This was a project without an assignment. In 2009, nobody was doing anything like this in the QSR space. Panera Bread's famous experiment wouldn't happen until 2013, and Starbucks wouldn't launch their order-ahead app until 2015. The major barrier for most of these brands was their POS hardware—back then, Radiant6 wasn't exactly offering this stuff off-the-shelf, and upgrading was expensive and onerous. For Dunkin', in particular, this last bit was problematic—the franchisees would have to agree to give it any prayer of happening, and they were disinclined to spend much on new gizmos. Coffee comes with a HUGE markup and most DDs of this era were printing money—it was not uncommon to see a Dunkin' across an intersection from another Dunkin' in the Boston area at the time.
In a nutshell, I realized we could get around those difficulties by hijacking the card consortium handling DD Perks. We had recently expanded the Perks loyalty program to include a reloadable DD Perks card, which was a souped-up version of the popular Dunkin' gift cards of the time connected to your email. So, my app was designed to centrally receive and process orders while still honoring the fulfilling franchisee's attribution, without upgrading the entire POS ahead of schedule.
But in the spirit of Steve Jobs, I like to bring a "One More Thing ..." slide. So, I took it a step further.
If you worked in an office in New England in 2009, you will remember co-workers constantly announcing that they were "running out to Dunks" and asking if you wanted something. Chances are you did this yourself any number of times. Working under the assumption that complimenting or augmenting an existing behavior is the easiest way to provide value and drive adoption, I was obsessed with capturing that messy, organic social construct—the Dunkin' Run—without introducing any new frictions (that weren't offset by some gain). My solution became the Dunkin' Run app, an order aggregator that allows multiple people to order and pay individually, while bundling the tickets under a single header, thus allowing for timely fulfillment and a single-person pickup. Users could announce on the app that they're going for a run and it would notify some subset of people in their contacts list (they could build the list each time and/or save them for future reference). It had a timer—if you responded with an order before the timer went off, when the Runner showed up in-store, your order would be bundled with theirs for carry-out.
The result was a resounding success. In the markets we tested, app adoption was just over 27%, which is around 25% higher than we expected! Technological issues remain in some regions—and this is true for the Perks card as well—but on Dunkin's digital transformation roadmap, the Dunkin' Run app is expected to grow considerably over the next five years. We expect it to become a cornerstone of Dunkin’s revenue by 2015, as the stores prepare to install scanners and other POS systems which will make dynamic ordering online possible with in-store redemption.
The original conceptual design that got the project funded.
CD: Max Fresen; UX Director: Joe Ayotte; Art Director: Raquel Jacome; Copywriter: Jane Goldman;
Update: August 2025
This version of the app is no longer available in the iTunes Store, obviously, but our more modern "On-the-Go Ordering" app (subsequently designed and built during my tenure at Digitas) is the spiritual successor to the Dunkin' Run.
