Domino's goes dominoes with new packaging

The domino effect. It was 6:53pm. Eight senior marketers sat slumped around a boardroom table at Domino's headquarters after what insiders described as "the longest innovation meeting since somebody suggested putting pineapple on pizza."

The whiteboard was full. Chicken. Loaded fries. Desserts. Stuffed things. Unstuffed things. More cheese. Less cheese. At one point, somebody reportedly suggested "Pizza Bites... but bigger." Nothing was sticking.

Then, as she emptied the boardroom waste bin before clocking off for the evening, the office cleaner glanced towards the Domino's logo hanging on the boardroom wall. "Why isn't the pizza shaped like a domino?" 

The room fell silent.

According to witnesses, they lifted her in the air like the young girl in the Old El Paso ad, before another sprinted from the room clutching a notebook like they'd just discovered gravity.

Within twenty-four hours, engineers had reportedly produced the first prototype: a Detroit-style rectangular pizza served in a matching domino-shaped box, appropriately named The Domino. “The single-serve product is designed to let everyone order their own combination of toppings rather than compromise over a shared pizza.”

Marketing academics have since described the launch as "one of those ideas so blindingly obvious that everyone assumes somebody must have already done it."

For 65 years, Domino's has sold round pizzas inside square boxes beneath a logo depicting a domino.

Nobody, it seems, had stopped to ask why only two of those things matched.

The move has been widely praised as a rare example of a brand finding innovation not by adding another menu item, but by simply looking at the name on the front door and asking whether it might actually mean something.

Marketing departments around the world are reportedly now staring blankly at their own logos in search of equally obvious product ideas, with executives at Apple understood to be quietly exploring fruit.

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