A Deep Dive Analysis of Online Food Delivery With 6 Ps of The Digital Marketing Mix-Based Framework

Online Food Delivery (“OFD”) experienced substantial double-digit growth worldwide, before and during the global COVID-19 pandemic. This paper presents a holistic analysis of OFD by utilizing the 6 Ps of the digital marketing mix to portray how each platform employs strategic marketing to drive sustainable growth. The article utilizes extensive reviews of previous literature, as well as up-to-date news and observations. It was found that each of the market players focused on the product by expanding from only OFD to become lifestyle-driven “everyday apps” by enhancing the UX/UI experiences of the application, which supported and coordinated profound experiences, personalized offerings, and precise data analytics. Price played a role but was not the primary focus since it is controlled by the government to protect consumers. It can be concluded that if an OFD platform would like to grow sustainably, it should place a strong emphasis on product service, quality, and user-friendly technology on the application. Most of the previous studies regarding online food delivery discuss factors in driving adoptions, consumer attitudes and satisfaction towards the application and OFD landscape. There are the gaps in the holistic analyses of OFD from the digital marketing mix framework. Therefore, this academic article is the first to focus on uncovering how each of the top three OFD players in Thailand adopted the digital marketing mix to optimize opportunity.


INTRODUCTION
Online food delivery (OFD) has become the fastest growing segment of consumer food business worldwide with, 20 percent compound annual growth rate from 2016-2021, compared to a declining trend in the dine-in segment (-5 percent) and the stagnated trend of total consumer food business (0 percent). (Passport by Euromonitor International, 2022) This is due to three primary reasons. Firstly, increased internet access, especially mobile internet, establishes a ubiquitous environment and renders the smartphone indispensable for consumers who adopted it as part of their daily lifestyles for e-shopping, as shown in the forecasted strong growth of global ecommerce market from $3.53 trillion in 2019 to $6.54 trillion by 2022. (Ali et al., 2020;Talukder et al. , 2022;Shankar et al., 2022) Secondly, urbanization and fastpaced consumer lifestyles allow less time for cooking or even dining out in a restaurant. (Talukder et al., 2022) Consumers must balance different parts of their lives, mostly work, personal life and family. Online food delivery has been gaining popularity since it addresses the pain points of consumers who are looking for food service alternatives that can provide a variety of food choices and save time on travel and waiting on queue. As a result, online food delivery services provided convenience benefits to consumers, allowing them to order their favorite food via call center, website, and/or fingertip on the mobile application. (Roh & Park, 2019;Sobika & Raj, 2021;Shah et al., 2021) The mobile application is the most popular platform used to order food, which can be accomplished with a few simple steps: search for restaurants, pick the desired dishes, and confirm the delivery location (Shah et al., 2021). Apart from offering convenience, most food delivery service has also taken the service to the next level by adding a larger variety of food choices and food vendors/restaurants into their service platform. (Cho et al., 2019;Roh & Park, 2019) Thirdly, during the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments announced social distancing restrictions preventing people from dining in restaurants or with other people to comply with this policy. (Wen et al., 2021)

2021) To respond and survive under such government policies, most food vendors
and restaurants initiated contactless food delivery to avoid the risk of getting and spreading viruses to customers, as well as to enhance food safety. (Sungboonlue et al.,2022;Rowland, 2022) Consumers who tend to have relatively higher incidence of ordering food delivery are millennials, adults living with children, as well as female adults, since such individuals must shuffle between work and personal/family responsibilities. (Ali et al., 2020;Senthil et al., 2020;Keeble et al., 2021;Hong et al., 2021) Within Asia Pacific, Thailand is renowned as the kitchen of the world, given its abundant food supply and famous Asian food. Therefore, Thailand was selected as the focus for this article because food delivery has been booming in the Thai food market. Food delivery business in Thailand experienced impressive growth year on year from $212 billion in 2018 to $3,181 billion in 2021, or more than 1400 percent growth in three years. The emergence of food delivery emerged to help consumers who live in urban areas to access to food and beverage under the constraints of congested traffic and busy lifestyles. Food delivery is the key enabler for consumers who wish to eat their favorite foods without going to buy it or wait in long queues.
By creating unique values for consumers, food delivery is one of the businesses growing against the trend of overall economic recession. In addition, the spread of COVID-19 accelerated the growth of online food delivery business, owing largely to the country's lockdown restrictions and work from home policies formulated by the government. (Sobika & Raj, 2021;Kasim & Rosli, 2022) This has transformed the dining patterns of people away from offline and toward online food delivery service.
Hence, the aim of this article is to fill this gap by presenting key digital marketing perspectives of prominent online food delivery platforms in Thailand by leveraging the 6 Ps of the digital marketing mix. The following literature review will begin with the evolution of food delivery, food delivery platforms in Thailand, business models of food delivery, mobile applications, challenges, and the 6 Ps of digital marketing mix.

