Dodo Pizza, the Russian c450 strong company, has hired David Sweeney, formerly of Burger King and Papa John’s, to lead its development in the UK, MCA has learnt
The technonlogy-centric brand has selected the UK as its focus growth market, and is relaunching its pilot store in Brighton, which it opened 18 months ago, ahead of a wider rollout across the country.
The UK will also become an international headquarters for Dodo, with the company saying it was confident it could compete with established players such as Domino’s.
The group announced its second store in Coventry last week, on the site of a former Pizza Hut, with the franchise owners expected to convert several other pizzerias they operate into Dodo this year.
Fyodor Ovchinnikov, Dodo Pizza chief executive, said: “For the next few years we’re going to concentrate heavily on the Dodo Pizza development in the United Kingdom. The UK is the largest European pizza delivery market. Domino’s has about 1000 pizzerias there. The competition is stiff, but we see great potential in the UK. We’re certain there is room for new interesting players in this complex market.”
Max Kotin, global head of communications, said the company had learned it needed to improve its marketing in the UK to compete.
He said: “In our experience, in Eastern Europe operations are the key to success. Since the competition is lower, providing a superior and consistent product with a friendly service is enough to reach high levels of profitability. We learned that in the UK, it’s not enough—on top of a superb product a QSR brand has to build a very competitive marketing system to be really successful, and that’s what we’re going to do focusing mostly on digital channels and social media. Right now, we’re relaunching our Brighton unit while covering the whole process in our weekly reports (LinkedIn, Instagram).”
Kotin also said the brand had not anticipated how polite the UK consumer would be and reticent about giving honest feedback compared to more straight talking Eastern Europe and Russia.
He added: “We faced an odd conundrum in Brighton: how to learn what our customers actually think when they are courteous to a fault.
“In Eastern Europe, where most of our pizza shops are located, people are straightforward. After tasting an imperfect product, most of them won’t have any problem saying something like, ‘was this sandwich dead for a week before you put its corpse in a microwave and resurrected it?”
We learned things are different in the UK. Folks here are super polite, and everything is coated with a few layers of pleasantries. So ‘not my first choice’ might in reality mean ‘utterly disgusting’.
“For a business, this nice culture can pose a real challenge. How do you improve your product if you can’t receive honest feedback?”
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