Vol. 130 Grubhub: The do-over meal 🍕

Case Studied
You snooze, you get a second chance

When food delivery apps want to reach college students, their first instinct is usually discounts. Think; $0 delivery fees, free first orders, money off for signing up. It’s a playbook about as predictable as a 2am pizza order.

This approach works when you have the budget to sustain it. But for brands that can't outspend category giants, a different kind of creativity has to do the heavy lifting. 

This week, Case Studied explores how Grubhub converted the most Grubhub+ Student members ever in a single semester.

The Brief

Grubhub is a food delivery marketplace that connects diners with local restaurants. Founded in 2004, the company merged with Seamless in 2013. Since then, it’s operated as one of the country's largest delivery platforms. 

But in the college delivery market, Grubhub faces a steep competitive climb. DoorDash holds 67% market share among students, and Uber Eats runs aggressive advertising campaigns across TV, social, and influencer channels.

Going into the fall 2024 semester, Grubhub was looking to get college students to sign up for Grubhub+ Student, a loyalty membership that's free for all four years of college. The problem was, many students didn't know the program existed. And those who did weren't convinced Grubhub had the deals or the selection to be their delivery app of choice.

Competing dollar-for-dollar with better-funded rivals wasn't a viable path to the brand’s goal. So instead, Grubhub found their angle in a specific, pervasive behavior among college students.

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The Execution

Grubhub partnered with Golin to launch Snooze Insurance. The insight that drove the campaign came from a two-year social audit of student posts that surfaced one repeated behavior: the elusive missed late-night order. 

Students consistently posted about waking up to cold food on their doorstep. They would set alarms for a Chipotle order placed at 3am, only to find it there in the morning. The app’s order data found that college studentsover-index on late-night Grubhub orders by 150%. Commissioned research backed this up further, finding that 72% of college students had missed a late-night delivery and woken up to it on the doorstep. 

Once they uncovered this insight, Grubhub and Golin built an integrated campaign around a first-of-its-kind product benefit: a do-over meal for any Grubhub+ Student member who fell asleep before their late-night delivery arrived.

Every Saturday, Grubhub+ Student members could text "DELIVERY" to 1-844-954-OOPS to claim their replacement meal. 

Rather than announcing the benefit through paid media, Golin took the story to college newspapers and local TV news first. The strategy was to approach student-focused outlets with a newsworthy angle before spending on amplification. 

The targeting work that followed leaned on Grubhub’s order data. Their team identified the sororities and fraternities on campus that were most likely to place late-night deliveries and miss them. Grubhub sent custom mailers directly to those houses. 

On the influencer front, the brand recruited roughly 40 creators for the campaign. Each one was chosen because they themselves had missed a late-night order before. The brief asked them to share their own real stories. 

A physical presence on campuses rounded the promotion out. Coasters printed with the Snooze Insurance hotline number showed up in college bars. Postings of the number appeared in bathroom stalls. And the brand staged a spectacle of a student asleep outdoors on campus, surrounded by Snooze Insurance pizza boxes.

The Results

Snooze Insurance delivered Grubhub's most successful semester of Grubhub+ Student sign-ups on record. 41% of participating students were new diners, nearly 6x higher than benchmarks from a separate campus promotion running at the same time.

Post-campaign surveys showed influencer content drove a 4x increase in recall of the Snooze Insurance program. Grubhub also saw a 400% surge in search volume, a 25% lift in brand favorability, and a 93% increase in people who "strongly agree" that Grubhub has relevant deals."

On the earned media side, the campaign generated 335 media placements and 637.2M impressions (more than doubling their goal on both fronts). The campaign reached 11 of 12 priority campus markets with 100% favorable sentiment. 

Owned social delivered 273.1K impressions with a 2.16% engagement rate and 74.5% positive sentiment. Influencer content generated an additional 23.7M impressions and Grubhub's social mentions spiked 4x year-over-year on key campuses.

The Takeaways

1) Think earned-first.

Golin built Snooze Insurance with earned media as the foundation. The announcement went to news outlets with credibility and direct reach into the target audience before any broader rollout. And looking at the results, the approach clearly paid off. 

If your campaign has a surprising product benefit, an unexpected insight, or a data-driven targeting decision, lead with that story. Let it gain steam with the press before you invest in paid amplification. If it catches on, your paid spend can reach audiences that already encountered the story organically. The impact of both can then compound.

2) Lead with insight.

We’ve seen many campaigns work because they were rooted in behavioral data. Snooze Insurance is no different. The missed late-night order was something students were already posting about and commiserating over. The do-over meal product benefit was an answer to a problem students already felt.

Before you build your next campaign, look at what your audience is already saying, posting, or complaining about. The insight that can fuel your next win could be hiding in comment sections or social threads. Once you find it, get creative with it.

3)  Build a benefit around a specific moment.

Snooze Insurance was designed for one very specific scenario, not a general need. That specificity helped make it memorable, giving users a concrete reason to engage in a particular moment. It also helped make students who had missed their late-night orders feel seen and heard. 

The more precisely a benefit maps to a real customer experience, the more likely they are to remember it and tell someone else about it. Before building out your next loyalty or retention offer, ask whether it's attached to a specific situation your audience has experienced. If it isn’t, consider how you can make it more precise.

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