Over at real estate magazine Estates Gazette [subscription required], news arrives that as the credit crunch tightens, Domino's Pizza is opening outlets in the U.K. at the rate of almost one store a week.
In an article in a recent edition, a business development manager spills the beans - no, I'll forget the metaphors - that the local is the global, vice-versa and upside down.
We typically set an eight-minute delivery boundary, so that there can be quite a few stores in a small area that don't compete with each other because people order very locally.
The best performing 'customer category' is "Happy Families" -
typically a household in which both parents are working and living in a detached or semi-detached house on a new housing estate.
And according to the article, those who fall into the category of "Urban Intelligence" are also enthusiastic pizza consumers.
This term has little to do with IQ - it is simply people who tend to live in cities, and in apartments rather than houses.
I don't know whether any of this is true but it does make for a neat marketing formula:
Gentrification does not = organic fruit-bread sellers but = inorganic tuna and sweetcorn on spun dough.
And 'local' = a franchised global brand working within an eight-minute radius.
Image courtesy of Jill Greenseth.
