AVOID - Marketing Instacart Employee Review

What a mess! From the outside, you’d think Instacart is doing something right. From the inside, you see what a disaster it is. Director and above leaders seem to lack fundamental leadership skills (listening, problem solving, strategic thinking, forward thinking, planning, emotional intelligence, and organizational effectiveness). They also seem to foster a culture of distrust, which is evident from severe micromanagement. The marketing leadership team seems to lack basic marketing domain knowledge. Their current strategy is to spend a ton of money, cast a wide net, and see what sticks. They are desperate to figure out how to grow the business and it’s showing. They are not methodical with their approach, they are not scientific with their tests, they have no official brand platform, and they lack basic reporting and analytics skills that are needed to sift thru their cluttered marketing plan to identify what is truly working. They are spending an egregious amount of money on a desperate, unorganized, unfocused strategy. They aren’t using marketing channels correctly and wonder why they are not seeing the return. They aren’t using creative content in a way that emotionally connects with their consumers. Lastly, they aren’t focusing their message or reason to believe benefit with the appropriate customer segment. When they hire someone from the outside who brings this to their attention, they accuse them of being difficult and reluctant to do things the Instacart way. They say “Our business is very complicated…more complicated than where you came from. This is how we do things. This is the Instacart culture”. On top of all of that, turnover is high. Several people have quit recently and they are either backfilling roles with contractors or not backfilling them at all. When the role is filled by a senior level contractor, they expect the contractor to be able to do 60 hours of execution work in 40 hours because they don’t trust them to manage strategy (because their background is too basic and simple). When contractors express frustration and don’t meet their expectations, they accuse them of being difficult. Bottom line, Instacart is just like every other delivery service company (DoorDash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, etc). They are a mess. Avoid them if you want to become a rockstar marketer.