Uber’s food delivery arm UberEats improved the most on its ‘Buzz score’ or positive recall factor in 2019 only to be snapped up by rival Zomato in January in 2020. While Zomato is also one of the brands which improved on its ‘Buzz score’, according to a survey by YouGov, progress made by UberEats to improve its customer connection is expected to help the Deepinder Goyal-founded unicorn consolidate even bigger market. Zomato got the India operation of UberEats in all stocks deal and the latter now has 9.99% stake in Zomato. After the acquisition, the food delivery business is largely a play between Naspers-backed Swiggy and Alibaba-funded Zomato.
Out of ten brands which improved the most in India, three belong to online food delivery business — Zomato, Swiggy and UberEats. Swiggy was the second most improved brand in terms of customer recall. YouGov, the UK-based market research and data analytics firm measures the public’s perception of brands.
India’s online food delivery business has undergone much turmoil in the last year. Not only did every major player burn piles of cash (Swiggy’s losses alone hiked by 500%), the industry also got into a tiff with NRAI over the pricing and discount issues. Firstly, both Zomato and Swiggy aggressively expanded into tier 2 and tier 3 cities in the last year and now serve more than 500 cities across the country, according to them. However, the same has come at the cost of high losses. Coupled with this was the heavy subsidising that food delivery platforms offer to retain customers.
Meanwhile, Google is the ‘buzziest’ brand in India in 2019 with a cumulative score of 54.3. Following close is the social messaging application Whatsapp and video streaming platform Youtube. Swiggy and Amazon made it to the top five buzz brands in India list.