Domino’s New Strategy Is a Masterclass in Fixing What Broke

Domino’s new strategy, branded as “Hungry for MORE,” is a deliberate pivot away from discount-led growth toward brand investment, product quality, and recapturing lapsed customers. After years of leaning hard on value promotions and loyalty mechanics, the company is betting that the path back to sustainable growth runs through brand equity, not coupon codes.

It is a strategy worth understanding carefully, not because Domino’s is doing something revolutionary, but because the problem they are solving is one that hundreds of brands quietly face and rarely address honestly.

What Is the “Hungry for MORE” Strategy?

Domino’s launched “Hungry for MORE” as its strategic framework in 2023, and it has been the lens through which the company has made decisions since. The four pillars are: more delicious food, more relevant value, more enhanced service, and more inspired teams. That framing matters because it tells you what the company thinks went wrong.

When a brand restructures around product quality and service experience, it is usually because customer satisfaction data has been quietly deteriorating while the business focused elsewhere. In Domino’s case, the previous years involved aggressive digital investment, loyalty programme mechanics, and a lot of promotional activity. That combination drove transactions but eroded the underlying brand perception that makes customers come back without a coupon.

I have seen this pattern play out at agency level more times than I can count. A client gets addicted to the short-term lift from promotional spend, the CFO sees the revenue line hold, and nobody wants to be the person who says the brand is slowly hollowing out. Then one quarter the promotions stop working as well as they used to, and suddenly there is a strategy review. Domino’s is not unique in this. They are just large enough that the strategy review becomes public.

If you want more context on how go-to-market strategy shapes long-term growth decisions like this one, the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub covers the commercial frameworks behind these choices in more depth.

Why Did Domino’s Need a New Strategy in the First Place?

The honest answer is that Domino’s ran into a problem that many brands in the quick-service restaurant category face: growth plateaued, and the mechanisms that had driven it stopped producing the same returns.

The company had built a genuinely impressive digital infrastructure over the previous decade. Its app, loyalty programme, and ordering technology were ahead of the category. But being the best at ordering pizza online is a table stake once every competitor catches up. And they did. Third-party delivery platforms also reshaped customer expectations, meaning that Domino’s direct ordering advantage became less distinctive as consumers defaulted to aggregators for convenience.

There is a useful BCG framework on commercial transformation and go-to-market strategy that captures this dynamic well. Competitive advantages in distribution and technology tend to compress over time. What replaces them is either brand strength or price leadership. Domino’s was drifting toward price leadership, which is a race it cannot win against grocery store frozen pizza and a dozen delivery apps offering discount codes to first-time users.

The Uber Eats partnership, announced in 2023, was a significant signal. Domino’s had resisted third-party platforms for years on the grounds that they eroded margin and handed over customer data. Reversing that position was an admission that the direct-only model was leaving volume on the table. It was a commercially pragmatic call, even if it cost margin. Sometimes the right strategic move is accepting a worse unit economics position in exchange for audience reach you cannot build yourself.

What Does “More Relevant Value” Actually Mean?

This is the pillar that requires the most careful reading, because “value” in a cost-of-living environment means something specific to consumers that does not always align with what brands want it to mean.

Domino’s is not abandoning value messaging. They are trying to reframe what value means in their category. The distinction they are drawing is between transactional value (a discount on a pizza tonight) and perceived value (confidence that Domino’s is worth the money). Those are different things, and they require different marketing approaches.

Earlier in my career, I overvalued lower-funnel performance activity. It looked clean in the data: spend goes in, orders come out, return on ad spend is calculable. But a lot of what performance marketing captures is intent that already existed. The person who was going to order pizza anyway now has a coupon code in their inbox. The transaction happens. The attribution model gives performance marketing the credit. The brand gets nothing from it except a margin hit.

Domino’s moving toward “more relevant value” is, in part, an attempt to stop training its customer base to expect a discount before they order. That is a hard habit to break, and it takes time to see the results. But the alternative is a loyalty programme that only activates when there is a deal attached, which is not loyalty at all. It is price sensitivity with a points mechanic on top.

The Vidyard analysis on why go-to-market feels harder now touches on a related point: customer acquisition costs are rising across categories, which makes retention and reactivation more commercially important than they used to be. Domino’s focus on lapsed customers fits squarely into that logic.

How Is Domino’s Approaching Brand Investment Differently?

One of the more interesting elements of the “Hungry for MORE” strategy is the explicit commitment to brand-building investment, not just performance spend. This is a meaningful shift for a company that had been heavily weighted toward digital performance channels.

The commercial logic is sound. When you over-index on performance marketing for long enough, you end up with a brand that is very good at converting people who are already looking for you and very poor at generating demand from people who are not. Growth requires reaching new audiences, not just capturing existing intent. That is a lesson I have had to relearn at different points in my career, usually when a client’s growth curve flattened and we had to explain why the performance numbers still looked fine while new customer acquisition had quietly stalled.

Domino’s is investing in creative work that is designed to build brand salience, not just drive immediate orders. That means television, brand partnerships, and campaign work that operates at the top of the funnel. The risk is that the results are slower to appear in the numbers, and in a publicly traded company, slower results create pressure. The discipline required to hold that position while the market expects quarterly improvement is significant.

The Semrush breakdown of market penetration strategy is worth reading alongside this, because it clarifies the distinction between growing share of an existing market and expanding the total addressable base. Domino’s needs both, and brand investment is the mechanism for the latter.

What Is the Role of Product Quality in the Strategy?

