DoorDash’s Brand City Experiment: What It Proved

DoorDash’s Brand City experiment was a controlled test of whether brand-level investment could measurably shift consumer behaviour in a category defined by price, convenience, and habit. The company selected specific markets, ran concentrated brand campaigns, and tracked what happened to acquisition costs, order frequency, and long-term retention. What they found challenged some of the assumptions that had driven their growth strategy for years.

This is not a story about a clever creative campaign. It is a story about a delivery company running a disciplined commercial test and learning something useful about the relationship between brand investment and performance outcomes.

What Was the DoorDash Brand City Experiment?

DoorDash identified a set of cities where they would run a brand-first investment strategy, shifting budget away from pure performance channels and toward brand-building activity. These cities acted as test markets. Other comparable markets served as controls. The goal was to understand whether brand investment created a measurable commercial return, and if so, over what time horizon.

The mechanics of the test were straightforward. DoorDash increased brand spend in test cities, held performance spend relatively constant, and tracked a range of commercial metrics including customer acquisition cost, order frequency, churn rate, and unaided brand awareness. They ran the experiment long enough to capture lagged effects, which is the part most companies skip.

I have run enough media tests at agency level to know that the design of the experiment usually determines whether you learn anything useful. The most common failure mode is testing for two weeks, seeing no immediate lift, and concluding that brand does not work. DoorDash avoided that trap. They built in enough runway to see whether brand investment had a compounding effect, which it does when it is done with sufficient consistency and reach.

If you want broader context on how brand positioning shapes commercial outcomes over time, the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub covers the underlying frameworks in detail.

Why Would a Performance-First Company Test Brand Investment?

DoorDash built its growth on performance marketing. Paid search, app store optimisation, referral mechanics, and promotional pricing drove most of their customer acquisition. That model works well in the early stages of category creation, when you are pulling in customers who are already searching for what you offer. It becomes less efficient as the category matures and competitors bid on the same keywords.

By the time DoorDash ran this experiment, the food delivery category in the US was no longer nascent. Uber Eats, Grubhub, and Instacart were all competing for the same audience. Performance channels were getting more expensive. Customer acquisition costs were rising. Retention was patchy because customers were happy to switch platforms for a discount code.

This is a pattern I have seen across multiple categories. Performance marketing is efficient at capturing existing demand, but it does not create preference. When a market matures and competition intensifies, brands that have invested in emotional positioning have a structural cost advantage. Their customers are less price-sensitive and less likely to defect when a competitor runs a promotion. BCG’s work on brand recommendation has pointed to this dynamic for years, showing that the most recommended brands tend to have strong emotional associations, not just functional ones.

DoorDash’s leadership understood that continued over-reliance on performance channels would create a ceiling. The Brand City experiment was their attempt to find out whether brand investment could raise that ceiling by changing the economics of acquisition and retention.

What Did the Experiment Find?

In the test markets, DoorDash observed that sustained brand investment reduced customer acquisition costs over a multi-month period. Customers in brand-heavy markets were more likely to download the app without a promotional incentive, more likely to place a second order, and less likely to churn in the 90 days following their first order. Unaided brand awareness also increased, which is a leading indicator for organic search behaviour and word-of-mouth referral.

The control markets did not show the same trajectory. They continued on the existing performance-led path, with acquisition costs that remained flat or crept upward as competition for paid inventory increased.

What the experiment did not show was an immediate return on brand spend. In the short term, brand investment looked expensive relative to performance channels. The return materialised over time, which is precisely why most companies never see it. They measure brand investment over the same time horizon they use for paid search, conclude it underperforms, and cut the budget. DoorDash held the line long enough to see the compounding effect.

When I was building out the SEO and brand practice at iProspect, we had a version of this conversation constantly with clients who wanted to see returns in the same reporting cycle as their paid media. Brand does not work on that clock. The clients who understood that, and gave us the runway to demonstrate it, consistently saw better long-term economics than those who pulled budget at the first sign of a slow quarter.

How Did DoorDash Approach Brand Positioning in the Test Markets?

DoorDash’s brand positioning in the experiment leaned on reliability and community rather than price or speed. This was a deliberate choice. Price and speed are functional attributes that any competitor can match. Reliability, in the sense of knowing your order will arrive correctly and on time, is harder to copy because it depends on operational execution across thousands of restaurants and drivers.

The community angle was more interesting. DoorDash positioned itself as a platform that supports local restaurants, not just a logistics layer between consumers and chains. This gave the brand a values dimension that Uber Eats and Grubhub were not occupying at the same volume. It also gave DoorDash a story that could be told through content, social, and local partnerships rather than just paid media.

HubSpot’s breakdown of brand strategy components identifies values and personality as distinct from positioning, but in practice they are inseparable. A brand that claims to support local restaurants has to behave that way operationally or the positioning collapses. DoorDash’s investment in local restaurant partnerships and their DashPass subscription model gave the brand claim some substance.

The creative execution in test markets reflected this positioning. Campaigns featured real restaurant owners and drivers rather than generic lifestyle imagery. The tone was warmer and more grounded than the category norm. Whether this was the optimal creative strategy is a separate question, but it was at least coherent with the brand position they were trying to build.

What Does This Tell Us About Brand Investment in Platform Businesses?

