Great Viral Marketing … errr Mistake

Apparently Domino’s pizza made a big marketing mistake that was uncovered by someone looking to find a coupon code. The customer entered the word “bailout” when he was ordering his pizza online, and the website responded by saying his medium pizza was free.

The person then told other people about this error, and when all is said and done, there were about 11,000 pizzas given out for free by Domino’s. Although this was apparently an error, the viral marketing can’t be beat. In a move that cost them under $50,000 (assuming their cost per pizza is just under $5.00), they are now getting thousands of dollars worth of free press – not to mention all the sodas and other things people ordered when they found out their pizza was free.

Although this was a mistake, it shows how powerful viral marketing can be, especially in the age of Twitter and other instant news distribution outlets.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

3 COMMENTS

  1. Great marketing indeed! Can’t be sure if it was a mistake or not, but even if they were not ready to make the coupon code known, it was hardly a real problem that it got out. $50K is pretty cheap for the press they got.

    By the time I heard about it, it was too late to get a free pizza, but at least I got the free Cinna Stix with the code SWEET. I read that was added after the pizza code was deactivated, but I figured, and later read elsewhere, that the code was not new. Either way, it worked for me Wednesday at least. And now that I’ve had them and like them, I may order them in the future as well.

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