Coffees, Comms and Kings: Global Communications challenges with Simran Kodesia: DoorDash’s Director of International Communications

As part of the Insider: Business Series, Influencing spoke with DoorDash's Director of International Communications Simran Kodesia about her career, her current challenges, and what's next for DoorDash within Australia.

Simran Kodesia joined us live from San Francisco, where she's finding time between Slack catchups, planning sessions and more across multiple timezones. Her career covers hospitality, professional communications, and more; and also includes time as one of the founders of AirBnB India. She says her time there not only helped lay the foundations for overcoming global communications challenges in her current role; but also provided an opportunity to do some good work along the way:

"One of the things we did at AirBnB was to partner with the King of Jaipur in India and actually get his palace, the City Palace of India, on the AirBnB platform; and got the King to become a Host on that platform. All the proceeds of that went to a Women's foundation, called the Princess Diya Kumari Foundation, that helped empower women in Rajasthan... that's something I'm incredibly proud of."

Kodesia joined DoorDash in August of 2021, and says that one of the one of the most enjoyable challenges at DoorDash is the sheer scale of the task: including preserving messaging across multiple languages, timezones, and local customs.

"The most exciting thing that I think about is how do you take a global message, a global playbook, and localize that," said Kodesia . "I think the most fun part about working for international communications, is getting to know the cultural zeitgeist of every country. When you're talking to people, you have to meet the audience where they are and you have to give them the communications message that they're familiar with."

Matching messaging like this can make for some fun content, too, says Kodesia : "We recently announced a piece that asked what is the difference in coffee orders between people in Sydney and people in Melbourne? People love that - that kind of comparison story. So the answer was people in Sydney prefer their lattes, but people in Melbourne prefer cappuccinos." 

Kodesia also highlighted the importance of working closely with their regional partners (e.g. Thrive in Australia) to deliver successful communications: "It is extremely important ... we would give them strategic advice, but would absolutely trust them and absolutely think of them as our partners to do the right thing for every market we operate in."

DoorDash will be making further announcements around their Drone Delivery Rollout early in 2023 - so stay tuned. 

ENDS