“More delicious food” is the pillar that is easiest to dismiss as marketing language and hardest to execute as an operational reality. Domino’s has made specific product investments, including reformulated recipes and quality improvements across its menu, that are meant to give the brand claim substantiation rather than just a tagline.

This matters strategically because brand claims without product reality eventually collapse. I judged the Effie Awards for several years, which means I spent time evaluating campaigns against actual business outcomes rather than creative execution alone. The campaigns that held up over time were almost always the ones where the product or service genuinely delivered on the brand promise. The ones that won on creative merit but underdelivered on substance tended to produce short-term spikes followed by brand trust erosion.

Domino’s has history with this. Their 2010 “Pizza Turnaround” campaign, in which they publicly acknowledged their pizza was not good enough and committed to fixing it, is one of the more studied examples of a brand using radical transparency as a growth mechanism. The “Hungry for MORE” strategy is not as dramatic as that, but it draws from the same well: the idea that honesty about what needed to improve is more commercially effective than pretending everything was fine.

Product investment also gives the sales and marketing organisation something real to sell. When I was running agency teams and working on pitches, the accounts where we produced the best work were almost always the ones where the client had a genuine product story. You can write strong copy for a mediocre product, but you cannot sustain a brand on it.

How Does the Loyalty Programme Fit Into the New Strategy?

Domino’s revamped its Piece of the Pie Rewards programme as part of the broader strategic shift. The changes made it easier to earn and redeem points, lowered the threshold for rewards, and extended access to non-registered customers. The intent was to broaden the programme’s reach while reducing the friction that was keeping occasional customers from engaging with it.

Loyalty programmes are a useful retention tool when they are structured correctly, but they can also become a crutch. If a loyalty programme is the primary reason customers return, the brand has a problem. The programme should reinforce a preference that already exists, not manufacture one artificially.

The changes Domino’s made suggest they understand this distinction. Making the programme more accessible is smart from a market penetration standpoint. But the more important question is whether the brand experience between loyalty touchpoints is strong enough to hold customers who are not actively thinking about their points balance. That is where “more delicious food” and “more enhanced service” have to do the work that the loyalty mechanics cannot.

Growth loops, where customer experience drives referral and retention without requiring constant promotional stimulus, are the more durable commercial model. The Hotjar perspective on growth loops captures why feedback mechanisms matter in sustaining these cycles. Domino’s is trying to build something closer to that than a pure discount-and-collect model.

What Are the Risks in the Strategy?

No strategy is without risk, and “Hungry for MORE” has several worth naming clearly.

The first is timing. Investing in brand equity and product quality during a period when consumers are acutely price-sensitive is a bet that the long game will pay off before the short-term pressure becomes untenable. That is a reasonable bet, but it requires patience from investors and leadership that is not always available.

The second is execution consistency. A strategy built on four pillars only works if all four are delivered simultaneously and consistently across thousands of locations. Domino’s is a franchise-heavy business, which means the “more inspired teams” pillar is not just an internal culture initiative. It is an operational requirement for the rest of the strategy to function. Franchise compliance at scale is genuinely difficult. BCG’s research on scaling agile organisations is relevant here, because the challenge of maintaining strategic coherence while decentralising execution is exactly the tension Domino’s faces across its franchise network.

The third risk is competitive response. As Domino’s pulls back from aggressive discounting, competitors have an opening to capture price-sensitive customers with promotional offers. Pizza Hut and Papa Johns are not standing still, and the third-party delivery platforms are running their own promotions regardless of what Domino’s does. The brand needs to be strong enough that a portion of its customer base chooses Domino’s even when a cheaper option is visible.

The fourth is measurement lag. Brand investment takes longer to show up in commercial results than performance spend does. The risk is that the organisation loses confidence in the strategy before it has had time to work, reverts to promotional activity to hit quarterly numbers, and ends up back where it started. I have watched that cycle happen at client level. The strategy was right. The patience ran out first.

What Can Marketers Take From the Domino’s Approach?

The most transferable lesson from the Domino’s strategy is not the specific tactics. It is the diagnostic honesty that preceded them.

Before “Hungry for MORE” could exist, someone at Domino’s had to look at the data and say: our promotional dependency is a structural problem, not a short-term headwind. Our digital advantage has been commoditised. Our brand perception is softer than our transaction volume suggests. That kind of diagnosis is harder to make than it sounds, because the people making it are usually the same people who built the system being criticised.

Early in my career, I was handed a whiteboard pen in a client brainstorm when the agency founder had to leave the room unexpectedly. My immediate internal reaction was something close to panic. But the discipline of having to form and defend a point of view in real time, without the safety net of deference to someone more senior, is one of the more useful things that happened to me professionally. Domino’s strategy has that quality to it. It is a point of view formed under pressure, not a consensus document.

The second transferable lesson is that distribution decisions are strategy decisions. Joining Uber Eats was not a marketing call. It was a commercial strategy call with marketing implications. Marketers who only think about channels and campaigns miss the bigger levers. The Semrush overview of growth tools is a reasonable starting point for understanding how distribution and acquisition mechanics interact, though the strategic framing has to come before the tool selection.

The third lesson is about the relationship between product and brand. You cannot advertise your way out of a product problem, and you cannot product-innovate your way out of a brand perception problem. Both have to move together. Domino’s is trying to do that. Most brands pick one and hope the other follows.

There is more on the commercial frameworks behind decisions like these in the Go-To-Market & Growth Strategy hub, including how brands structure the relationship between brand investment and performance spend over different growth stages.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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