Zomato Brand Profile

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XAVIER INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT BHUBANESWAR

BRAND PROFILE OF

Submitted to : Prof. M N Tripathi Submitted by : Aman Pachisia(uemf16003) Ankur Mittal(uemf16004)

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

We would like to express a whole-hearted gratitude to all those who have helped with the report or have been associated with the report in any which way and made it a worth-while experience. We sincerely thank Prof. M N Tripathi, who we cannot thank enough for having given us the opportunity and his total support for working on such a project. We are greatly indebted to our batch mates for having shared their invaluable contacts with us which went a long way in the successful completion of our report. Thank you.

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Contents Zomato : An Indian startup acquiring the world...........................................................................................................5 About Zomato............................................................................................................................................ ...................6 Mission & Vision............................................................................................................................................... .............7 Milestone......................................................................................................................................... .............................7 Business Model............................................................................................................................................... ..............8 Value Proposition....................................................................................................................................... ...................9 Customers....................................................................................................................................... ..............................10 Value Chain............................................................................................................................................... ....................11 Zomato’s Scope of Activities......................................................................................................................................... 11 Zomato supply.............................................................................................................................................. ................12 Zomato consultancy...................................................................................................................................... ...............12

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Zomato Partners........................................................................................................................................... ................13 Social Media Strategy........................................................................................................................................... ........14 Content Marketing........................................................................................................................................ ...............17 Business Aim.................................................................................................................................................. ..............23 Swot................................................................................................................................................ .............................28 GCM Matrix.............................................................................................................................................. ....................29 Portor Diamond Matrix.............................................................................................................................................. ..30 Current Business Strategy........................................................................................................................................... .31 Innovation at Zomato............................................................................................................................................ .......32 Major Competitors..................................................................................................................................... ..................35 Major Acquisition....................................................................................................................................... ..................36 Three Problems that were at Zomato..........................................................................................................................36 Conclusion....................................................................................................................................... .............................38 5

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Zomato: An Indian Startup acquiring the world

Zomato initially named as Foodiebay was started by Mr. Deepinder Goyal. It is a restaurant searching platform providing in-depth details with autonomous reviews and ratings. Foodiebay, the initial name was changed to Zomato in November 2010 to increase their reach among people.

Zomato is a restaurant discovery platform providing comprehensive menus, reviews and contact details for restaurants in 21 cities across the world. Territories include India, USA, United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the Philippines, South Africa and now London. Founded in New Delhi in 2008, Zomato employs approximately 1000 staff over the globe.

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About Zomato Founded in 2008, Zomato has raised over $613 million to date, most recently a $50 million round from Info Edge, Sequoia Capital and Vy Capital in April, which valued the company at $1 billion. The company is expecting revenues to triple this fiscal year, with the various income streams that it has introduced over the past few months. "We see a lot of opportunity in terms of product evolution on both the consumer as well as the merchant end. We have been ahead of the curve building mobile-first products in the restaurant search space for a while now and are extensively focusing on mobile as a company. Cashless and online ordering are great examples of our mobile-first products," said Goyal. "With the growth of mobile-first and mobile-only users in India especially, we see a lot of potential for our product. In the long term, we want to own the communication platform between restaurants and customers and want our users to have access to all kinds of restaurant information around them so they can make an informed decision before a meal."

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Mission and Vision  Zomato’s mission is to ensure nobody has a bad meal.  Zomato’s vision is to be the global platform when someone is looking for food locally.  The said mission and vision is achieved by: o Helping people discover great places around them. o Building amazing experiences around dining. o Enabling restaurants to create amazing experiences.  To expand in more than 50 countries.

Milestone  Number of listed restaurants: in 2008 it was 4000 restaurants which increase to 94000 in 2013 and currently 384,100 in Q1 of 2015.

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 Monthly visitors of Zomato increases to 35 million in 2014 which was 11 million in 2013 and 0.015 million in 2008.  Yearly revenue of Zomato in 2008 was 0.06 crores which increased to 11.3 crores in 2013.  Spread in 21 countries worldwide.

Business Model

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Zomato’s Value Proposition

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Zomato’s Customers Customer groups

Customer channels

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Value chain

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Zomato scope of activities

Zomato supply

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Zomato Consultancy

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Zomato Partners

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Social media Strategy

Zomato uses different platforms to engage their customers with them. Facebook There is a huge engagement of customers on Facebook. Zomato has more than 600k strong Facebook community.

