A new restaurant opens in town. Fine dining. The early reviews are good. Everyone is talking about it. Expensive, but worth it. The desserts are extraordinary. You call up some friends and the six of you make a reservation. While you’re waiting for your meal you see desserts going past. It looks like every table has ordered something scrumptious. You look at the menu and your mouth begins to water. Then you look at the prices and the six of you decide maybe you’ll share a couple of them instead of everyone buying one.

The meal is done and you’ve picked up the dessert menu one more time to choose a couple to share when your waiter walks over and says, “You guys have been such a fun table, I’d like to buy everyone a dessert on me.”

Would you be talking afterward about a meal like that? Of course you would! For the price of some sugar and flour (that the restaurant has already baked into the price of the meal), the restaurant is buying word-of-mouth through Generosity.

The key here is that they did not advertise it, it was given with sincerity, it had value, and it was unexpected. When you can give something away like that, people will talk.

Yesterday my son pointed out to me something that fits that criteria. He told me Domino’s Pizza is filling potholes. I had to Google it right away.

Domino’s Pizza is paying communities real money for their crews to go out and fill potholes. All the community has to do is take a few cellphone pics of the crew and spray chalk the Domino’s logo with the phrase, “Oh yes we did” onto the newly filled pothole when they’re done.

The city manager of Milford, Delaware explains how they gave him $5,000 to fill potholes in his town. With a budget of only $30,000 for fixing potholes to begin, an extra $5,000 goes a long way. The spray chalk on the logo might seem offensive to some, especially if you don’t like Domino’s Pizza, but the talk they are generating from that money is unbelievable.

Yes, it was unexpected. Yes, it brought value. Yes, it was done without advertising. You can argue sincerity all you want, but the comment from Kate Trumbull, VP of Advertising for Domino’s is spot-on …

“This idea came from when you hit a pothole and you have a pizza in your front seat. It’s kind of a dramatic moment and dials up the fear factor that something would happen to your delicious pizza,” said Trumbull. “It came down to how we’re so passionate about pizza – and every single piece of the experience.” (from Yahoo)

Here is the clincher. They spent $5,000. Their logo was washed away with the first rain. The town of Milford, DE was just under 10,000 people in 2010. You can look at it as only 50 cents to reach everyone in that city. You can look at it as a way to make the roads better for their delivery vehicles. But the best way to look at it is that the city manager wrote an article in the Washington Post about it. The news stations all did stories about it. People who saw it on the road all told their friends about it.

The word-of-mouth—even from the people who hated it—is through the roof! Everyone is talking!

Even the haters are probably acknowledging that the potholes needed filling. Their complaint is likely just about the commercialization of it and where that may lead.

I give Domino’s a hearty win for this campaign. It is the kind of creativity that helps a campaign budget reach far beyond the money you spend. That’s the power of Generosity.

Four elements to make Generosity work for you:

• Don’t advertise it
• Give freely from the heart
• Give something of value
• Give something unexpected

You don’t have to pave the roads to get people to talk, but I’m sure you can find something of value you can give away for free.

-Phil Wrzesinski
www.PhilsForum.com

PS We gave away free helium balloons all day, every day. It helped parents get crying children out of the store, and helped them come in more often for “looking trips”. When helium balloons became expected, I brought in an art teacher to teach my staff how to draw doodle animals on the balloons. We never got the kind of talk Domino’s did, but people still talked, and that’s all that mattered.

PPS No, if you don’t like Domino’s Pizza, it probably won’t make you rush out and buy a pie. But it just might make someone on the fence, buy a “thank-you pie” just for fixing that pothole at the end of their street. It also has a long-term effect of making you feel just a little better about Domino’s as a company, and that ripple effect, while hard to measure, will be huge. Now, if they double-down and add some generosity to their product when they deliver it, they’ll knock it out of the park.