bloggers and communicating with YouTube to track the two offenders down, where upon they were arrested.  Subsequently, the restaurant was shut down and sanitized.

Domino’s response to the situation was seen through an apology posted on their website (seen here). 

The company also asked its employees with Twitter accounts to tweet the link to the apology. The company also took to its own Twitter page (seen here) with their first post being a tweet the link to the apology.   After the original post, the company, which is Australia based, responded to tweets made by those concerned about the incident.  The responses were quick, however anyone in the United States that viewed the tweets may have felt a bit put down by the company’s tweets.  The company kept returning to saying that the incident happened in the United States and Australia had strict health codes, kind of insinuating that health in the U.S. was subpar.

The company’s U.S. president, Patrick Doyle, went further to issue an apology using YouTube (seen here). 

The public responded well to the video, but the response could have been quicker.  With the way the company decided to respond on Twitter, it is lucky that no one read too much into it, because it could have started another PR problem.  Overall, though the timing for the response was a little delayed (48 hours could feel like weeks in the world of public relations), Domino’s response to the situation was very well handled.  The company used two major outlets to convey its apology to its publics and was well received.