Honesty in Marketing

After reading many classmates’ blogs, I finally found Amanda’s post and I thought it was really interesting. She talks about honesty in marketing and how it can affect the image of a certain product or brand. In my opinion, I like the idea of having an honest world but I know that achieving that is near impossible, especially when there is so much competitiveness everywhere. Marketing is certainly one of the places in which I wouldn’t expect much honesty, because let’s face it: most times it’s about winning, not about transparency.

While doing some research on transparent marketing, I stumbled upon Domino’s Pizza campaign called “Domino’s Pizza Turnaround”, which was all about being honest with the consumers. The first step was accepting that their pizza was, basically, horrible. In the video we can see people in focus groups complaining about various features, describing the crust as ‘cardboard’ and the sauce as ‘ketchup’. As a result, they decided to redesign their recipe in an attempt to make a better product.

We will never be sure if Domino’s chose this marketing strategy because they wanted to make a real change or because they couldn’t hide the fact that their product was terrible anymore. Anyways, I’m really glad that we can see some transparent marketing once in a while.

If you want to know how customers reacted to the new recipe, watch this video.