Helping Just Eat maintain a competetive edge
When new entrants to the food delivery market threatened Just Eat’s top spot, we helped the food delivery giant retain their competitive edge. We overhauled their future vision and strategy, optimising every element for buoyancy in fluctuating markets.
Macro-trends and market needs
Recognising change, adapting accordingly.
Just Eat Takeaway.com is a leading food delivery business that puts millions of customers in touch with local restaurants every day. Its brands are household names across the world, and as of 2021, in the UK alone, the business took its one-billionth order – so it’s fair to say there was no issue with customer awareness!
But it hasn’t all been plain sailing. Food delivery is a competitive industry, and a couple of years ago, Just Eat was facing significant disruption from new entrants to the market. They got in touch with us for help maintaining their place at the top. We recommended a comprehensive strategy and vision overhaul, to make sure every element of the business was optimised for the future’s ever-changing markets.
The incumbents bite back
A great deal has changed since Just Eat started in 2001. Back then, their main value to customers was in information provision – where are all my local takeaways? – and simplifying placing orders. But with today’s powerful smartphones allowing customers to do their own research, and competitors just as able to provide a stellar food-ordering experience.
Just Eat needed a new point of differentiation, and a new path to success.
We collaborated with Just Eat’s product and technology teams on multiple fronts to kickstart a complete transformation of their product offering.
Transforming the customer experience
We defined eight customer experience foundations around which we would frame everything we did: Brilliant beginnings; Catering to all food occasions; Knowing me, knowing you; Getting closer to food; Courting the consumer; Hiccup-free delivery; All right on the night; Make a habit of it. We brought them to life through design, copywriting, and a focus on the customer journey.
Developing new products and services
We focused on elevating the core product experience by:
- Exploring new opportunities to add more value and differentiate the product;
- Mapping the entire service in order to address system-level issues;
- Getting underneath the skin of these issues, and recommending improvements and innovations.
Enabling sustainable innovation
We partnered with Just Eat’s leadership and product teams to define cross-departmental objectives and analyse key results that reinforced the strategic priorities of the business. We also recommended steps to take to improve focus and direction.
Appealing graphics, a richer voice
Our partnership involved working with Just Eat’s consumer product teams to translate their refreshed brand into a new design direction for the consumer-facing product.
Together, we then collaborated on the design of the next-generation consumer experience – joining the dots and bringing to life their refreshed multi-year product strategy.
Combining a bold colour palette with enticing food photography that worked hand-in-hand with fresh illustrations to create an app experience that would, quite literally, whet the customer’s appetite.
Injecting a little brand personality, we created chatty, personable copy that embraced word play (Rice to meet you, anyone?) and wasn’t afraid of a pun or two (Forever and ever, ramen).
Fresh ingredients. Big names delivered.
To humanise the restaurants behind all those reviews and estimated delivery times, we introduced Restaurant Stories – a different kind of store front for the online ordering experience.
Leveraging new delivery capabilities and the introduction of branded restaurant groups (McDonalds, KFC), we designed an experience that seamlessly integrated order tracking, dynamic pricing, and advanced recommendations.
A billion-order business
Our shared goal at the inception of this project was to help Just Eat achieve half a billion orders by 2021. And as we said at the start, they smashed this goal, surpassing the 1-billion order mark in autumn 2021. To put this in context – it took Just Eat 16 years to get to 200 million orders. And in just three and a half years, they’ve added another 800 million orders to their plate.
