The wordplay is nice, but the advertising in ineffective in driving profitable baskets.

People do not buy Peats or Oats…. they buy a cart, a basket, a shop.

Before the pandemic, there was a well-observed customer profile and trigger point where someone went from being an in-store grocery shopper to an e-commerce grocery shopper.

Customer profile: young families

Trigger point to channel switch: You try to do a weekly shop with a bored, crying toddler one too many times.

The quick commerce players that got funded during the pandemic and the takeaway delivery companies who moved into grocery shortly afterward ignored this fundamental insight.

They believed that convenience and top-up shops were what a decent proportion of shoppers wanted to do on an e-com app.

They believed that if they could incentivise – and advertise – enough to get people to use their apps, then they would realise they loved buying small carts on an app.

And if they could get the order density high enough, they believed these startups and scaleups could be profitable.

Looking at the Uber Eats ad campaign in the UK, it seems that this philosophy of changing the behaviour of shoppers on smaller less-profitable baskets – rather than advertising to existing e-commerce grocery shoppers – is still in force.

Can you imagine a Tesco, Walmart or Carrefour TV ad that said:

‘Think Tesco, think peas’

‘Buy Oats from Walmart’.

Never. Not in a million years.

They advertise FULL SHOPS, (or at a minimum occasions).

The brief to a q-commerce’s creative agency should be:

– Make us famous for full basket shops

– Find ways to encourage higher AOV

– Encourage larger basket shops every 1-2 weeks

What do you think?