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Twitter Twitter is a place where Zomato is sparkling. It has more than 114 k followers there. Used as a conversation platform with the customers, Zomato is doing a great job in engaging their customers on their page. They answers all the queries raised over the platform by the customers. Blog Sharing and updating with all the latest updates is a key point for any organization. Zomato uses their blog as their mouthpiece to share all the latest updates. Pinterest The platform shares the food experience with great content to attract their customers. The company needs to do a lot of job to make its followers on this platform which will certainly work in their promotion.

Instagram This platform lets the user share the foodie photographs just by sharing it using the tag # Zomato. The image automatically gets shared on the microsite.

Success Story The key factor for Zomato success is its marketing strategy and in-depth knowledge of their competitors. Zomato aims to be a place where the foodies hangout. The company has spread in 20 countries with its headquarter in New Delhi, India providing

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service to over 35 million values customers per month. The list of registered restaurants on the website has increased to 384,100 till March 2015. Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the 3 main platforms which made the base for the success of Zomato with a deep presence among their customers. Other than that, Zomato has extensively invested a lot over SMO’s, SEO’s and has worked a lot more user interactive. Side by side with a goal to branch globally, they also invest much on TV ads to bombinate Zomato. Pankaj Chaddah, the co-founder of Zomato agreed, “ads on the mobile app revenue game for them”. More than 50% of their total traffic come “Using loc-basedtionservices to target ads around a consumer’s physical location helps this decision easier” said Chaddah. Sanjeev Bikchandani, co-founder of Info Edge and Zomato’s largest sharehol will focus on segments such as online food ordering, restaurant booking, subscription-based services and billing inside of restaurants”. It all started in an office cafeteria five years ago in Delhi, India. Zomato's founders used to sit with their colleagues and stare at the same five menus from restaurants near their workplace. Bored with the limited choice, they started collecting restaurant menus and placed them on a website. Four years and fourteen cities later, Zomato was ready to spice up the UK food market. The India-based restaurant discovery service set up in London with help from London & Partners.

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CONTENT MARKETING

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Images play a vital role in social media marketing. And there are enough data to support the notion. According to Zabisco, we process visuals 60,000 times faster than text. And 40% people respond better to visual content, compared to any text information. Almost every brand is working on this area and trying their level best to charm their audience with visuals. But only a few are doing it with an A+ grade. Zomato is one of them. Zomato is a restaurant and other eatery finding application that currently operates in 15 countries including India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, New Zealand, the Philippines, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, Chile and Portugal. Now coming back to their social media campaigns, if you see their Facebook page, you would know that I am not at all exaggerating. Here are 8 lessons every brand should learn from Zomato. They are entertaining: They always manage to put a smile or sometimes big laughs on your face. There lies the greatness of Zomato’s Facebook strategy. It tickles the funny bone, always.

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Probably, this is one of the reasons that you cannot ignore their updates, once they hit your timeline.

Excellent graphics: Each post of Zomato marks excellence and higher degree of creativity. You can detect something new on there every post. It may be a new foodie thought, or a new painpoint of their audience, or just an extraordinary post on a regular affair. All their updates offer freshness as well as a clear message.

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They never fail to cash the latest happenings: Zomato always create something for ongoing events. And their USP is that they do it differently. For example, take the following post about Valentine’s Day for instance. It covered every type of people, no matter if they had a date or not. And ultimately, the foodie, who was without a date, had the final smile.

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Have a definite call-to-action: It’s now proven that call-toaction is an important factor of image marketing. Zomato does it flawlessly. But what makes them different from others is, they do it very delicately, so that their posts don’t sound too sales-y.

They prefer quality to quantity: Experts have been preaching to give importance to quality and not to quantity. Zomato follows it. They don’t post everyday. Sometimes, they skip posting for a fortnight. Does it affect their engagement? No! Their audience eagerly waits for their updates to come. And when it makes the grand entry, engagement reaches the zenith. Updates are simple yet engaging: Zomato does not use industry jargons. Their posts are simple with enticing graphics

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and text. It increases their engagement quotient to a great extent. No matter how their posts are, be it text-rich or graphicsrich, you cannot go away reading the entire piece. If you are a Zomato fan on Facebook, you would admit this.

All posts are relevant to the niche: Zomato deals with food. All their posts are somehow related to the industry and successfully tickle the foodie bone of every person. Sometimes they suggest their audience on their food choices while sometimes they literally drag them to browse their website. In other words, Zomato successfully brings out the foodie in you. Knows its audiences: Zomato knows its audience, and how! There are posts for everyone, or to say it precisely, for every foodie. Be it a series watcher or a sports fan; a parent or a tech

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geek, Zomato deprives nobody. Take the following update for an instance.

