Deliveroo's Global Marketing Chief on Transforming the Brand

The ‘four Ps’ of marketing. Maybe not quite an obsolescent thing for marketers to talk about these days, but it's refreshing when brand chiefs recognise that while the promotional P has its place, the product P needs to be one of the most important tactical considerations to drive growth. Adam Bishop, the newly promoted chief global marketing and product officer at Deliveroo, is aiming to do just that. Putting marketing and product functions together, and connecting the dots on how Deliveroo develops the app and how it builds the brand for consumers.

It was in October that Bishop was promoted to the new role - consolidating two departments (product and marketing) to match the business’ growth trajectory. He aims to ensure that the proposition experience matches the brand promise to deliver food from restaurants to customers – a proposition that is also in the process of expanding.

In August, Deliveroo reported its first profit of £1.3 million for its 2024 half-year results in comparison with its loss of £82.9 million during the same period the year before. This year has also team online orders grow by 2 per cent to 147 million.

“We’ve continued to grow,” says Bishop who joined the company in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic and the prolonged spike in online delivery demand. “That's just down to the fact that we understand all the sides of the marketplace we serve. We've sit over our consumers and we make sure we build this proposition and experience that really serves all their unique needs.”

And while becoming the top marketer in the business is still a new role for Bishop, it is significant as Deliveroo moves towards its ambition to develop a premium membership service and extend its delivery to offer retail and groceries too. As recently as June, the company expanded its shopping service with the announcement of a partnership with fragrance retailer The Perfume Shop to offer customers a selection of designer perfume brands delivered in as little as 25 minutes from purchase.

To promote that, Deliveroo ran a trial of its app’s new SPF SOS” service delivering sun cream to sunburnt beachgoers in Brighton, proving that marketing remains a core proposition for the technology-focused firm, even after the restructure.

The company has just taken another significant step with the release of a brand campaign - a new global brand platform ‘Now Just Got Even Better’, with the first campaign focusing on the rapid delivery company’s loyalty programme, Deliveroo Plus. Created by Pablo London, the initial campaign under the new platform will mark the first time Deliveroo has featured the Plus loyalty programme in its above-the-line campaign for the brand.

From being an engineer to becoming a classically trained marketer

Bishop started his career as an engineer in the early 2000s having taken a cross-disciplinary engineering training course at university before he realised that building bridges and buildings wasn’t for him - and probably better for the health and safety of others as well.

Looking for a career pathway he came across the Proctor and Gamble graduate recruitment scheme, where he initially landed an internship before taking on various commercial roles and learning the ropes under now M&C Saatchi chief executive Zaid Al-Qassab who spent over 20 years in the conglomerate.

“That was my first taste of working for this wonderful, classically trained marketer where I came across the marketing fundamentals which P&G is known for and so well drilled on, particularly in terms of how you think about product and the overall proposition and pricing,” says Bishop.

After 12 years, he joined BBC Studios, taking on international roles before eventually becoming senior vice president and chief commercial office EMEA in 2020, helping to develop the media organisation’s On Demand TV offer and developing premium content.

“It’s an organisation that is obsessed with its audiences. I think that was what gave me the bug about Deliveroo… you could just feel it in the way that people were talking about Deliveroo and its obsession with consumers. You hear a lot of companies say it, but when you can feel it from someone, that means something very different,” Bishop claims, adding that this stems directly from founder Will Shu.

That potential is what brought him to join in 2021, initially to lead its digital media, performance marketing and eCommerce solutions before taking on responsibility for its advertising platform and product development, and now marketing as well.

“As a creative agency the zenith you strive for is demonstrating the power of a brand’s platform not just through how it communicates but through how it behaves in the world. Adam’s unification of the marketing, product and experience teams means that Deliveroo is structured in a way that doesn’t just allow for this, but it actively demands it and sparks truly end-to-end thinking across every customer touchpoint," comments Pablo joint managing director, Hannah Penn.

"What we’re excited about in the platform we’ve launched together, 'Now just got even better', is its obvious potential to supercharge Deliveroo’s role in culture. But even more excitingly, we see it as a north star against which we can innovate from a product, experience and partnerships perspective. There’s a lot more to come, and by removing all the silos and smashing together people with different expertise and focuses - Adam has really set the stage for the most exciting chapter to date for the brand, ensuring marketing can really help to tangibly drive the business forward ," she adds.

Product, data and consumers: formula for growth

The reorganisation that took place last autumn and saw him take on his current post is an indication of that obsession with consumers, explains Bishop, and by centralising marketing and product together it would allow Deliveroo to have a better end-to-end understanding of the consumer.

That centralisation brought together the brand and experience group, the in-house creative studio, the marketing technology group and the on-platform design, the product organisation, alongside the advertising platform teams and the user experience team which works on the app, all under Bishop.

Most of those teams are based in the UK headquarters but are challenged to ensure they maintain a line of sight on each different region in which Deliveroo operates such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Belgium, Qatar, Kuwait, France and various other countries with differing cultures and expectations.

“If we're doing things correctly, we have a complete line of sight between all the great insight and data we have on our consumers, how we think about the positioning of our brand and our business and how we talk to consumers about that, how we brand build, how we think about our brand comms, and then the gorgeous experience and product that we serve up for them.”

Consequently, a lot of the technological development is built in-house including the marketing capabilities and customer relation management tool, but advertising creative is still handled externally. Deliveroo works with Pablo which Bishop describes as “a great long-standing partner,” for the business and who were behind the new campaign.

“We'll be talking about moments and just linking again to that line of sight between the insight we get from our consumers; how we think about our positioning, how we brand, build and communicate, and the service and product and experience that we get people,” explains Bishop.

Creating Deliveroo Plus

The development of Deliveroo Plus is a consequence of the linking up of marketing and product to build a subscription membership offer with Gold and Silver plans to provide delivery costs, restaurant as well as store offers and discounts. A top-tier subscription product Plus Diamond launched in May, providing super-Gold users with further benefits including 10 per cent cash back credit on orders.

A second ad campaign to promote this offer is planned for release in January as the business aspires to become fully focused on Plus by 2026.

The aim is for members to spend as much as three times more than the average non-Plus user of the platform built on insights. Those include members being more than twice more likely to try a new restaurant that appears or twice as likely to top-up their baskets with a non-food item through the shopping function as well and a concierge service.

“When you think about combining marketing and product, then that's what's interesting here. We've gone out and thought about our moments positioning; what moments are these consumers in? We've gone and gleaned a load of rich insight, both from our own data, but also deep qualitative research that we've done with our top consumers, and then we've built a proposition around it,” adds Bishop.

And with demand growing for exclusive in-person events, that is another element that is being introduced to the proposition with its restaurant partners, however, Bishop says it is still early days and a smaller part of the proposition.

Meanwhile, the advertising part of the platform allows the company to further monetise the around 300 million orders to handles each year across all markets, from 7 million active monthly users and 183,000 restaurant and grocery partners.

Advertising is now generating around 90 million pounds revenue annually and growing due to the level of high Intent users that come to the platform, actively looking to order from partner sites.

One advertiser is ITVX, which through a partnership booked through EssencemediacomX, allowed the broadcaster to promote content on the Deliveroo app to users after they placed an order to check its delivery status. According to Bishop, that campaign was seen across 9 million orders with a 1.3 per cent click through rate.

Harry Plester, director of content and innovation, EssencemediacomX said of the campaign: “We understand the importance of owning the at-home entertainment experience, working with Deliveroo allowed us to disrupt these key decision-making moments across the Deliveroo user journey.”