“How do you convince a market that a whole new category should exist at all?”

Foodpanda Singapore

Head of Marketing / early market operator · Early-stage category development

Built early demand and category awareness for food delivery in Singapore, before the category was an established consumer habit.

Context

Food delivery was not yet a default consumer behavior in Singapore. The job wasn't to win share from an established category — it was to convince people the category should exist for them at all.

Stallholders and diners inside a Singapore hawker centre, stalls lining both sides of a covered hall — The incumbent. Singapore already had cheap, fast, excellent food within walking distance of almost everyone — which is exactly why delivery had to be argued for rather than simply offered. — Exec8, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Action

Ran hands-on local acquisition and marketing to drive first-time orders in a category most consumers hadn't adopted yet.
Iterated on offer, messaging and channel mix to find what actually converted a skeptical, price-sensitive first-time user — social campaigns, partnerships and newsletters, everything tracked and A/B tested rather than argued about.
Matched channel to message rather than hunting for one winning channel: different restaurants and cuisines converted through different channels, so the mix was segmented instead of consolidated.
Worked order volume and basket size as connected problems rather than optimizing one in isolation.

Result

Grew daily orders from roughly 20 to roughly 500 over about 12 months.
Grew average order value from roughly SGD 23 to roughly SGD 43.

Lesson

Entering a market sometimes means building the category, not simply taking market share.

The public record

The launch and the category timing are public record. The order-volume and basket-size figures above are not — no public source exists for single-market operational metrics at this stage of a company, and none should be expected.