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Business aim As part of its global expansion plans, Zomato saw an opportunity to enter and dominate London's restaurant review and bookings market. But the company needed a trusted partner to help it understand the sector, establish an office and recruit the right staff.

London & Partners services  Finding an office: introductions to serviced office providers; guidance on office space in Tech City  Recruiting staff: advice on salaries, recruitment and work placements  Market intelligence: providing information on London restaurant, hotel and venue listings  Professional services: advising on accountants and legal firms

Business success in London Zomato set up its sales team in London in November 2012 and launched its website just three months later in January 2013. By April 2013 the London operation had 16,900 restaurants on its books and employed nine people. It is on track to employ 25-30 people within three years.

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The Strategy Rao pinned down three major factors that would make the campaign a success: in-house PR, community engagement and the right timing. Zomato believed its staff could talk most passionately about the brand. This is why Rao kept the PR in house. He explains: “We wanted to do our marketing efforts because we personally wanted to build relationships with the media over time. If you change from one agency to another, you lose that contact. It approach when it comes to PR. It was definitely cheaper to do it ourselves as well.” Simultaneously, Zomato built a social media community. It reached out to bloggers every week, collecting valuable feedback and improving the product. As most of the marketing was done in house, it was also important to get a taste for the opinion.

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Six months in, Zomato had been cooking up ideas with the online community side-by-side. At this point, half a million users were coming onto its website every month. Zomato’s recipe was going Now it was to time plant o launch. Its campaign to increase brand visibility.

“We had a good momentum going, so all we needed was that pus stages a success. We felt the timing was right. The feedback had been integrated, our product was very good and we had a strong user base. We wanted to take it to the next level,which meant more people should know about Zomato,” In order to reach the greatest number of hungry commuters, timing was very important. Rao explains: “We could he campaign has in run July, but many people would have been on holiday so we decided to wait until September.” Zomato’s campaign resembled a tightly run kitchen, with Rao exactly what results he’d like to see reeserved-foldincreaseup.in “We wanted website traffic, but we also focused on mobile apps. We weren’t-fold look increase, but were hoping to have the amount of downloads do.

The Execution The next step was to take a closer look at its users. “We no 95 per cent of our users take the Tube at some point. So we considered that would be the best way to reach out to them. We also saw that 70 per cent of our users are young professionals who work for corporations. When looking where to advertise, we

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selected the City and Canary Wharf because they were Zomato’s most po explains. The £500,000 campaign also enticed people by advertising its tasty wares through other mediums. “From the total budget, a significant amount went o also decided to advertise in print. So we ran ads with The Evening Standard, City AM,The Wharf and outer-London trade publications,” he says. For the company’s online campaign, Zomato used a display ad behavioural targeting to get its message out. “From the cate focused primarily on food blogs and online communities. We also targeted people whose online behaviour showed an interest in food and e-commerce websites. While food websites ensured relevance, the e-commerce sites were added so that we could target people who have a certain disposable income and can afford eating out.” But the heat almost got too much in the kitchen, as the team struggled to decide on its main message. “Our initial USP was that we had lots of rich the simple message explaining how we started. Up until the deadline we had several messages in place. In the end, we decided to forget about everything and go back to basics,” Rao says. To get Zomato’s ravenous followers to share the company’s co considered the best way forward media strategy.“Our never social involved too much talking about the product itself. The posts on social media, especially on Facebook, are more about showing our humorous side. People prefer to share that content. Our main intent was for people to link Zomato with restaurants and food.”

The Outcome

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The campaign ran for two and a half weeks, leading to some t five-fold increase in the number of reviews that were submitted; 70 per cent of those came through the mobile apps. The numbers were significantly higher than in India, where we saw a two-fold increase in reviews after our campaign The mobile apps proved particularly popularwnloaded.“The muchapps were more, which pushed up the rankings and the amount of people interacting. From a user point of view, that was the biggest indication that outdoor advertising impacted user interaction. When you’re in the Tube you don’tseesuchhavean connecti increase is great.” After the campaign, the apps shot through the ranks. The Zomato iOS app is now placed at number eight in the food and drink category, having jumped from slot 84 in under two weeks. The company’s web asedtrafficfrom5 perhascentalsoto10 incre per cent week-on-week. When looking at the complete 10-month period, Zomato has gone from zero to 20,000 restaurant listings, 700 to over 700,000 unique monthly visits and from zero to 12,000 restaurant reviews. Big food brands have also become more receptive to Zomato’s servic brands are getting to know about Zomato, which is a good sign. Many have been e-mailing us, asking to update their listings or for a meeting to discuss what more can be done on Zomato,”says he

