Soap.com Street Campaign Urges New Yorkers to “Schlep Less, Shop More”

New Yorkers are sadly accustomed to seeing people living in boxes. But during the second half of October they could also see a handful of people dressing in cardboard and interacting with the world, racing delivery guys and showing up in the crowd at “The Early Show”.

The occasion was a guerilla promotion by the parent company of e-commerce Web sites Diapers.com and Soap.com announcing the arrival in New York City of same-day order delivery for both sites.

Conceived with agency AdStore and activation firm Bandwidth, the “Box Boy” campaign was designed to alert New Yorkers to the fact that customers with a registered account at either Diapers.com or Soap.com can now go online at either site before 9 a.m. Monday through Friday, place an order, and have their items delivered by the time they return home from work that same day.

Prior to this month, the best both sites could offer new Yorkers was next-day delivery, something available to two thirds of their U.S. market area. (The rest of the country can get orders filled within 1-2 shipping days.)

“More than just a promotion, this is an integral part of our value proposition for New York City customers,” says David Zhang, marketing director for Soap.com. “Our goal is to bridge the gap between offline and online shopping, and one of the hurdles to online shopping for essentials is having to wait a long time for delivery of things like toothpaste and toilet paper. Getting these to your door the same day is a huge way to make life easier for customers.”

At the same time it announced the delivery upgrade, parent company Quidsi inc. announced it was lowering the minimum Soap.com order needed to qualify for free shipping from $49 to $25.

The street portion of the campaign involved 35 actors dressed as a pile of the distinctive colorful boxes from Soap.com, with a large logo on the side and some of the personal care products sold on the site peeking out. Those characters roamed the city in teams ove3r a two-week campaign, chanting about free same-day delivery, handing out discount coupons and encouraging New Yorkers to “shop without the schlep.”

While the Box Boy character roamed the streets of Manhattan, Soap.com’s same-day delivery capability was being promoted via a month-long run of subway ads on about 570 train cars. The subway campaign was built on “brand trains” with ads for Soap.com taking over an entire side of a car interior, so that riders in seats facing that side saw nothing but that messaging.

The campaigns focused on Soap.com rather than Diapers.com for several reasons. Launched just last July with an inventory of 25,000 products from 900 manufacturers including both well-known brands and high-end luxury products, Soap.com is much less prominent that its infant-specific counterpart. Diapers.com rolled out in 2005 and reportedly took in $180 million in revenue in 2009, in online orders for diapers, baby wipes and bigger ticket items in juvenile furniture.

The average ticket for Soap.com’s beauty and wellness products and household essentials is much lower than that for Diapers.com, Zhang says. “The purchase dynamic for the two sites is very different. People place bigger orders for baby products. On Soap.com the typical ticket is much lower, and we wanted to make sure people got our message so that online shopping could become a core part of these everyday products. And of course, while not everyone is in the market for diapers, everyone is potentially a Soap.com customer.”

New York is the first market in which Quidsi has offered same-day delivery. While the company will evaluate the experience for possible rollout to some of its other dense urban markets, Zhang says it was important for the Jersey City-based parent to be able to offer speedy shipment in its home base.

“New York is a crucial market for us,” he says. “The penetration of Diapers.com is higher here, and the kind of urban customer we find in New York represents a higher lifetime value for us. It’s an important place for Soap.com to win, so we built this integrated campaign to go after the New York market.”

At press time, Quidsi also announced the launch of
BeautyBar.com, an online shopping site offering 3,000 SKUs of luxury beauty products.