Rating "Rate Our Chicken."

Successful service encounters start off with well executed marketing as the process of making relevant promises that set the expectations of what will be delivered through the experience.

The Domino’s ad “Rate Our Chicken” is an effective one not just for the promises it makes but also for how it personalizes promise fulfillment for customers.



The ad makes that simple promise that is easy to evaluate - specifically that we’re going to like their new chicken product. But while most advertisements stop here, Domino’s challenges customers to evaluate their delivery of the promise by asking every customer to rate their chicken with a survey on the box the chicken is delivered in. If you’re a fan of Chip & Dan Heath's SUCCES formula for evaluating marketing, there aren’t many promises you’ll see that are more concrete than this one.

But because service encounters are about more than the tangible goods associated with them, and successful service marketing finds a way to express the intangibles of the offering. Featuring the people who make and fulfill the service promise in marketing is a usually a strong execution of the message and the brand.

In this case, Domino’s personalizes the promise by literally giving it a name. I don’t know if Tate Dillow is really the man behind Domino’s chicken, but putting him in front personalizes it as one person making a promise to customers. There’s a good chance customers will feel sympathy when Tate’s boss asks customers to rate the job he’s doing with the new chicken by putting a survey on the box.

As a service ad, “Rate Our Chicken” works because it is a simple quality promise well executed by making it easy to evaluate and including the people responsible for performing it in the service encounter.