Evolution of Food Delivery
Online food delivery refers to the method of ordering food from third-party

Food Delivery Platforms in Thailand
Food delivery business in Thailand is consolidated under a few large vendors. Such vendors may be referred to as third-party food delivery platforms, as they act as middlemen between customers and food vendors. (Roberts, 2020) However, larger restaurants like Pizza Hut, The Pizza Company, McDonalds, and Burger King may have their own proprietary applications. This third-party food delivery is the consolidator among smaller and medium restaurants. Another emerging trend is the "cloud kitchen," a food vendor serving only delivery without a dine-in location. (Senthil et al., 2020) Given the popularity of third-party food delivery platforms on mobile applications, chain restaurants also enrolled themselves with third-party food delivery platforms to enhance their exposure to potential customers.

Business Models of Food Delivery
Food delivery platforms use two main business models for revenue generation: a profit-sharing model and a transportation model. (SCB Economic Intelligence Center, 2021) Platforms that operate with a profit-sharing model will have agreements to share profits with food vendors, ranging from 10 to 35 percent of food sales, together with revenue from delivery fees, cooperative advertising fees, and revenue sharing of 10 to 15 percent from food deliverers. Food delivery platforms spend earned profits to invest in consumer communication and promotions, such as discounted food prices and free delivery. The second revenue stream model was introduced by Robinhood, the newcomer, who focused on medium-sized and small food vendors that may not join the other platforms due to an inability to share their thin profit margins.
Robinhood earns revenue mainly from delivery fees without taking a stake of food sales. This is probably because Robinhood is owned by a bank that would like to gain access to small and medium-sized food vendors to offer financial products, such as loans and insurance, rather than profiting solely from the food delivery business.

Online Food Delivery Mobile Applications
Ever-increasing internet penetration access has facilitated the downloading and usage of food delivery mobile applications. Given that the smartphone is the 33rd organ of the Thai people, who revealed that they can't leave home without smartphone. (Trueid, 2021) Therefore, the owners mobile food applications have strived to be the best in featuring food assortments, restaurant offers, and garnering positive customer reviews. (Shah et al., 2021) Hence, mobile applications are the main media for building brand trust, bonding, and customer loyalty, and are prioritized more highly in doing so than other traditional media. (He et al., 2019;Ahn, 2021) The satisfaction of consumers toward food delivery applications is driven by usability, usefulness, and affinity, which are mostly reflected through post-purchase ratings and comments in the application. (Park, 2022;Lee, & Han, 2022) This is mainly driven by the ease of using such technology, which utilizes simple but effective user interfaces that make ordering food online easier than before. (Ali et al., 2020;Hong et al., 2021) Therefore, the quality of information and user experience design positively influenced user satisfaction and loyalty. (Ahn, 2021;Pandey et al., 2021;Michalikova et al., 2022) The quality delivered by online food delivery can be divided into functional quality, including ease of use, application design, responsiveness, privacy, security, quality of information, and personalization, as well as technical quality, such as quality of food and quality of service. (Su et al., 2022) Furthermore, Bangkokians' behavioral intentions to order online food delivery are influenced by application performance, usage experience, such as browsing for food and restaurants, and overall ease of use.

