As the legend goes, the modern-day cheeze pizza was invented in the late 19th Century by a pizzaiolo from Naples who devised the simple, but genius, tomatoes-mozzarella-basil-olive oil-combination to impress her majesty, Queen Margherita of Savoy. The dish quickly became a favorite of the queen, just as it would later become the preferred, drippy, hand-held snack of college dorm dwellers, children at birthday parties and, let’s face it, all of us.

In concocting the Margherita, pizza chef Raffaele Esposito was a bit of a culinary renegade. He said basta to garlic, assolutamente no to sardines — the more traditional pizza ingredients of Naples. The pizza Esposito delivered to the queen that day was his own signature recipe, giving birth to one of the most mimicked dishes of all time.

At its Ann Arbor, Mich. headquarters, Domino’s Pizza is trying to conjure up the spirit of Esposito in a new pizza recipe to celebrate its 50th anniversary. There’s a social media twist. Domino’s says after two years of toiling away in the kitchen it has reinvented its signature cheese pizza recipe. It was a process, it insists, that was inspired by you. The company has produced a 4-minute-plus video that details how Domino’s made the leap from a pizza best known for being under 30 minutes away from your doorstep to one that no longer tastes like “cardboard”. The video is brutally self-critical, highlighting unflattering customer Tweets that call the original Domino’s pizza flavorless, attacking it for using “processed cheese” and, the kiss of death, declaring it to be inferior to microwave pizza.

At the outset of the video, Patrick Doyle, president of Domino’s North America, jumps into the frame and tells us, “there comes a time when you know you’ve gotta make a change.” The next four minutes reveal less about the culinary thinking that actually goes into the most ordered pizza in the world. Instead the company provides us with a series of earnest admissions from Domino’s pizza chefs who swear they feel our pain and believe they’ve developed a recipe that even its toughest critics will love.

The Domino’s experiment is getting a lot of attention, and it raises a lot of questions too. Principally, can a fast food brand as ubiquitous as Domino’s Pizza (the chain is in 55 countries and has over 8,500 locations) change its core product based on the demands of an agitated minority? Better yet, should it? In other words, can the wisdom of crowds produce a better pizza?

It’s comforting to think it can. But, as Domino’s demonstrates in the video, the public is never invited into the kitchen with them. Wisely too. Could you imagine an “everything pizza” that takes into the account the tastes of millions? It might look something like this. So what is this all about then? It’s actually a pretty shrewd marketing initiative. Domino’s “Pizza Turnaround” initiative is getting the web community to talk about the taste of quality pizza, a subject in which most of us have an opinion, a charitable one at that. Let’s face it, the general public isn’t too demanding about pizza. Remember that old line about pizza being like sex? Even when it’s bad it’s pretty good, goes the rejoinder, a statement that could adorn half the pizza delivery boxes on the planet and nobody would think twice about ordering it again.

There’s another issue about pizza and public opinion. Everyone believes they are the expert. Who cares what the next guy has to say? This is true even in Italy where I live. I once claimed second prize in a pizza bake-off against a group of very competitive Italians with a pizza recipe that involved neither tomatoes nor mozzarella nor basil. And today? Even those I vanquished could care less what I have to say about the almighty pizza. They don’t want to talk pizza, they want to eat pizza! This is the brilliance of Domino’s warts-and-all campaign. Over 900 people have left a comment on the site, mostly to say, mmm, pizza. Getting hungry yet?

The other brilliant piece of the “Pizza Turnaround” campaign is that it succeeds in diverting our attention away from a messy YouTube-inspired crisis Domino’s found itself in a year ago. The last time most of us saw Doyle in a YouTube video he was trying to restore the company’s reputation in a mea culpa heard round the online world. In a video carried on the Domino’s YouTube page, Doyle apologized last April for an amateur video shot by two bored employees from the chain’s Conover, N.C. franchise.

That video showed an on-duty Domino’s employee shoving strands of mozzarella cheese up his nose (among other similar juvenile gags) while the other filmed it on a digital camera. The two, in a show of remarkable stupidity, then posted the video to YouTube. The original damning video is no longer live; instead, the link carries an incongruously stern warning, the kind you’d expect to see in a trademark dispute. “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Kristy Hammonds,” YouTube informs us. Hammonds, by the way, is the now ex-employee busted for filming and posting the video to YouTube.

Within days of the video hitting YouTube last April, Domino’s was faced with an unprecedented PR crisis. It was probably the low point of Doyle’s career. “We sincerely apologize for this incident,” Doyle said at the time, with the hangdog look of an embarrassed father in the most famous corporate mea culpa ever posted to YouTube. “It’s not a surprise this has cost us a lot of damage to our brand.” It’s not surprising either that the Domino’s corporate response has also been pulled from YouTube. I wrote about it in April for The Big Money’s YouTube Brandwatch column, a column that carries a reader vote. While the general public may have been grossed out by the stunt, readers of this site felt the impact on Domino’s brand reputation would be fairly minimal. Just 44% of those who chose to vote in our online poll felt the video would detract from the Domino’s brand; but a full 56% figured it would either enhance the brand’s reputation or have zero effect.

Readers, we salute you. Your instincts were dead on. Domino’s share price has surged nearly 40 percent since the booger incident on sales that, while not great, have outperformed competitors. And Doyle? He will take over as CEO in March, replacing David A. Brandon who moves on to become the University of Michigan athletic director. This shuffle at the top isn’t surprising. Brandon was nowhere to be seen during the initial YouTube trouble and he’s not a visible part of the “Pizza Turnaround” effort either. No matter. According to the rest of us, he’s no more an expert on pizza than we are.

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