Dealing with the Dominos Debacle

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the past two weeks, you have inevitably seen or heard about the YouTube video featuring two (ex-) Dominos employees making sandwiches in a blatantly un-hygienic manner. The video was pulled from YouTube and Dominos released statements via Twitter, blogs and Web sites – Patrick Doyle, Domino’s president, even made a response video for YouTube.

Despite their full-fledged effort to acknowledge and respond to the video, Dominos has faced tremendous backlash from the public relations world since the event. Their “wait-and-see” approach allowed the video to spread like wildfire through the masses for 48 hours, giving other outlets the opportunity to speak first.

In today’s Internet-driven world, all businesses are held to a tremendously high standard. With sites such as Twitter that have instant updates, the video was available to thousands of consumers within minutes. The public expected the company get word out right away, control the message and make the bad news go away, but instead the company waited almost two days before releasing an apology.

We’ve all ordered from Dominos, or some variation, which is why this video struck particularly close to the heart. Domino’s PR team should have recognized this and immediately reassured the public that they were taking this incident seriously by outlining their steps to correct it.

Dominos is now on top of the situation, the employees were fired, and thanks to Miss California’s interview at the Miss USA pageant this story has been able to creep under the radar. In his response video, Doyle stated that Dominos will be looking into their hiring practices. Not a bad idea.