How Delivery Apps Commoditise Your Brand
- The Treue Team
- Sep 22, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Oct 9, 2025
The Race to the Bottom: How Delivery Apps Commoditise Your Brand (And Your Escape Plan)
Delivery apps feel like a lifeline. They offer a seductive promise: instant access to thousands of new customers, a stream of orders on a quiet night, a way to compete in the modern digital marketplace. For many NZ businesses, signing up feels less like a choice and more like a necessity for survival.
But this lifeline comes with a hidden, corrosive cost.
In exchange for visibility, you are slowly, order by order, giving up the one thing that makes your business unique: your brand. You're being commoditised, and it's a race to the bottom.
The Great Commoditisation: How it Happens
How do delivery apps commoditise your brand? Commoditisation is the process of turning your unique, story-rich business into just another interchangeable option on a list.
On a delivery app, your brand isn't a destination; it's a thumbnail. You're a single line-item in an infinite scroll, sandwiched between your direct competitors, forcing you to compete on price and delivery time, not on the quality of your craft or the warmth of your service.
The customer experience is no longer yours. It's the app's loading time, the driver's attitude, the temperature of the food on arrival. Your carefully prepared product is reduced to a variable in someone else's algorithm.
Worst of all, this model makes customer retention for restaurants nearly impossible. The customer's loyalty is to the app's convenience, not your business. They are their customer, not yours.
The Escape Plan: From Dependence to Independence
Breaking this dependence isn't about deleting the apps overnight. It's a deliberate, strategic process of taking back control.
Step 1: Reframe the Apps as an Acquisition Channel Start seeing the 30% commission fee for what it is: a marketing cost to acquire a new customer. The apps are a billboard, not your business model. Their job is to introduce someone to your brand for the first time. Your job is to make sure it's not the last.
Step 2: Create a Compelling Reason for a Direct Relationship You cannot expect customers to change their behaviour for no reason. You must give them a better deal or a better experience when they come directly to you. This could be a small discount for ordering from your website, access to an exclusive menu item, or, most powerfully, the ability to earn rewards in a loyalty program. Your goal is to make a direct relationship with you more valuable than the convenience of the app.
Step 3: Build Your "Owned" Platform An "owned" platform is a direct line to your community. It's where you control the brand, own the data, and build the relationship. This is where you convert the traffic the apps send you into a tribe you can nurture. The ultimate version of this is a membership or subscription model.
The Membership Model: The Ultimate Anti-Commodity
A subscription is the final, most powerful step in breaking the cycle of commoditisation.
It fundamentally changes the dynamic. A subscriber is no longer a free agent browsing a list of options; they are a committed member of your community. They have already chosen you.
This is the difference between being a commodity and being a cornerstone of someone's routine. It's a weekly dinner subscription, a monthly team lunch package, or a daily coffee pass. It's predictable, high-margin revenue built on a real relationship.
Delivery apps are a tool. But they should be your billboard, not your business. It's time to start converting the traffic they send you into a community you own.
Treue is the simple platform designed to help you build that owned community. We give you the tools to launch the loyalty, membership, and subscription programs that turn an anonymous app user into your loyal regular.
The Race to the Bottom: How Delivery Apps Commoditise Your Brand (And Your Escape Plan)
By The Treue Team
