Delivery Club

Market

Target market

The target market is made up of a range of food delivery businesses. There are approximately 50,000 in the UK of which roughly 8,000 are located in London.

These can be split further into three groups:
1) An independent business offering a home delivery service to customers from a single location.
2) A mini-chain of less than 10 branches, each offering a home delivery service from a different location.
3) A large food delivery chain with branches across the UK.

All these groups face the challenge of a shortage of delivery drivers in the UK and the majority also lack visibility of their delivery drivers. The largest UK chain, Domino's Pizza, recently reported a shortage of drivers and had to limit marketing spend as a result.

Customer satisfaction is a high priority to these businesses because they heavily rely on repeat ordering. They are also reliant on the delivery drivers to be well-trained, reliable and polite because they are the face of their businesses.

Characteristics of target market

Two of the three co-founders of Delivery Club have direct experience launching and growing a business in this industry. From their experience they have a firm grasp of the challenges that are present. They managed the deliveries for over 40 restaurants in London with a single fleet of drivers.
(MyDeliveryCab.co.uk was successfully sold to Dinein.co.uk in November 2014).

Overall, there is an increasing volume of consumers ordering home delivery and wanting convenience. There are weekly and seasonal patterns to ordering behaviour as well as weather correlations.

The majority of UK food delivery businesses don't currently GPS track their drivers, including some of the largest national chains. This leads to them relying on estimation for the dispatching and allocation of orders to drivers.

We have found that the demand for delivery drivers is outstripping supply. We have seen businesses finding themselves short-staffed and having to limit their marketing spend because they simply cannot fulfil the consumer demand.

Marketing strategy

The majority of members would be registered to the platform through telephone sales calls. In some cases, face to face meetings would be arranged, particularly for the chains.

A database of target customers has been built and the use of telephone sales calls for membership registration has been tested during December 2014. This has proven to be effective, confirming that there would not be a need for a large field sales force.

In addition, a membership referral scheme would be adopted to support the sales strategy.

Other ways that the target market would be reached include: social media marketing, on-line advertising, PR and through the Delivery Club website.

Competition strategy

The concept of a platform to facilitate the sharing of delivery drivers is new to our knowledge and as such we do not consider there to be any direct competitors.

Indirect competitors include companies that provide GPS tracking solutions for restaurants. Delivery Club aims to provide a holistic solution at a more competitive price.

To succeed against future competitors the most important aspect will be to leverage from the first entrant advantage. The strong growth strategy coupled with a closely monitored member retention policy will help in this regard. Of course, if and when a competitor does enter the market, the threat will be assessed and the management team will react accordingly.

A question that the management is frequently asked is "Do you foresee Uber entering this market?"
"Uber has and continues to build their business facing consumers. I don't expect that in the short term that they will shift from this strategy and move into the business to business arena", ~Krupa Patel, CEO.