When I first met Kofi Amoo-Gottfried, he was sitting in a booth at an empty Chili’s. Keep in mind, this was a virtual meeting. But his background looked so real, I thought he might have commandeered a local Chili’s as a temporary COVID workspace. He hadn’t. The dozens of virtual backgrounds were part of an April DoorDash campaign called “The Lunchroom” that put you in partner restaurants ranging from McDonald’s and Baskin Robbins to The Cheesecake Factory (many with corresponding playlists, no less). Backgrounds are also available for The Moon, which at first I thought was a restaurant chain I hadn’t heard of, and then realized was exactly what it sounded like. The Lunchroom campaign is a classic example of the creativity Amoo-Gottfried has brought to DoorDash in his role as its top marketer.
It’s been a busy year for the food-delivery platform, which has become the leading player in the food delivery space and found itself one of the pandemic’s most relied-upon brands when restaurants around the country shifted to take out-only. Sales have skyrocketed during the pandemic, and the company cites Second Measure data showing the service has more than 45% market share, ahead of competitors like Uber Eats (24%) and Grubhub (22%). The company announced a multiyear marketing partnership with the National Basketball Association (NBA) on Monday that makes it the first-ever on-demand delivery platform of the NBA, WNBA and NBA 2K League.
The recently-valued $16-billion company (it reportedly filed confidential paperwork for an IPO in February) positions itself as “merchant-first” and has leaned into that messaging in its support of the restaurant industry’s pandemic struggles. It cut commission fees for local restaurant partners by 50% through the end of 2020, announced expanded assistance and protection for its Dashers and pledged commission relief and marketing support to help restaurant partners generate up to $200M in additional sales this year. The brand has also introduced specific initiatives to support Black-owned businesses including a loan-matching program with the global non-profit Kiva and $0 delivery fees for merchants in the Black-owned Business program through the rest of the year.
When discussing the last few months — a recession, a global pandemic and civil unrest over police killings of Black and Brown Americans — he said, “You find out who you are in a crisis — as a person and as a company.”
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Prior to joining DoorDash, Amoo-Gottfried was VP of Brand & Consumer Marketing at Facebook and Head of Consumer Marketing for Internet.org. In his roles at ad agencies Wieden+Kennedy and Leo Burnett, he worked with brands like Kellogg’s, Coca Cola and Nike. Ultimately he made what he calls a “completely bonkers decision” in 2008 to leave his dream job leading strategy for the Nike account at W+K to build an agency for Publicis in Ghana: “While this looked like career suicide on paper, I couldn’t say no to going back home, to being an entrepreneur, and to playing a small part in the story of Ghana’s development,” he has said.
“It ended up being the hardest and most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done. We built a world-class agency in sub-Saharan Africa, and I learned a ton about leadership, about resilience, about fighting for what’s right, and about managing ambiguity and uncertainty.”
Source : Callie Schweitzer Senior News Editor, Marketing at LinkedIn News Published
