Just Eat

Take-outs from the takeaway: Product innovation

Building customer empathy in hard-to-reach environments…

Takeaway Owners

Operating in the increasingly competitive place where tech meets home delivery, Just Eat reached out to Crowd DNA to help optimise the brand’s relationship with takeaway outlets – specifically in the UK and Spain – and their owners.

It’s a tough space to research. Takeaway owners are busy people, not particularly inclined to divulge the inner workings of their businesses.

Interviews And Ethnography

We embarked on extensive research with 16 takeaway businesses in the UK and Spain, first working hard to build relationships through phone interviews. With an important level of trust gained, this was followed by an ethnographic phase, in which our teams spent time in the restaurants and outlets, witnessing how each operated, the main challenges they face and where digital services can provide advantage.

It was a challenging process, but less in-situ research techniques wouldn’t have got remotely close to the detailed understanding that we arrived at here.

Rich Narratives

Capturing very rich and real narratives to share in our workshop sessions with Just Eat stakeholders helped this data-driven brand to craft striking new ways to connect with takeaway providers.

And while the project was originally focussed on developing specific products, the insights revealed so much about these businesses as to open up a breadth of opportunities for Just Eat across marketing, CRM and account management.

"Takeaway partners are the heart and soul of the Just Eat business. They are also busy, independent and diverse. Crowd DNA's approach to cultural insights allowed us to get a fascinatingly detailed and authentic read on what working life is like for them, and where we can provide them with true value. We were hugely impressed by Crowd DNA's ability to recruit hard to reach audiences and their carefully considered outputs and recommendations."
Rufus Weston, head of insight, Just Eat

  • Narrated Galleries

    We love films, but narrated galleries – fusing showreels of still images and audio of participant commentary – creates outputs that allow for high levels of reflection and audience empathy. Ideal for user experience work, in other words

  • Crowd Communities

    We’ve a wealth of experience at setting up and managing communities for clients, with learnings on how best to engage audiences and a full box of tricks for maximising what we get out of the work – including geo tagging, streaming in social media data and a mobile optimised platform

  • Pinterest

    We’ve used Pinterest to really good effect on a number of projects recently, helping us to explore differences and commonalities among different typologies in areas such as fashion and style, home, holidays and entertainment. Engagement levels with participants always rank high, and clients love the vividness and clarity of the findings.

  • Citizen Journalism

    Citizen journalism works on the principle of making reporters of our participants, briefing them to capture what’s happening in the lives of their friends and family via video dispatches and blogging. It gets us places where we can’t otherwise get. It bypasses the bias of having a researcher in attendance. People are often more accurate reporters on those around them than on themselves, so that’s another bias circumnavigated.

  • Network Audits

    If you want to really understand how people interact with those around them, it’s logical to research interconnected groups of friends, family and work colleagues. First developed as part of our award winning word of mouth research for Guardian News & Media, and since then refined and reconfigured across a range of global projects, our network audit approach helps us understand who’s influencing who as authentically as possible.