The Challenges of the Online Food Delivery Business
Given the dramatic growth in topline revenue, food delivery platforms have faced enormous challenges. Firstly, food delivery operators experienced profit loss due to continual expansion in services, human resources, aggressive promotions, as well as incentives to deliverers. Most deliverers work with multiple food delivery operators.
In 2020, Grab earned topline revenue at $218 million, while the business lost $8.5 million on the bottom line. Foodpanda earned revenue at $132 million, but lost $108 million in profit. (Marketeeronline, 2022 However, the new players also imitate the additional services offered by more mature players, rendering such additional services less of a competitive advantage. how online food delivery can be improved in the future to meet up and coming demands of the customer in a fast-paced, changing environment.

METHODOLOGY
This academic article is derived from a review of global statistics, literature, news articles, observations, and analysis under the 6 Ps the of digital marketing mix to present a holistic perspective of online food delivery in Thailand, which can be replicated in other markets and regions in the future.

FINDINGS
Each major online food delivery player has a substantial customer base acquired since the launch of its platform. Foodpanda is leading with 7 million people, followed by Grab with 2 million people, and LINE MAN with 1.5 million people. (The Standard, 2020) While there are considerable differences in the size of customer bases between Foodpanda and the other two players, active customers and spending per order must be considered. This is due to the fact that one customer may install more than one application, and the purchase is likely driven by variety of restaurants and discount offers. (Kasim & Rosli, 2022) Given that it is becoming more difficult to acquire a high-quality potential customers, online food delivery services must maximize their marketing mixes to attract the right target group and also retain good quality customers by encouraging them to spend more with the application by offering enough online services to become an everyday app. (Bluebik, 2022) Therefore, the emerging game-changing strategy is to move from being a specialized food delivery platform to becoming an all-in-one application that serves the needs of customers for courier, delivery, shopping, taxi, and financial services. However, this movement depends upon the capacity of the existing infrastructure and ecosystem of each platform. For example, LINE MAN is an affiliate of LINE, the most popular conversational social media application, which can transfer its customer base from

LINE to LINE MAN, LINE TV (online TV), LINE Pay (e-wallet), etc. Meanwhile,
Grab started from a taxi service and can garner its customer base from its passengers.
On the the other hand, Foodpanda, which began with online food delivery without other services, may find it difficult to increase customer spending and interaction within its ecosystem. Therefore, this paper shall investigate each of the 6 Ps of online food delivery platforms to analyze what they have achieved and what must do to continue to expand and meet the ever-changing needs of the consumers in the next stage of growth.

Product
The current big three online food delivery platforms have different strategic directions in terms of geographic expansion, restaurant coverage and rider service. usage by 2026. (Brand Buffet, 2022) This indicates that becoming a super app is the trend toward which each player is trying to move, but the elements of the services offered must be thoroughly considered and balanced, based on the strengths and heritage of each platform, as well as target consumers' needs and lifestyles.
Technology is one of the key enablers for upgrading consumer experiences to the next level, while new technologies emerge and disrupt one another. Therefore, platforms will have to pick and choose the technologies that can bring about sustainability for business and society.

Pricing
Pricing sets the expectations in consumers' minds. If consumers perceive that the value, they received is far beyond the price they paid, they will be satisfied and continue to be loyal to the platform. Pricing among the three platforms does not differ greatly. The average price starts from 10 to 15 baht for one to five kilometers. (Prachachat, 2021) Delivery pricing is similar because consumers tend to compare the delivery charge across different applications before ordering. This is driven mainly by the government policies during the COVID-19 pandemic that platforms must declare every cost incurred in food delivery and could not over charge on the price since food delivery was considered an essential service during the pandemic. (Prachachat, 2022) This means that the upper ceiling of the price is controlled by the government. Thus, the only special advantage that would encourage the customers to order is when the application or restaurants offer free delivery within a certain distance and absorb the cost. The delivery price is not the key point of differentiation because pricing is similar across platforms, and if any player attempted to use it as a loss leader, the others would follow. Therefore, it would not be differentiated and sustainable. Another trend is the evolving cashless society, which means that most ewallet and internet banking are accepted as forms of payment, in addition to cash and credit/debit card. This drove some of the player to launch their e-wallet services, like LINE PAY to serve its online food delivery and LINE Shopping (e-commerce shopping).