The Analysis Looking back, Rao would have liked to get more for his money only focused on brand visibility. But ideally I would have also done

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a campaign with a call for action. In some time we will start to think about doing that.” The challenge Zomato now faces is to maintain the impression objective of brand visibility we’ve achieved. Now the campai lies in sustaining our impact. So we’re refocusing the campai happens. We’ve visited restaurants and put over 2,000 sticke campaign is prolonged over time,” Rao says. For Zomato’s next campaign, the company will be going back t explore what zero-cost marketing efforts it can use. “It’s about PR restaurants and getting more bloggers on board. We’re also l expanding within the UK. So for 2014, our budget will be invested in city expansion,improving content and doing events related to food.” So expe served up, coming to a city near you.

SWOT Analysis

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Global Competitive Matrix ( GCM ) Framework

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Porter Diamond Framework

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Zomato’s Current Business Strategy  Customer’s Point of View Zomato’s offers to the customers are: provides the databases of various restaurants with information like food menu, prices, budget constraints, contact related, working hours, location of restaurant and more usefully, the reviews from other users. It also provides the option for mobile apps for almost all mobile platforms. Zomatohas a huge presence over social media which has further contributed to app usage.  Restaurant Owner’s Point of View Restaurants through this route have got access to a large pool of customers registered on the app, which is growing at an exponential rate. Zomato provide restaurant owners a platform for online visibility. This is particularly useful for many small restaurants which can’t afford a website themselves or didn’t have much business due to location drawbacks. The contacts information on websites has increased the home delivery orders to nearby places. The customer interaction happens in the form of feedback and reviews. Restaurants can enjoy additional visibility by Zomato’s dedicated marketing campaigns, but this comes at a cost.  Zomato’s Point of View Zomato sells advertising spaces on websites to restaurant owners and make recommendations to restaurants based on changing trends& sales performance analysis. Zomato also initiates various

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paid marketing campaigns for clients.Product pricing which is sustainable, offering products with longevity an expanding operations in a calculated but committed manner are the ways through which Zomato signal their desire for longevity.

Innovation at Zomato Zomato operates in a niche segment by offering restaurant database to customers along with the menu, the location and perhaps the most important, reviews. One can ponder over how a player operating in a niche segment be so successful that the segment itself has started grabbed eyeballs and is becoming main-stream. This has been made possible by the strategic innovations the website has carried over the years of operation. A 360 degree turnaround strategy was employed in the spheres of Marketing, Operations and IT infrastructure. While many of the innovations can be termed as proactive, Zomato managed to find creative solutions to some of the major problems prevalent in the segment. Marketing Being a niche player, it is very important that the masses are aware about website and its offerings. Not only did Zomato achieved the same, it established advertising as its core competency. They employ both Below the Line (advertising) and TV ads to remain at top of the consumer’s mind. Most of their campaigns went viral due to creativity in their ads, be it print, social media or television. As a result, Zomato has become

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synonymous with the term ‘restaurant database’. Most of the other players do not have any significant presence online. Zomato has a major presence on social media i.e. Facebook and Twitter. ‘There are two kinds of people in the world’ has been the most successful campaign so far in terms of customer engagement (See Exhibit 1). Zomato believe in ‘Content is the King’. They never spam the wall with irrelevant posts, create ads around food, replies to each and every user post and have apps for all the mobile platforms. The re-branding in 2010 proved to be a major challenge. Foodiebay became Zomato due to i) having the term ‘ebay’ in their name and ii) having received funding by InfoEdge of which large part was to be used for marketing. The company saw it as the right time to adopt a different identity and lay out a formal organizational structure and culture. The company was growing rapidly and a rule book had to be followed. But Zomato lost many loyal customers and was a target of a number of hate mails due to the name change. Moreover, the sales team wasn’t aware of the reason of re-branding and there was widespread confusion. The company didn’t do well in this regard, none of the employees were informed and there was a fear that they were being taken over. Things have been much better lately. Operations Zomato isn’t as involved in intensive operations as a manufacturing or FMCG firm would be. The challenges being faced by Zomato are more of ‘growth pangs’. Their operational strategy is to get things done on priority rather than creating new processes for them to be accomplished. Since, the teams are getting bigger and bigger in size, controlling them and infusing order in the chaos has lately been proving difficult. As the

