Pizza, pizza! A competitive analysis was completed on Dominos, Pizza Hut, and Papa Johns. Competitive analysis is gathering external data that is available freely, i.e. social media like Twitter tweets and Facebook posts. That is what He, Zha, and Li (2013) studied, approximately 307 total tweets (266 from Dominos, 24 from Papa John, 17 from Pizza Hut) and 135 wall post (63 from Dominos, 37 from Papa Johns, 35 from Pizza Hut), for the month October 2011(He et al, 2013). It should be noted that these are the big three pizza chain controlling 23% of the total market share (7.6% from Dominos, 4.23% from Papa Johns, 11.65% from Pizza Hut)(He et al., 2013) (He et al., 2013). Posts and tweets contain text data, videos, and pictures. All the data collected was text-based data and collected manually, and SPSS Clementine tool was used to discover themes in their text (He et al., 2013).
He et al. (2013), found that Domino’s Pizza was using social media to engage their customers the most. Domino’s Pizza did the most to reply to as many tweets and posts. The types of posts in all three companies varied from the promotion to marketing to polling (i.e. “What is your favorite topping?”), facts about pizza, Halloween-themed posts, baseball themed posts, etc. (He et al., 2013). Results from the text mining of all three companies: Ordering and delivery was key (customers shared the experience and feelings about their experience), Pizza Quality (taste & quality), Feedback on customers’ purchase decisions, Casual socialization posts (i.e. Happy Halloween, Happy Friday), and Marketing tweets (posts on current deals, promotions and advertisement) (He et al, 2013). Besides text mining, there was also content analysis on each of their sites (367 pictures & 67 videos from Dominos, 196 pictures & 40 videos from Papa Johns, and 106 pictures and 42 videos from Pizza Hut), which showed that the big three were trying to drive customer engagement (He et al., 2013).
He et al. (2013) lists the theory that with higher positive customer engagement, customers can become brand advocates, which increases their brand loyalty and push referrals to their friends, and approximately 1/3 people followed a friend’s referral if done through social media. Thus, evaluating the structure and unstructured data provided to an organization about their own product and theirs of their competitors, they could use it to help increase their customer services, driving improvements in their own products, and driving more customers to their products (He et al., 2013). Key lessons from this study, which would help any organization gain an advantage in the market are to (1) Constantly monitor your social media and those of your competitors, (2) Establish a benchmark of how many posts, likes, shares, etc. between you and your competitors, (3) Mine the conversational data for content and context, and (4) analyze the impact of your social media footprint to your own business (when prices rise or fall what is the response, etc.) (He et al, 2013).
Resources:
- He, W., Zha, S., & Li, L. (2013). Social media competitive analysis and text mining: A case study in the pizza industry. International Journal of Information Management, 33(3), 464-472.
Dr. Skylar (Sky) Hernandez 