When Laura Jones mentions taking a plunge, the CMO of the Instacart food-delivery service isn’t always referring to a dive into unfamiliar marketing endeavors, though she professes to do that often these days. One of the technology veteran’s outside interests is cold water swimming in waters frigid enough to trigger teeth chattering.  

 

If she can handle an experience that bracing, how difficult can it be to navigate marketing’s current scramble?  

 

It merely requires a fearless openness to the unfamiliar, suggests Jones, who contends that she learns something new on just about a daily basis. A case in point: When she joined Instacart nearly four years ago, its marketing budget was a rounding error compared to the resources of tech giants like Apple or Wayfair. Three years later, it was running a Super Bowl ad. 

 

Jones’s past experience extends far beyond the basics of marketing for just any tech-based service. Before joining Instacart, she’d spent six years building the marketing operations of Uber, the gig-economy pioneer. She rose to Global Head of Marketing for the company’s core business, on-demand rides. 

 

And she’d worked for Google before that. 

 

At Instacart, she’s charged in part with introducing the service to younger generations who may be as new to grocery shopping as they are to the company’s services. Instacart relies on about 600,000 self-employed individuals to shop for users of its app. Consumers who don’t want to trek to a store can choose what they want from a detailed online marketplace. The listing shows what nearby grocers are offering the desired products, and at what price.  

 

Instacart matches up the online order with a pinch-hit shopper who then buys the selected items and delivers them to the consumer.  

 

It also posts ads for brand-name items as consumers are shopping for those specific types of products, creating a retail media network (RMN) that extends across a multitude of retail chains.  

 

Although groceries remain the company’s stock in trade, Instacart has branched into the purchase and delivery of other products as well, including alcoholic beverages and beauty aids. 

 

Jones has indicated that AI will figure large in Instacart’s efforts to expand its market. But she maintains that plenty of human creativity will also be required, given how the marketing landscape is rapidly changing. 

 

Instacart recently partnered with Pinterest to enhance the delivery service’s RMN. When an Instacart customer is shopping via the company’s app for a particular product, the shopper will be shown ads for brands they’ve checked out earlier on Pinterest. 

 

That call for constant creativity is fine with Jones. When she’s not treading icy waters, the graduate of Stanford University’s MBA program enjoys the artistic demands of painting. 

 

Jones will offer insights on her approach to marketing at Go2MarketEdge, a new type of conference that IFMA The Food Away from Home Association will host Aug 5-7 in San Francisco. The event is structured as an immersive experience, with attendees plunging into the new realities of marketing and sales.  

 

And all at room temperature. 

 

More information about Go2MarketEdge is available here. 

 



As Managing Editor for IFMA The Food Away from Home Association, Romeo is responsible for generating the group's news and feature content. He brings more than 40 years of experience in covering restaurants to the position.

Cover image courtesy: Closed Loop Project