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company is growing, a restricting or some innovation in operations division may be necessary. Moreover, the company is following global strategy and will soon be open for business in Singapore and Dubai. Hiring the right people has been the challenge. A lingering question of whether to hire Indian for overseas operations or hire the local personnel who may prove to be difficult to control, has always been at the back of the mind. Meeting demand for new features on the website from the customer has been another big challenge. The idea may not be a strategic fit for the company but they have to think hard on the issue if a major chunk of customer demands the same feature. One such often requested feature is ‘accepting orders online on behalf of restaurants’. While Zomato affirms that they possess the necessary technical skills and sales personnel to implement the same, operational challenges such as customization of food as per the customer and adhering to promised delivery time are yet to be worked upon.

IT Infrastructure Zomato’s website is visited by 20 million foodies every month. The website provides them innovative features such as opportunity to share their stories being a foodie and allows them to create and share their personal food diary. The website automatically detects the user’s location and has a customized page for everyone (see Exhibit 2). There is an active blog updated by the CEO himself. New features are added almost every week. Such large traffic has to be backed up by a robust infrastructure

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and Zomato is constantly working towards meeting up to the challenges. As the website is growing bigger, customer reviews are becoming all the more important. A review can make or break a restaurant’s business. Lately, the website is seeing a lot of spam, a lot of restaurants are planting fake reviews. Zomato has to evolve its IT system for having basic automated spam filters to sophisticated pattern matching algorithms. All this will of course involve costs. Most of the companies of Zomato’s size do not even care about load times of their websites. But Zomato is planning to lay infrastructure in every country where it operates, so that load times are faster and users can get food faster. Cost is again a major issue.

Major Competitors There are lots of competitors available but majorly there are 3 :  Foodpanda

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 Just eat  Burrp

Major Acquisition by Zomato

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THREE PROBLEMS THAT WERE AT ZOMATO Our engineering team is always cranking to improve our services and make your food hunt easier. As a small update, here is what’s keeping us awake at night these days: 1. Building a dish database : Wouldn’t it be great if we could search for restaurants serving a specific dish? For example, it would be great to be able to find the best places that serve a Tenderloin Steak. The only way to make this happen is if we have structured data for every dish served in a restaurant. We’ve already made some effort in this direction the manual way - by typing out a few thousand menu cards in every city that we are in. However, given the churn rate of the restaurant industry (about 25% restaurants shut down every

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quarter), it is getting difficult for us to manually keep pace with all the new menu cards that come our way. We are trying to create intelligent OCR systems to supplement our existing dish ontology. Misspellings (in the menus) and from the OCR mechanism just make it all the more complicated. 2. Spam control : Two years ago, this wasn’t a problem. Why? Very simply, a restaurant’s rating Zomato didn’t make or break its business back then. Nowadays, it does make a difference, to a certain extent. Since a lot of restaurant owners also realise this, they try to game the system by planting fake reviews on the platform. We have, over time, learnt how to identify most of these cases, but some intelligent spam tactics skip our automated filters. Our filters currently range from simple data analysis and pattern matching to user behaviour mapping over a few months. However, we realise that we constantly have to keep track of what is making its way onto the platform to help maintain its neutrality and usefulness to our users. Also, we need to evolve these systems to outsmart everyone who tries to game the system (despite following the rules). It’s an ongoing effort, and I don’t think we will ever be able to say this problem has been solved for good. 3. Lower server latency for our geographically widespread traffic : This isn’t something new, and a few companies have already done this very efficiently. Most companies our size don’t even care about this. However, we want to serve all our traffic (in the Philippines, as well as in London) from servers that sit close to our users’ physical locations. Lower server latency = users get to food faster. Replicating all our infrastructure in various locations on a master-slave basis and then keeping everything in sync is not

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easy for us as of now, and this is something we are trying to address over the very short term itself.

Conclusion Zomato has been able to grow at such an astonishing pace due to the adoption and effective implementation of Turnaround Strategies in every field of the business, be it marketing, operations, IT or HR. Funds have always been a major concern and every time Zomato has managed to obtain them from an eager venture capitalist. Zomato is here to stay, and everyone realizes it. Deepinder must decide whether the company wants to focus on innovating its business model and keep providing new features in India or continue with the existing model and expand globally. Funds will have to be directed accordingly. More and more competitors are entering the market, although they haven’t seen as much success. Can Zomato afford to ignore them all and hope that no one replicates their business model? Suddenly the phone rings, a person of the other side says, “Sir, we are live in Chile. Where do we expand next?”

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