At this year’s ROMI, Vyacheslav Levchenko, General Manager of Bolt Food Ukraine, shared his experience in successfully managing a three-sided marketplace. As an experienced professional with a long career in marketing, startups, and operations management, he examined in detail the relationship between operational efficiency and marketing investments.

The “Survivorship Bias” in Business

In the world of digital marketing, it’s easy to fall into the trap of past success. We often tend to stick with strategies that have already delivered certain results, without noticing new opportunities that lie on the surface. This phenomenon is called the “survivor marketer’s error,” and it can cost businesses significant losses.

In other words, we mainly focus on optimizing what already works, ignoring potentially weak areas in our strategy. This can lead to missing new growth opportunities. Operational efficiency, on the other hand, is key to solving this problem. By improving internal processes, we free up resources that can be invested in new marketing tools and experiments.

Business Growth Cycle

It’s important to understand that a company funded by its own resources goes through a certain growth cycle. Unlike startups, which can often “burn” significant investments, self-funded companies must use their resources more carefully. Higher profitability opens the way for development investments — whether it’s discounts for customers or large-scale marketing campaigns.

This launches a positive cycle: attracting additional capital stimulates growth, which, in turn, provides even more investment opportunities, creating a sustainable business development trajectory. This allows the company to gain a significant competitive advantage.

Unfortunately, most marketers regularly face the problem of insufficient understanding of their work by management. Tasks assigned to marketing teams are often oversimplified and limited to basic metrics such as reducing marketing costs and increasing organic traffic. These are certainly important indicators, but they don’t reflect the complete picture. Expand your perspective and pay attention to more strategic aspects of marketing that can take your business to a new level.

The Importance of Retention

Although it’s well known that retaining a customer is cheaper than acquiring a new one, many companies don’t pay enough attention to retention. The problem is that this is usually handled by analysts in companies who focus on mathematical models. Marketing, however, deals with people, and people make decisions based not only on logic but also on emotions. To retain a customer, it’s necessary not just to offer them a discount, but to make them feel special. Personalization, exclusive offers, and positive brand interaction experiences all contribute to increasing loyalty levels. That’s why marketers should direct their efforts toward retention to convert customers into loyal brand advocates.

From Segmentation to Profit

Despite the importance of customer segmentation, implementing it successfully is quite difficult due to the large volume of data, diversity of criteria, and complex nature of analysis. Appropriate segmentation involves using the following parameters:

• sociodemographic characteristics
• purchase frequency
• average check
• price sensitivity

By combining these criteria, we can identify so-called profit generators — customers who are less sensitive to price and bring the most profit. By focusing on them, we maximize profit, gaining additional resources to work with other segments.

Pricing strategy often remains outside marketers’ attention, particularly in technology companies where pricing is predominantly delegated to analysts. However, it’s marketers who can add value to the product by influencing how customers perceive the price. A 10% discount can be presented in such a way that the customer feels as if they’re getting much more than just a discount. Therefore, marketers should take an active part in forming pricing strategies to maximize company profits.

Currently, Food Delivery is experiencing a period of rapid development but faces a number of problems that require non-standard solutions. A characteristic trend is the uneven workload of couriers throughout the day: order peaks occur during lunch and dinner hours, leading to underutilization of the courier service at other times. Additionally, the shortage of couriers is a critical challenge that limits business scaling possibilities. At the same time, the decline in the purchasing power of the population forces companies to revise their marketing strategies, specifically to increase the average check.

Conclusion

The experience of Bolt Food Ukraine shows that the success of a modern business, especially in the dynamic food delivery industry, is impossible without close interaction between marketing and operations. This comprehensive approach includes data analytics, audience segmentation, price and product portfolio optimization, as well as investment in team development and implementation of innovative technologies.