At first glance, food delivery on a platform like DoorDash might seem intuitive. Even so, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes. During the Variety Studio presented by Canva at Advertising Week, DoorDash Chief Marketing Officer Kofi Amoo-Gottfried spoke about the partnership between product development and marketing, focusing on the delivery platform’s advancements in recent years.
For Amoo-Gottfried, helping service providers has always been at the forefront of DoorDash’s company mission. He cited the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to sift through the amount of businesses on the platform. That data is then made available to help restaurant owners and other merchants on DoorDash so that they can evaluate how to best leverage the delivery platform.
“Our mission is to help local restaurants, to empower local economies, to help businesses grow. So we can now look at all the merchants on DoorDash, hundreds and thousands of them, and understand which ones are performing really well and why, and then surface those recommendations back to other merchants through our merchant portal,” said Amoo-Gottfried. “So now, if you’re a merchant and you have your merchant portal on DoorDash, you can come to that and get bespoke personalized recommendations based on where your business is at.”
Amoo-Gottfried described DoorDash’s business approach as “to work backwards from the customer,” paying attention to convenience and clarity.
“We try to think about, ‘What do people need from us at every moment and how do we evolve to do that?’” Gottfried emphasized. “I’d say the biggest one for us this year as a company has been the evolution of our product over the past few years, from being a restaurant delivery platform to being a platform that delivers basically everything.”
DoorDash, which has expanded to include grocery and beauty delivery, among other new features, has also added tabs that reflect these new categories. According to Amoo-Gottfried, the marketing team then created campaigns that advertised DoorDash’s offerings.
For Valentine’s Day, for example, Amoo-Gottfried and his team spearheaded the development of a “self-love bouquet,” which takes into account the fact that many of DoorDash’s users are singles. To appeal to their demographic, the marketing team created a customized bouquet filled with eleven red roses and “The Rose,” a popular sex toy. For Amoo-Gottfried, it’s a prime case study for how the marketing team tries to marry the growth of the app with the public awareness of those new features.
When asked about navigating the challenges of social media, Amoo-Gottfried expressed that it’s important for the company to engage in conversations “authentically.”
“A lot of it is really trying to find that line and just being aware of which conversations you can participate in, and which ones you want to sit out, but then knowing that there’s going to be risk and being okay when it does go wrong, which is inevitable,” said Amoo-Gottfried.
