As quick service restaurants struggle to find audiences among health conscious consumers, a rather unlikely chain is riding high: Domino's Pizza. With a market cap of $7.2bn, its stock is trading higher than ever, up about 400 percent from four years ago. This isn't because the company introduced some fantastic new pizza topping or figured out how to instantly zap pizza into homes, Domino's says.
The company claims it's a smash hit with millennials because it knows how to reach them where they are. Hungry twenty-somethings can order a pizza through the company's mobile app. Or use their Apple watches. Or by tweeting out a pizza slice Emoji. Domino's receives more than half its orders on digital channels and chief digital officer Dennis Maloney says the company is no longer a restaurant - it is an ecommerce company.
Today's consumers are always-on "omnishoppers," expecting the companies they do business with to be ready to handle their conversions whenever and wherever they decide to buy. Digitally native millennials expect that every digital impulse be closely followed by equally "instant" fulfillment. This is true whether the purchase is pizza, shampoo (consumer packaged goods e-commerce is exploding), groceries or just about anything else.
