Thoughts

The new iPhone app from Pizza Express performs a great function.  Not only can iPhone users locate a restaurant, check special offers and book a table but, iPhone users in a hurry, can pay their bill via the app rather than wait. That’s all great and useful functionality but it’s also a prime example of a marketing manager being led down the wrong path by short sighted and greedy agencies. Why? Because it’s available only on the iPhone but there’s absolutely no reason all of that lovely functionality couldn’t have been made available to any smartphone (and laptop/tablet/netbook) users on a good-old mobile-optimised website.

I see a lot of this Emperor’s New Clothes, especially to do with iPhone apps and, normally I just sigh and let them go but this one continued to betray a lack of coherent digital strategy by promoting it with a QR Code on the table.

There’s nothing wrong with QR Codes in themselves, of course. They are a useful asset when used in a relevant manner and all Android phones come with a QR code reader as standard. But the app isn’t available for Android, it’s for the iPhone; The iPhone does not come with a QR code reader as standard.

This means that Pizza Express have built a service but put barriers to entry at every touch point. In fact there’s even a petition on the Pizza Express Facebook page from disgruntled Pizza fans. UPDATE: Pizza Express have removed the discussion now. Nothing like a bit of censorship when your customers are trying to tell you what they want.

If Pizza Express had thought about their customers instead of being dazzled by shiny beads and mirrors, they would have realised a mobile-optimised website can provide a better service to more customers. Dominos Pizza, for example, have a great mobile-optimised site.

So now my rant is over, I’ll leave you with this little equation:

If a Pizza has a radius of z and a depth of a, we can calculate its volume as pi zz a