Marketing Assignment: Food Delivery by Deliveroo During COVID-19

Question

Task:
Prepare a detailed and well-structured marketing assignment on the topic: How Deliveroo adapts to food delivery under new COVID-19 restrictions?

Answer

Introduction of Micro marketing environment
The report on marketing assignment brings about the discussion on the marketing environment in context to the online food ordering business or company ‘Deliveroo’. Marketing environment is defined as the combination of internal and external factors that influence the marketing operations of the organisation. Roofoods Ltd. (brand name, Deliveroo) was founded in 2013, is an online food delivery company, situated in Australia (Deliveroo, 2018). The company serves customers by making the food available at their doorsteps during corona virus outbreak, and supports other food restaurants in the industry. Thus, the report will analyse how Deliveroo adapts to food delivery under new COVID-19 restrictions, leading on to the comparison, and recommendations for better delivery services in several regions.

Issue in marketing environment
The assignment discusses about the issue of micro environment in marketing context of the business. Micro environment consists of the factors that are closely related to the company, and influences directly the ability of the organisation to serve their customers. These key groups are the organisation itself, customers, competitors, intermediaries, suppliers, and publics as mentioned in the pg. 210, in the book. Macro environment on the other hand include external factors, also affect the organisation’s activities.

According to the research done, it has been mentioned in the article that Deliveroo aims to support the food restaurants as they adapt to deliver under Covid-19 restrictions. This focuses majorly on assessing how deliveroo run their operations of delivering food under the new restrictions and regulations of the government due to the pandemic outbreak (Bezerra, 2020).

Rules mentioned in the guidebook produced by Deliveroo under the outbreak include, contact free delivery at the check-out for the customers, to avoid any human interaction. Furthermore, the publication of this guidebook is promoted by a communication strategy, and free webinars to the restaurants to allow them to make decisions regarding switch to delivery. Through doing this, restaurants receive a guidance from Deliveroo, to join the platform, and keep their delivery business open within region to help people (Gilliland, 2016).

The online food delivery business, Deliveroo prioritized to reinvent their marketing strategies, and took an opportunity under the new government rules and regulations. The company has introduced many marketing tactics, and activities to deliver food to the people during this outbreak (Camilleri, 2018)

This is supported by the apps to encourage social distancing, supporting the communication between the company and customers until the order gets delivered, and using other social media practices (Sharp, 2017). Deliveroo also supports other restaurants owners in training their customer service, with using media, and other systems.

SWOT ANALYSIS

This earned them a major advantage over the delivery services during this outbreak, and increased their revenue levels up to 70.9 percent. Thus, Royal stacks gained a positive response, as highlighted in the article, number of delivery customers increased by216 percent, and aiming towards secure delivery (Zhang, 2018).

Thus, the article described how the business supports other restaurants by providing them with the guidebook, and using SWOT analysis, mentioned the strengths and opportunities available to Deliveroo .

Comparison and Recommendations
The research studies and other articles has mentioned about the key contribution of the food delivery service company, Deliveroo within Australia, UK under the COVID-19 restrictions.

Deliveroo must have made certain changes in their delivery services during the difficult times of coronavirus outbreak. The company has shown a positive contribution during this outbreak, through supplying all the household essentials such as bread, milk, juices, and ready-to-made meals to the citizens of Australia, Melbourne, and also helping those in need during the pandemic. Moreover, it aims to deliver the items or food in less than 30 minutes of time, and free of cost (Hussey, 2020).

Recommendations
Deliveroo must ensure hygiene with the pickups, and drop-off facility. They can also improve their packaging strategy, such as utilising double packaging, or material which can be easily thrown off by the customer immediately after the order gets delivered. This means effective disposing of packaging will also aid in the prevention of spread of coronavirus amongst people. These are the key differences, which occur due to the ineffective strategic actions taken by the company to deliver food (Penu, 2020).

The key differences in actions and their reasons
Now, the report compares the actions taken by the company, and the required actions to enhance effectiveness. Referring to the course material and other books related to marketing management, the company must focus on enhancing their integration with marketing channel firms. Marketing channel firms cooperate with the organisation to create value and marketing intermediaries (middlemen, physical distribution firms, marketing service agencies).

The key difference here includes ‘marketing channels’ and ease of communication and improvement in faster and secure delivery. The differences occurred because Deliveroo is working with other food restaurants by making one-to-one direct contact, to switch towards delivery-based business (Richardson, 2019).

Mission or objective of Deliveroo
Deliveroo is on a mission to transform the way food is ordered, while partnering with the best local food stores and national restaurants providing customers with their favourite best quality food at their doors. The reason is to attain the smoother deliveries, to help those suffering and in need during this crisis. Deliveroo aims to bring great restaurants closer to their customers, and fulfil the needs of large customer base in the country (Razai et al., 2020).

Effectiveness of Deliveroo’s actions
It has been found that Deliveroo is catering to the maximum aspects of hygiene, effective food handling, and supporting their staff in delivering food. Thus, it can be analysed from the research on the food delivery services of Deliveroo that the company has achieved effectiveness in their actions for delivering food by catering to the customer’s need during this outbreak (Deliveroo, 2018).

On the contrary, I consider that the food delivery businesses must focus on the elimination of foods that may contain items or affect the consumer’s health. They should focus higher on providing health products only, this would be more effective (Spring wise, 2018).

Conclusion
To conclude the above analysis of the marketing assignment it can be stated that online food delivery is one of the significant earning business during the COVID-19 outbreak. The above assignment described about the food delivery business of the company, Deliveroo within several different countries. The company also provided a major help and support to restaurants in making effective decisions regarding their food delivery to customers. This has stated clearly how Deliveroo handles and adapts to deliver under the COVID-19 restrictions, catering to the safety of consumer’s health. Furthermore, the report also detailed the key differences and other aspects as to which the company must adopt to improve their effectiveness in the delivery services.

References

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4. Deliveroo. (2018) Our products and services. Available at: https://restaurants.deliveroo.com/en-gb/ [Accessed 29th Apr, 2020].
5. Gilliland, N. (2016) The four goals underpinning Deliveroo’s growth strategy. Available at:https://econsultancy.com/the-four-goals-underpinning-deliveroo-s-growth-strategy/ [Accessed 29th Apr, 2020].
6. Giuliani, J. (2020) Deliveroo supports the food industry as it undergoes dramatic change. Available at: https://www.marketingmag.com.au/news-c/deliveroo-supports-the-food-industry-as-it-undergoes-dramatic-changes/ [Accessed 29th Apr, 2020].
7. Hussey, A. (2020) Food delivery in demand during COVID-19. Marketing assignment Available at: https://kerry.com/insights/kerrydigest/2020/food-delivery-in-demand-during-covid-19 [Accessed 29th Apr, 2020].
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9. Razai, M.S., Doerholt, K., Ladhani, S. and Oakeshott, P. (2020) Coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19): a guide for UK GPs. BMJ, 368.
10. Richardson, N. (2019) Sustainable Marketing Planning. United Kingdom: Routledge.
11. Sharp, B. (2017) ‘The Marketing Environment’, in Marketing Theory Evidence and Practice, Oxford, pp. 204–243
12. Spring wise. (2018) Deliveroo to deliver Marks and Spencer food during COVID-19 pandemic. Available at: https://www.springwise.com/innovation/retail/m%26s-deliveroo-food-delivery-coronavirus [Accessed 29th Apr, 2020].
13. Zhang, L. (2018) May. Research on the Marketing Strategy of Enterprises Based on the Change of Marketing Environment. In 8th International Conference on Social Network, Communication and Education (SNCE 2018). United Kingdom: Atlantis Press.