Domino’s is continuing its innovative mobile-ordering streak by integrating Amazon Echo prior to the Super Bowl, an attempt to drum up sales during one of food takeout’s biggest days of the year.

The pizza chain is hoping to become a leader in mobile-ordering solutions and create a modern brand image in the eyes of consumers. Its latest launch is expanding its mobile-ordering experiments to Amazon Echo owners, allowing them to place and track orders through voice recognition.

“This opens up a whole new ground for event-based marketing,” said Bryan M. Minor, Ph.D., chief scientist at Acquisio. “The offering from Amazon Echo for AI is very strong and currently under initial research.”

Voice ordering
Customers who own Amazon Echo can now order Domino’s by linking their Pizza Profile to the Amazon Alexa application. Users can reorder their go-to favorite food items by speaking to the Amazon Echo speaker, and it will automatically send their past order to the local Domino’s.

Users will also be able to track their orders through the addition of their telephone numbers in the Amazon Alexa app and Domino’s Pizza Profile, and can receive an update from the Echo speaker by asking it through voice recognition. The new service was launched this week in time for the Super Bowl game on Feb. 7.

The Super Bowl is not just a big day for the players, but it also means that food retailers need to up their game to drive the most sales for the popular delivery and pickup event. Domino’s is hoping pizza customers will choose it by offering more convenient and trendy ordering options through mobile and Amazon Echo.

Domino’s estimates that it will sell more than 12 million pizza slices in the U.S. and 4 million chicken wings during this years’ Super Bowl, and in the past has seen a 25 percent increase on the day in delivery miles compared to a typical football Sunday.

Domino’s innovation
A Domino’s Pizza executive at the Mobile Marketing Association’s SM2 Innovation Summit 2015 discussed the brand’s strong digital sales, which stem from enabling mobile-savvy consumers to place pizza orders via an application, social media, a virtual voice assistant and an online site to ensure maximum (see more).

The retailer also continued its mobile blitz this year by introducing a new loyalty program, Piece of the Pie Rewards, that enables consumers to order pizzas via its mobile application or online to begin earning points redeemable for free menu items (see more).

“The home-centric approach of Alexa is certainly of interest for locally focused advertising by SMB,” Mr. Minor said. “Ability to leverage this technology going forward will be monitored closely, along with competing products like Google Voice Search, Apple Siri, Microsoft Cortana, and Facebook M.”