Marketing Leader of the Year 2017: Just Eat's Barnaby Dawe

Just Eat’s Barnaby Dawe has been at the vanguard of a home eating revolution, transforming the concept of the local takeaway meal— historically a Saturday night treat from the Chinese or Indian — into a digitally-led, branded experience that links 17m customers across the globe to a network of 67,000 restaurants.

Since joining the UK-based company in 2015, Dawe has been instrumental in evolving Just Eat’s positioning from a disruptive upstart into a market leader operating in 13 countries and with full year revenues up 52% to £376m in 2016.

Key to Just Eat’s growth is its mastery of technology. Dawe himself is something of a technophile and has embraced virtual reality, artificial intelligence and robotics.

His CV shows a marketer whose extensive media experience, at Sky, The Sun and Channel 4, has been of huge value.. While Just Eat is clearly a global brand, the business relies on its relationships with its local partners, and its ‘Tech Accelerator’ initiative to support food tech start-ups highlights its entrepreneurial approach.

Dawe understands that being a brand, and especially one with technology built into its DNA, requires vigilance and foresight. “It’s hard enough to predict how things will change in five years, let alone ten, given the pace of change,” he says.

Dawe epitomises the new breed of CMO, one that understands that the marketer’s role is changing and with it the nature of marketing itself. “We will see a lot more product managers and data scientists being integral to the marketing team in the next five years,” he says.