Maurine Alma

Take it away Maurine (we couldn’t resist…).
‘Very funny. Yes, Just Eat Takeaway.com is a long name. We've had it since our merger with Just Eat in 2019. Internally we often use JET. We're now active in all our 25 markets in a similar way; same orange house style, same logo. That's one of the ways we do scalable marketing; to make sure the look and feel is similar across the world. We've just taken over Grubhub in the US. In the future we can maybe align the platforms so you can use the product everywhere in the world.’

JET has been in the news quite a lot lately. They say it's eat or be eaten. 
‘When you just read the news, the only way we seem to be growing is by takeovers. But we also grow organically really rapidly. During the pandemic we obviously accelerated our growth, but even before that we were growing fast. That is because our category, online food ordering, is still growing globally. Despite the high penetration of adult population in countries like The Netherlands and the UK – both over 30 percent - there is a lot of growth potential. Here in The Netherlands, we're by far the biggest, but other players have been coming in. If you come in as a third or fourth player in this developed market, it will be really, really hard and expensive to grow. Our goal is to increase our scale by expanding restaurant offering and driving consumer penetration as fast as possible, ahead of everyone else, and then become the preferred choice.’

How is JET currently performing? 
‘First half year results show very strong growth. After merging with Just Eat in April 2020, one of the focuses was to strengthen market leadership in the UK. Deliveroo and UberEats had come in and were growing faster than Just Eat. Now we are growing much faster and have further cemented our market leading position. We've been investing quite heavily, not only in marketing and branding, but also in sales and our delivery network.’

What do you offer that your competitors don't?
‘The big difference is in the network effect, whereby we have a lot of restaurants on our platform. When a lot of consumers choose you, this results in more orders and hence more revenue for your partner restaurants, which in its turn attracts  more restaurants to your network. In most countries we play this game way better than anyone else. Furthermore, we're very reliable and easy to use - be it on the app or on the web. And we have a hybrid model; many of our restaurants have their own couriers and we also provide delivery services to restaurants without their own delivery capabilities.’

Marketing is very important from a strategic point of view, so why doesn’t JET have a CMO on its board? 
‘Obviously the CMO and the CTO are important. I report to Jitse Groen, the founder and CEO, who built the company himself. He's done his own AdWords campaigns so he's very knowledgeable in all areas. At the same time, he can't do everything by himself anymore. I was the first CMO to join but obviously there was already a big marketing department. All our markets have their own local marketing teams. Obviously, as the global CMO I'm in touch with them. We have offices in The Netherlands and the UK and we’ve integrated the local marketing teams into the central team. We now have over 700 people in 25 countries in our marketing department.’

Organising them must be a daunting task…
‘The big markets have their own teams. Most of the performance marketing can easily be centralized because it's mostly done behind a computer. But we also have local people that are doing the campaigns. For instance, native speakers to check key words. They are part of one specialized global team. This way you can leverage and get the best talent, tools and technology. We therefore have specialized teams that work across the countries, and focus on branding, retention, performance and partnerships. For instance, we partner with brands like Ben & Jerry's or Heineken. We also have a big team for partner marketing; they do the marketing for our restaurants but also the merchandise for our restaurants, as well as the outfits our delivery guys and girls wear.’

Millions of people use your platform daily, resulting in a treasure chest of consumer data… 
‘You can't do without data, but there is a limit to what you can do with it. It's important to really control what you're doing and that you understand the implications of using the data. First and foremost, use your own data to see what people are actually doing on the platform, how they behave, and from there look at the opportunities.’

Are you concerned about the third-party cookie ban? 
‘If someone has placed an order, we see it on our platform. Without tracking we don't know where it's coming from. We can't connect the dots and optimize our campaigns anymore. That is a huge challenge and we do not yet have the answers. The likes of Google and Facebook are helping us to see how we can use our first party data as well. The key thing is that we're also using other ways. We're betting big time on more contextual advertising to be able to show a relevant message at the right point in time, such as the sponsoring around soccer.’

What's is the next big thing in marketing data and tech? 
‘At a certain point TV will become programmatic, it will be digitalised. That will really create a huge revolution in how to effectively reach your customers. You will be able to see way better what the effect is of someone watching an ad and what's happening afterwards. Currently it's guesswork.’

How do you measure return on investment?
‘During sports matches, for example, we see how the order pattern is developing and if it's incremental versus when we're not showing those ads. Do we see an uplift in new customers? Are we able to attract more? Does the order frequency from existing customers increase? We also look at top of mind, which is key. Our category is very instant, you're hungry and you want to order and you don't want to browse and consider all sorts of things. If the brand is top of mind, then obviously, you're miles ahead of anyone else. Therefore, you need to be visible at the relevant moments. Television advertising and sponsoring are the most efficient for mass reach.’