Grubhub’s CMO: It’s All About ‘Moving Eating Forward’
Barbara Martin Coppola had plenty of tasty marketing insights about championing a new brand vision, engaging diners with compelling content, and keeping the customer conversation going long after a meal is done.
CMO.com was introduced to Grubhub CMO Barbara Martin Coppola at the 2016 Cojones Awards event. Coppola won the “Innovate” category, for implementing new ways of engaging customers living a digital lifestyle. And it’s little wonder: Grubhub, including the Seamless brand in New York City, is the nation’s leading online and mobile food-ordering company, dedicated to connecting hungry diners directly to 45,000-plus local takeout restaurants in more than 1,100 U.S. cities.
CMO.com had the opportunity to speak with Coppola for some tasty marketing insights.
CMO.com: You are clearly a digital native. Tell us about your business and marketing journey before you came to Grubhub. What were the big lessons you brought with you and have been using?
[I was drawn] to Grubhub [by] the company’s potential. Although Grubhub is already the nation’s leading online and mobile food-ordering company, 95% of customer takeout orders are still done by diners who call a restaurant on the phone with a paper menu in hand. Imagine how much room there is for Grubhub to scale and grow if we’re only currently capitalizing on 5% of the addressable market.
My personal cultural heritage from France, Spain, and Italy allows me to understand well the importance of food as a way to express yourself and celebrate life with loved ones. Brand storytelling is an important way to emotionally connect with customers to win their hearts, minds, and, in our case, stomachs. I believe there is an emotional and rational side to each individual, and brands that win today are the ones who can establish an emotional connection with users. Storytelling for us is about addressing the multifaceted lives of our users and bringing beautiful narratives about food to the forefront. Some of my favorite examples are stories about chefs who pour their hearts into the food they cook.
CMO.com: What is Grubhub’s history, and what has changed since you’ve been there?
Coppola: Grubhub was founded in 2004 and connects restaurants with diners to provide an alternative to browsing paper menus and calling restaurants individually to order. We are laser-focused on innovating in the online-ordering space, especially in mobile technology, which I truly believe has the power to amplify the offline world, adding inspiration and convenience.
Grubhub sent $2.4 billion in gross food sales to local takeout restaurants in 2015 and processes an average of 1.9 million orders per week, 60% of which are placed through mobile devices.
From Grubhub’s beginnings more than 10 years ago, the company developed a marketing voice and sense of humor that catered to a younger demographic. This served us well as a quickly growing startup, but we recognized it was time for the Grubhub brand to evolve to match our stature as a publicly traded technology leader and that we had the opportunity to move eating forward.
CMO.com: What have you done in that regard?
Coppola: Earlier this year, we championed a new brand vision for Grubhub that elevates the look, feel, and experience of using the platform. This rebrand, which has already contributed to accelerated order growth, highlights the moments of celebration around food. We try to be relevant at the neighborhood level, providing communications with personalized, relevant options and inspiration at the time we think the person is going to be hungry. We do a lot of experimentation with inspirational content that showcases the restaurants on our platform to ensure it continuously builds brand affinity.
With our Seamless brand, in particular, we rolled out a campaign in New York shortly after I joined the company. Named “How New York Eats,” it highlighted the personality of the city and connected with New Yorkers’ lives and sense of humor. Seamless is a staple in the lives of so many New Yorkers and has great user affinity, with some even using Seamless as a verb, like “Let’s Seamless dinner tonight.”
CMO.com: How is Grubhub changing the approach to marketing, growing brand affinity, user adoption, and engaging consumers living a digital lifestyle?
Coppola: Grubhub is a two-sided network that serves diners and restaurants. Our marketing efforts to serve these two groups are symbiotic, with each having a positive impact on the other. More restaurants means more diners, which means more orders for restaurants and increased efficiencies for Grubhub.
For our diners, creating an engaging feedback loop on mobile is incredibly important. It matters deeply not only because we are constantly working hard to delight our diners, but because we have a base of very sticky users who tend to order more frequently the longer they have been customers on our platform. Ninety percent of our orders come from existing diners. We keep engaging these loyal users by tailoring our feedback loop to deliver a mobile experience that also impacts the analog–or offline–world of food.
CMO.com: Can you elaborate?
Coppola: This feedback loop starts outside of the Grubhub platform on our social channels, which we use to inspire diners to order meals through thoughtful content. When customers move to purchasing within the app, we aim to make the experience as positive as possible. This means engaging diners with compelling content on the Grubhub home page and curating dining options to match user preference. We also extend the feedback loop after a diner has ordered with an engaging step to drive loyalty. A game we developed, called “Yummy Rummy,” is designed to say “thank you” to our diners after they order. Once the diner has completed a feedback loop, it becomes our priority to create a new one by using our order data to be thoughtful about when to next communicate.
On the restaurant side, it’s our aim to offer the right mix of restaurants to our users in each city so that they have a variety of options. A diner may want pizza one night, but crave a salad the next night, and ramen the one after. We provide insights to our restaurant partners on what dishes are selling well, what delivery boundaries would work best, and even report on an individual restaurant level to help them run their business more efficiently.
CMO.com: How do you leverage data to inform your decision-making?
Coppola: Grubhub has a huge opportunity to use its vast amount of data to relevantly connect with consumers at the right time. Data is an important consideration for storytelling because it provides insight for when to communicate with a user and what to say to be personally relevant. Just as developers test products and functionality before production, we do rapid-cycle A/B testing of our communications to learn which campaigns our active network of 7.4 million users most enjoy, so that we deliver the most entertaining and compelling content.
CMO.com: What have you learned at Grubhub that you had not learned at previous companies?
Coppola: I’ve learned how important it is to understand the power of people’s routines. Many of our orders from individuals are reorders of the same items from the same restaurants, which is an interesting insight. Even though people like to discover new restaurants, they love to come back to their favorite choices over and over. This insight matters because it informs how we build the user interface and experience to make it easier for people to reorder their favorites.
One realization before coming to Grubhub that has been reinforced is the power of emotional marketing, especially around food. Food is the second most-shared item on the internet after pictures of friends and family–it is always on people’s minds! Tapping into this content on social media is extremely important and rewarding for our brand.
Third, I relearned how important it is to have a motivational vision to tap into people’s passions across our entire marketing team. People will rally around a shared vision and desire to embody it.
CMO.com: What are the top three marketing principles you believe other CMOs should practice, too?
Coppola: First, storytelling is powerful in all aspects of marketing. It is important to us as humans to tell stories verbally and visually that have authenticity.
Second, data is essential for creating efficiencies and developing campaigns that resonate with our diners and restaurants. It has never been truer that marketing is a mix of art and science.
Third, marketing teams must have a positive mission in order to guide successful work. Without these motivational values around purpose, performance, and pursuing your dreams, it’s difficult for the first two principles to happen.