DeliverooBrandStrategy

This was a live brief from Deliveroo, set in collaboration with Wolff Olins UK for the Product and Brand Management module of my MSc. The question was blunt — what is the single biggest strategic problem Deliveroo must solve to grow in the UK? — and the answer had to come with an audience, a brand idea, implications for the brand's assets and an experience concept.

It was an individual assessment, worth half the module, delivered as a ten-minute pre-recorded presentation of no more than fifteen slides. I built it on secondary research and the frameworks the module taught, and designed the deck myself in Canva — Deliveroo's own teal, with type choices of my own.

Food delivery had become a category of lookalikes. People were choosing almost entirely on price, promotion and delivery time (Tandon, 2021). Just Eat had stronger brand recognition, and exclusive restaurants pulled customers to whichever app happened to carry the meal they wanted.

The brief also asked what other markets could teach. The US is the world's second-largest food delivery market and India its sixth, so I looked at the leaders there. From DoorDash, Deliveroo could adopt diversification beyond restaurants. From Zomato, it could learn to personify the AI it already uses — making it a friend in the ordering process.

Rather than lean on articles, I went where people complain without being asked. Reddit is the comment section for apps — unfiltered opinions on the UK's delivery apps — and my professor encouraged me to look there. I set what I read against my own experience and conversations with people who use these apps.

• High fees and hidden costs
• Long wait times
• Mishandling of items, with no meaningful route to resolution

I named it the Trust Gap: people want their food delivered correctly and on time, but missing items, long waits and silence when things go wrong had worn their confidence down. The research I trusted most — Tandon (2021), Statista and Sandland (2024) — said the same. And one finding changed the brief: on Reddit, Deliveroo drew fewer complaints than Uber Eats or Just Eat. The industry was failing at delivery. Deliveroo's problem was that its care wasn't visible.

Two personas carried the audience. Fanny Longbottom is 19, a student in Manchester on a small allowance, too busy prepping for exams to cook, who still wants affordable, healthy meals. Dean Kumar is 40, a fintech consultant in London on £70k, who cares less about fees than about speed and quality. Different lives, different budgets — the same frustrations. Food delivery has no age or income requirement, and neither does the Trust Gap.

I mapped Deliveroo with the Butterfly framework, across its offer, communications, capabilities and culture. Its capabilities and culture were already care-first — rider insurance, an ethical gig model, safety-first rider policies, a founder who was the first rider and still rides. Its communications were still leading on "fast and local", the one promise every delivery app makes.

The gap makes sense. At the end of the day people want their food fast, so Deliveroo markets speed. But if speed is the only thing that matters, the biggest competitor wins. What people don't know is that Deliveroo cares more about how their food reaches them, and how the people who bring it are treated.

The line came from Deliveroo's own logo. The mark is a kangaroo — the roo in the name — and a kangaroo carries its joey in its pouch, the way a rider should carry your food. The joey felt almost hidden, as if someone at Deliveroo had thought of it without realising what it could do. The chaos came from the reviews of rival services. I wasn't trying to invent something new; I wanted to bring out what was already there.

The idea runs through three levels — Care in Delivery, Care in Experience and Care in Culture. They are the three things Deliveroo already does better than anyone, and the three things Uber Eats and Just Eat can't claim.

That reached the logo too. Deliveroo's current mark doesn't read as a kangaroo — it looks more like a bunny or a dog, and misses the roo entirely. So I explored concepts that do — a kangaroo carrying its joey, and its food, with care. I also recommended a new typeface for the wordmark, keeping the same colours but putting the emphasis on "roo", so the name carries the kangaroo too.

The brand idea needed proof people could see, so I designed Deliveroo Care+: a care accountability system across all three sides of the marketplace, built on a rating I called the Care Score. Riders rate customers and restaurants, customers rate riders, and restaurants rate riders — each on the care shown at their touchpoint.

• Care Scores for restaurants, earned from good reviews by riders and customers.
• Care Scores for riders, from customers — on time, correct items, communication, and the state of the food on arrival.
• Care Scores for customers, from riders, because Deliveroo cares how its riders are treated.
• A late-delivery countdown — "30 min until your order is on us" — that makes the compensation Deliveroo already offers visible.
• Delivering with Care, short rider training on courier pouches, keeping food steady and talking to customers.
• Easy access to customer service for any order, ongoing or past.

The two proof points work in different ways. The scores make Deliveroo's community visible to the people it serves. The guarantee turns a policy Deliveroo already had into a reason to choose it.

At my professor's request I also looked at Deliveroo through an ESG lens — its net-zero ambition, bike-based delivery, packaging and treatment of riders, mapped to the UN's Sustainable Development Goals. Committing to goals and demonstrating progress are two very different things, and Uber Eats and Just Eat were slightly ahead. The point was simple — Deliveroo needed to be louder about it, in the app and on social media.

Then I ran a customer-based brand equity (CBBE) analysis, to show how Care+ and visible ESG commitments would move people up the pyramid, from knowing Deliveroo to being loyal to it. Pairing it with the Butterfly framework showed what both are good at — condensing a brand's identity and equity into a single picture.

It was coursework, so none of it ran. It was marked 82.