Platform businesses have a particular relationship with brand investment because they are not selling a product in the traditional sense. They are selling trust in a system. When you order from DoorDash, you are trusting that the restaurant will prepare the food correctly, the driver will deliver it promptly, and the app will handle any problems fairly. None of those things are fully within DoorDash’s direct control, which makes the brand’s role in managing expectations especially important.

Brand investment in this context does two things. It sets expectations before the transaction, which shapes how customers interpret their experience. And it provides a buffer when things go wrong, because customers with strong brand affinity are more likely to attribute a bad experience to circumstances rather than to the platform itself. MarketingProfs has documented how brand loyalty behaves under pressure, and the consistent finding is that emotionally connected customers are more forgiving of service failures than transactional ones.

This is not a trivial point for a delivery business. Errors happen. Restaurants run out of items. Drivers get stuck in traffic. A brand that has built genuine affinity can absorb those failures without losing the customer. A brand that has competed purely on price and speed has no such buffer. The customer simply opens Uber Eats next time.

I have seen this play out in agency contexts too. When we were managing large performance accounts, the clients with the strongest brand equity consistently had better retention metrics than those competing purely on promotional mechanics. The performance data looked similar in the short term, but the cohort behaviour over 12 months was materially different.

What the Experiment Gets Right About Marketing Measurement

One of the things I find most useful about the DoorDash Brand City experiment is the methodology, not just the result. Controlled market testing is not new, but it is underused. Most companies either run brand investment without any measurement framework, or they try to measure brand through last-click attribution, which systematically undervalues it.

DoorDash used a matched market design. They identified cities that were comparable on relevant dimensions, assigned them to test and control conditions, and measured the difference in outcomes over time. This is a much cleaner way to establish causality than trying to isolate brand effects in a unified attribution model. It is also more honest about what you are measuring.

The broader principle here is that measurement should match the nature of what you are measuring. Brand investment operates over longer time horizons and through indirect mechanisms. Measuring it on a 30-day return window is like measuring the effect of exercise by weighing yourself after one session. The metric is technically connected to the outcome, but the time frame makes it meaningless.

Moz’s analysis of brand equity measurement makes a similar point about the gap between what brands can measure easily and what actually drives long-term value. The metrics that are easiest to track in digital marketing, clicks, conversions, cost per acquisition, tend to capture the tail end of a decision process that started much earlier. Brand investment operates at the beginning of that process, which is why it rarely shows up cleanly in performance dashboards.

DoorDash’s willingness to use a methodology that could actually detect brand effects, rather than defaulting to the measurement infrastructure they already had, is one of the more commercially mature things about this experiment. Most companies measure what is easy to measure and then make decisions based on that. DoorDash built a measurement approach around the question they were actually trying to answer.

The Limits of What This Experiment Proves

It would be a mistake to read the DoorDash Brand City experiment as proof that brand investment always works, or that any company in a competitive category should immediately shift budget toward brand. That is not what the experiment shows.

What it shows is that brand investment worked for DoorDash, in specific markets, at a specific stage of their competitive development, with a specific positioning approach, sustained over a sufficient time period. Each of those conditions matters. Change any one of them and the result may be different.

DoorDash had scale. They had operational infrastructure that could support the reliability positioning they were building. They had a product that was genuinely competitive on functional dimensions. Brand investment amplified a real advantage. It did not manufacture one that did not exist.

I have seen companies try to use brand investment as a substitute for product improvement, and it does not work. If the underlying experience is poor, brand advertising accelerates churn by raising expectations that the product cannot meet. The DoorDash experiment worked in part because the product was good enough to deliver on the brand promise. That is a precondition, not a given.

BCG’s research on agile marketing organisations points to a related issue: the ability to act on brand insights requires organisational alignment between marketing, product, and operations. DoorDash had that alignment. Many companies do not, and brand investment without operational follow-through tends to produce disappointment on both sides of the investment case.

What Marketers Should Take From This

The DoorDash Brand City experiment is a useful case study not because it is dramatic, but because it is disciplined. It is a company asking a specific commercial question, designing a test that can actually answer it, running the test for long enough to see meaningful results, and then acting on what they learned. That is rarer than it should be.

The practical implication for most marketers is not to copy DoorDash’s approach wholesale. It is to take the underlying logic seriously. If your performance channels are getting more expensive and your retention is driven primarily by promotional mechanics, you have a brand problem, not a media problem. Adding more performance budget to that situation will not fix it. It will make the economics worse over time as you bid against yourself and your competitors in an increasingly expensive auction.

Brand investment is not a soft option or a vanity exercise. When it is done with commercial discipline, measured properly, and sustained long enough to compound, it changes the economics of acquisition and retention in ways that performance channels alone cannot. DoorDash’s experiment is one of the cleaner demonstrations of that in recent years.

Building brand positioning that holds up over time requires a clear view of where you sit in the competitive landscape and what emotional territory you can credibly own. The articles in the Brand Positioning and Archetypes hub cover those frameworks in depth, from archetype selection through to positioning under competitive pressure.

The question worth sitting with after reading this case is not “should we invest in brand?” It is “do we have a measurement framework that would let us see if it was working?” Most companies do not. That is the gap to close first.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

Frequently Asked Questions