NEW YORK — An executive from Dunkin’ Donuts enumerated twelve “innovation insights” for an audience at Mobile FirstLook 2017, many of which were centered around the reduction of consumer friction, labeled as one of the top bulwarks for food-and-beverage consumers.

The Dunkin Donuts exec provided a number of lessons learned from the company’s excursion into a mobile-centric approach in her “Mobile Meets Coffee” keynote, and explained the motivation behind the coffee purveyor’s use of mobile to stay competitive across its more than 8,000 stores in the United States. Much of the motivation behind building a stronger intersection between CRM and loyalty is to reduce friction for customers.

“We like to get to ‘pretty damn good’ at Dunkin’,” said Sherrill Kaplan, vice president of digital marketing and innovation at Dunkin’ Donuts. “If we wait for perfection, there’s this constant game of ‘oh, there’s this one more piece of feedback we’re waiting on,’ et cetera.

“If we wait too long to hit perfection, consumers pass us by, and the market passes us by,” she said.

On-the-Go Ordering
Ms. Kaplan described the On-the-Go Ordering feature as the company’s biggest operational innovation since implementing a drive-thru. She would go on to describe a few lessons that she—and Dunkin’ Donuts at large—learned in the years-long process of implementing the service.

The first lesson outlined was that innovation is not a choice; it is a requirement for modern brands. According to research cited in the presentation, 84 percent of consumers say it is important that the company they buy from is innovative.

And Ms. Kaplan was not shy in referencing brands notorious for their lack of innovative spirit, recognizing brands that have fallen by the wayside while competitors adopting omnichannel tactics engrossed their market shares.

“The companies that choose to not innovate look like Blockbuster. They look like Borders.”

Another lesson Dunkin’ Donuts and Ms. Kaplan offered was that innovation is not just a department. At Dunkin’, the culinary, digital and operations departments all use the same nomenclature for their processes: Incremental thinking—adding value and solving for today—folds into thinking about the Next Generation, which develops into Transformational thinking.

Reducing friction

One of the initiatives referenced in the presentation was Dunkin’ Donuts’ Perks Week, a loyalty program that also incentivized new customers though a different promotion each day. Users of Dunkin’ Donuts’ loyalty app were afforded increased point multipliers and exclusive deals (see story).

The brand continued its bet on loyalty rewards on mobile earlier this month, offering a free travel mug to eligible reward members in the New York metro area and informing them by way of a push notification on their mobile devices (see story).

Many of the recent innovations introduced by Dunkin’ into the food and beverage sector are centered around addressing consumer friction, a significant bulwark for any company selling a food product. Features mentioned by Ms. Kaplan geared towards reducing friction include the aforementioned On-the-Go Ordering, Curbside Pickup and a nascent delivery option—a product of a partnership with burgeoning delivery startup DoorDash.

When asked about any brand ambivalence towards relying on a third-party service in offering a delivery option, Ms. Kaplan said that Dunkin’ welcomes the partnership, as integrating delivery infrastructure within its own brand is not a priority due to operational limitations.

“We decided that we don’t want to be a delivery company ourselves,” Ms. Kaplan said. “The demand is not like as if we’re a pizza company.

“The first phase was to partner with people already doing it. The next step is how to bring back some of that ownership of data.”