Harneet Singh Rajpal has been associated with Domino’s Pizza since 2006. As Vice President of Marketing, Harneet has led many successful product launches and the brand moved on to a positioning of ‘Khushiyon ki Home Delivery’ striking an emotional cord with the consumers. In an exclusive interview with India Digital Review, Harneet Singh Rajpal speaks about his thoughts and plans of using digital as a marketing medium for Domino’s in India.

Dominos ended 2012 by winning 2 Effies, out of which, one was a Silver Award in the Digital Marketing category. What do you are the factors that lead to this feat?

If you look at the Indian food services market, we are the pioneers in using technology to connect with the consumers. Our online ordering platform was among one of those activities where we reached the consumers conveniently and vice versa. We were the first ones to do this in India and we took a lot of learning from other Dominos markets like UK, Japan, Korea, Australia etc where the 40 to 50% of our revenue come from online ordering. We took a year and a half of research before setting up the eco-system. In India, we have a 30 minutes delivering promise and we wanted to honour that promise even on our online platform. For that we made sure that all our 500+ stores across 112 cities remain live 24*7. In April 2011, we did our nationwide launch of our online ordering platform and today 12 to 13% of our delivery sales come from online ordering.

Recently we had also launched a Pizza Tracker where consumers can track where there Pizza has reached. This ensures that the consumer control on the pizza ordering model increases more. Couple of months back we launched our mobile ordering platform which is linked to the backend of our online ordering platform. We also have apps for all smartphones and we are going to launch a wapsite also. Almost 8 to 10% of our online orders happen on mobile. In that sense, we are almost among the top 5 apps for Mcommerce in the country. The Effies is recognition of our digital efforts. 

How does the digital medium - both internet and mobile, figure in Dominos India’s plans to reach out to consumers?

There are two things to it. Mobile and internet are two emerging mediums and obviously do not provide the reach that TV would provide. For us, TV would continue to be the primary marketing medium for a long time to come. But more importantly, our investments on digital have increased significantly in a year. Before launching our online ordering platform, we just had a website and that had no activity. Now our website actually speaks about our new branding and we are also spending a lot on SEO and SEM and mobile advertising. We also have 2.5 million fans on Facebook and that makes us among the Top 5 ‘most engaged’ brands on Facebook across categories in India. We are actually experimenting a lot with new mediums be it web or mobile because we believe that the kind of engagement we have with our TG on these platforms is much higher than any traditional medium.

The online ordering platform was in news for being hacked and customer details being shared. What steps have you taken to make sure that doesn’t happen again?

We engage with a lot of IT security firms to ensure that our website is completely safe for our consumers. This very incident didn’t happen n our ecommerce platform, rather it happened on a property on our brand website and we only have name of consumers and their birthdates. In terms of financial data, we have tie up with BillDesk and we don’t capture any kind of financial data of the consumers. That ways, it is completely safe and we are spending more to ensure more security for our consumers.

Recently, Dominos has gone through a rebranding campaign. How do you plan to extend this on digital?

2008 onwards, we have been positioning ourselves as ‘Khushiyon Ki Home Delivery’ which actually moved from ‘Hungry Kya?’ which was our positioning for 10 years. At that time, we moved from a functional positioning to an emotional positioning to forge the emotional connect with the people. ‘Khushiyo Ki Home Delivery’ did incredibly well for us and that resulted us in being the market leaders in Pizza. But the positioning of happiness became very mundane because as many as 32 brands had the word happiness in their positioning. Now we found that the happiness that we are providing is helping consumers to spend more time with each other and thus strengthening relationships between people. And that is why we have now evolved our positioning to 'Yeh Hai Rishton Ka Time'.

This concept was launched on Facebook to our 2.5 million fans and we also embarked on a lot of engaging dialogues with our fans. Stories about how Domino’s has helped in people’s relationships came out of Facebook conversations. We also launched and revamped our new brand website keeping the emotional quotient in mind. Going forward, we will devise all our digital communication around the tagline of 'Yeh Hai Rishton Ka Time' and that is how we plan to integrate our traditional campaigns with digital.

In your category, visual brand building works the best. With new engagement forms such as videos coming up on internet, what are your thoughts on visual brand building exercises on internet in India?

Of late we have come across various services from partners and vendors and are evaluating some services through which we can generate a direct connect with the consumer. There are a lot of innovations lined up in the technology space which will be featured around our new brand positioning.

What answers do you seek from your digital advertising agencies and digital media partners while promoting your brand on internet?

First thing that we ask our partners is that how can we integrate our brand communication across platforms because we don’t want our traditional campaign to be talking a different language than our digital campaign. We do believe that if digital has to become a mainline advertising medium, it has to become integrated with the thought of the brand. Every medium has to help the brand in creating its own world.

Technology-based media is said to be a measurable medium. What is your take on this? Have we overdone the measurement quotient and made this medium hard to understand for the brand marketers?

People say that brand marketers are harsher to online medium as they are very RoI dependent. But if you look at how we evaluate our traditional media performance, you will see that it is very scientific. Ever medium, at a nascent stage, is subjected to a bit of scrutiny from the marketers as it needs to prove itself. Once that basic equation of investment and returns is generated, then the medium becomes a part of the mainstream. Online is going through a similar scrutiny phase but given its potential it will grow in to a mainstream medium. However, for us, it has passed that phase with good marks and so far it has worked wonderfully well. Besides, we are also increasing our spends on digital and engaging with our digital marketing agencies Quasar and Blazar to come out with innovations that are necessarily not RoI driven.

How do you see Dominos India’s digital spends moving this year - in terms of growth and focus?

As I mentioned, we have already increased our digital spends. This year we will be spending around 7% of our total media budget on digital and I can foresee ourselves spending more in the future on this medium.

How do you see more traditional advertisers like you embracing the digital medium now?

See it’s a matter of time. Every industry might have a different parameter or yardstick to evaluate this medium. But I don’t think any industry can ignore this medium now. This medium helps in forming a dialogue with the consumer at a time when the traditional medium is not watched, hence digital will obviously have a role to play in brand building. Today, the amount of time a person spends on a PC/laptop, mobile, tablets is much higher than what he spends watching TV. And when the consumer is spending so much of time on one particular medium, marketers will have to follow the consumers here. It will take a lot of time for digital to become a dominant media platform because the base is still low but as and when the users start to graduate on tablets and smartphones, we will see more monies being spent on the medium.

One digital segment that engages the consumer well is social media. But it does adversely affect your brand as well as at times of hate speech being generated.  How do you manage the both?

I actually love Facebook as it helps all the 18,000 Domino’s India employees on their toes. When we are in the scrutiny of consumers 24*7, then we can’t afford to be laid back at any point of time. The product has to be good and the consumer has t be satisfied. This puts a lot of pressure on the organisation to actually do things much better than the past. We as an organisation have become more responsive and cautious about the way we run our business, the language we use while communicating with our consumers.

There was a report recently that said internet holds 6% share of the Indian ad revenue market. How do you see this number growing in India two years down the line?

It should definitely be in double digits.