Grubhub Uses Donuts To Entice Local Sign-ups

When Grubhub wanted to let people know how its partnership with Amazon will work, it chose to activate in a pop-up event in Pioneer Park section of Chicago last month. Using a 12-foot inflatable donut to attract attention, the event was in support of Grubhub’s Delivery’s Other Half campaign in which Amazon Prime members do not get charged delivery fees from the food-delivery platform.

Of course, you can’t display a giant donut without having actual donuts on hand, compliments of local mainstay Stan’s Donuts & Coffee, which also provided coffee and hot chocolate.

New York-based marketing agency BMF created the activation where attendees could sign up for Amazon Prime Grubhub+ on the spot using a QR code printed on branded signs, coffee sleeves, and napkins.  Social media ads and influencers created content to drive attendance.

In addition, an LED truck drove around a popular circuit in Chicago to drive awareness and curiosity about the $0 Day partnership.

 Marnie Kain, Grubhub’s VP of Brand, talked more in-depth to StreetFight about how it all went down.

Why did Grubhub choose Chicago and Stan’s Donuts and Coffee as a patner for this event?

Chicago is our hometown. We are headquartered there, and we learned through our research that even in our hometown, awareness of the Amazon $0 offer was very low. We know that the Amazon affiliation halos the Grubhub brand, and the Grubhub affiliation halos the Amazon brand. So we thought, where better to start than our hometown? Stan’s is iconic – a beloved Chicago favorite and has been an important restaurant partner of ours for a long time.

 Can you speak to the power of experiential/bringing together people IRL through shared experiences? How does that fit into the overall marketing mix? 

Experiential fosters the kind of loyalty that builds community around brands in an authentic way. Food is emotional, and the experience that people have on a local level with the restaurants that they love is something special. Our activation was an opportunity to bring this to life in a real way. Now even more people know they should be taking advantage of $0 delivery fees. Our restaurant partners benefit from this Amazon Prime collaboration and the experience we created surrounding it, too, as it’s driving additional growth for their businesses.

We love creating human connections. Post-pandemic, people are craving IRL authenticity. Nothing does that better than coffee and donuts.

We knew awareness was low, but we got to watch conversion in real time. People saw value in it, and they got to experience how easy it was to connect their Amazon Prime account to Grubhub.

How are you measuring the success of this hyper local event?

The purpose of this activation was to generate awareness as well as sign ups. Our incentive, the high-value gift cards that we gave away, were a huge hit.  But also, through word of mouth, we achieved tremendous social engagement through our influencer program as well as people who experienced the event. We optimized that word of mouth by teasing the campaign in advance on social media, with the donut showing up unexpectedly, in iconic locations in the city.

 Have you done other hyperlocal events like this for Grubhub?

To mark our 20th Anniversary, we created the Food Feastival in Chicago. It was a great way to show appreciation for our hometown restaurant partners that make up an iconic food scene while treating customers to a free lunch experience.

We’ve also done other hyperlocal events like Freezefest with Taco Bell which even won an award in Event Marketer’s 2024 “Campaigns of the Year” for food and beverage category.

Creating these experiences with our restaurant partners is a good thing in the new world of marketing but also in the world at large. It’s about building community at a grassroots level.

We have a plan to expand the activation in other key cities.

What were some of the challenges you encountered in planning this event? It seems to have a lot of moving parts.

We didn’t anticipate how many people drink hot cocoa. That was a surprise. I also think how convivial the Chicagoans were. They kept saying “That’s Chicago. That’s the Midwest.” They were really proud of that.

Getting the right permits was a challenge, because in certain areas you couldn’t set up. There were some limits as to where we could go, and there were questions about how much traffic there would be in the area. But we wound up being right by a bus stop. It was perfect.