Place
Place is where consumers get to know and begin interaction with online food delivery.
Since this occurs on the online platforms, they mostly rely on the most popular

Precise
Precise refers to the leverage of big data from customers to drive differentiated positioning and loyalty programs. This is unique to the digital marketing mix since program but encourages customers to apply as a pro-member to enjoy special privilege to enjoy free delivery, 50 percent off food prices, and other special deals with limited times per month. This shows that Grab leveraged the big data to engage customers with different privileges for each member tier and sell subscription packages to meet needs of the customers. This tends to explain why Grab retains its leadership position within the highly competitive market.

Personalized
Personalization is one of the unique qualities that online food delivery can offer to  to understand what they can enhance from good to great, since customers' needs are ever changing and dynamic, meaning that what satisfies the customer today may not be good enough for tomorrow.
The key analysis points of the three online delivery platforms are summarized on the

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
Online food delivery has received tremendous attention from both business and academics due to its impressive growth over the last five years, driven by upgrading technology, consumer lifestyles, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Most past studies focused on specific domains, factors in driving adoptions, consumer attitudes and satisfaction, and online food delivery landscape. However, a holistic view of online food delivery within the digital marketing perspective has not been offered. This paper synthesizes the online food delivery business in Thailand within the framework of the 6 Ps of digital marketing mixes from different sources to portray how each of the key players drives online food delivery adoption and usage in Thailand. The 6 Ps of digital marketing mixes includes product, price, place, precise, personalized, and profound. This framework considered both the quality and quantity that each application offers to the target consumer. It was found that product is still one of the main focuses for online food delivery where each player continued to enhance features and benefits to become a lifestyle-driven everyday app for consumers, in order to increase spending and maintain customer loyalty. This observation is also consistent with the research conducted by Kasim and Rosli (2022), who mentioned that the online delivery platform can create sustainable growth through product quality and technology that meets the need of the customer. Place plays a crucial role in brand building and bonding creation with the customer, since place is the application where consumers interact with the brand, which is consistent with the studies by He et al. (2019) and Ahn (2021). Place must be supported and coordinated well with profound, personalized, and precise. Profound can create a good first impression and daily satisfaction for the customer because seamless and friendly UX/UI experiences tend to make the consumer want to return to the application.
Personalized experiences are another step from profound, in the use of big data to predict what could interest customers and to offer them the right choices of restaurants and meals. This, in turn, can increase customer spending. Precise is related to personalized on how big data can be used to increase customer loyalty and positioning, where each platform may offer different forms of loyalty programs, whether it is a membership tier or subscription program. This reinforces stronger relationships between customers and the platform, as well as the brand itself. Price, especially delivery fees, is controlled by the government, and customers mostly compare the delivery price across applications before submitting an order. Therefore, most applications tend to offer occasional free or discounted delivery pricing to incentivize new customers or reward existing users as part of their loyalty programs.

PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Given the emphasis of online food delivery platforms on product and place, the key focus for online delivery platforms should be product and place, selectively coordinated with profound, personalized, and precise based on customer requirements, which can be accomplished accordingly: As far as product is concerned, being a lifestyle-driven everyday app means different things for different customers. Platforms will have to understand deeply what the current daily challenges of the target group are, for example, taxi calling, grocery shopping, laundry, home cleaning, courier, gift purchase, party arrangement, ewallet, financial loan, entertainment, and health-related advice, etc. This can be done through concept testing with prospective customers or soft launching of services with a small selection of customers to get feedback and respond.
Digital place or application/website is the window of transaction and communication with the customer. The application will need to evolve by predicting customers' requirements through big data and through conversations with customers. Profound, Personalized, and Precise can be chosen to focus selectively. For example, meal alerts and meal plans for the week can be incorporated to support customers who are busy with work and do not have time to think of meals, especially for health-related consumers who are concerned about the food quality and specifications. This will upgrade positioning of the platform in the customer's mind from mere online food delivery to being a food caregiver or a "foodie" expert.